Selling higher really means earning access to those who will be making the Action Decision. ‘To buy, or not to buy,’ that is the question. And it can only be answered by the person or persons with the authority and responsibility to make these critical decisions on the company’s behalf. These are the same individuals who will prioritize the various goals and objectives the company is trying to achieve. They ultimately decide which course of action to take, and they decide where to draw the line of available resources. In short, only they know what we need to know in order to mount a successful sales campaign. Never forget that . . .
Until we meet and understand those who will make the final Action Decision, we really can’t know much about what it will take to win the deal, or even if there is a deal to win.
Selling higher is not optional. It’s the only way to really be success- ful at our job. If we can’t elevate our sales campaign and get through at the higher levels of our prospective customer’s organization, we will never really know:
1. Is It a Top-Down or Bottom-Up Initiative?
Many of the people involved in a Selection and Buying Process never actually know whether or not the initiative that is driving the buying decision originated at the executive level or is a grassroots campaign. I have seen many selection committee members and even some committee chairmen just as surprised as I was when their management decided to ‘move in a different direction,’ which means they decided to pursue a different course of action or to forgo action altogether.
2. What Is the Business Disparity (Goal or Problem) They Are Trying to Address?
For those who are assigned to the selection process of choosing the best vendor or source, the goal is to make a well-informed, quality Source Decision. In a high percentage of cases, they have not been told, nor have they ever bothered to ask, ‘Why?’ the company would consider such a purchase. In some corporate cultures, when your boss tells you to do something, it can be career-limiting to ask ‘Why?’
3. What Is the Desired Outcome or Result at Point ‘C’?
For many of the lower-level buyers involved in source selection, their point ‘C’ is actually point ‘B.’ Once they sort through all the responses to their request for proposal (RFP), watch all the demos, weigh all the evidence, and make their recommendation, they’re done. Understanding how the solution will be used, what kind of return is expected, when it is expected, and what bad thing happens if things don’t work out as planned, simply may not be part of their job description.
4. Does the Project Tie to and Support Corporate-Level Goals and Objectives?
Very few companies that we sell to do a really good job of communicating how the contribution of the various business units and functional departments support and contribute to the overall success of the company as a whole. Most individual contributors, many managers, and even some directors, are not privy to how their goals and objectives fit into the overall corporate strategy. If they don’t know, how can they possibly help us understand?
5. What Action Drivers Are at Work-Motive, Urgency, Return, Consequence, Means, and Risk?
When we ask a manager, ‘When do you need to start seeing results?’ they typically answer, ‘As soon as possible.’ Some even think that we will ‘jump higher’ if they say, ‘We need these results yesterday!’ If you’ve ever gone through one of these ‘we need it yesterday’ drills, only to have executive management say, ‘Come back and see us in six months,’ you’ll know the folly of qualifying an opportunity with a low- level buyer.
Please read this next sentence very carefully . . .
A sales opportunity qualified with anyone other than the person or persons who will make the final Action Decision is not qualified.
Sure, collect the ‘opinions’ of all the people who influence the buying decision, build relationships at all levels, use all the information you gather to create a composite picture of what it’s going to take to win the sale, but don’t rely too heavily on anything unless it comes from the mouth of the person or persons who make the final Action Decision.
6. Who or What Are We Competing With?
At the lower levels, where the Source Decision is made, our competitors are other companies that sell the same things that we sell. As far as our low-level buyer is concerned, if we can offer a better price than XYZ Corp., we’ve got the deal. Who are they kidding? We will compete in the Resource Decision with every other potential use of the money and manpower required to buy and implement our solution. We will compete with alternate courses of action, any of which may increase revenue or reduce costs just as effectively, or even more reliably than we can. And in the end, even if the initiative that our solution is a part of is deemed worth pursuing, they might decide to delay taking any action. We might find ourselves placed on the ‘back burner’ for a while. Typically, only the executives making the higher-level decisions know who or what we are really competing with.
7. What Resources Can or Will Be Made Available to Ensure the Success of the Investment?
Quite often the selection committee is told, ‘You select the best vendor or the best source for this solution and recommend it to us here in senior management. We’ll take it from there.’ Can you imagine how demoralizing it would be to tell the committee, ‘You spend a few months selecting, and then we’ll see if we can even afford to do it or not.’ I know that some buyers are purposefully blowing smoke when they say, ‘We’re definitely going to buy.’ Other times, they are just repeating what they have been told or led to believe by their management.
8. Is There an Executive Predisposition to One of the Vendors or Sources Being Considered?
The CEO, or someone else sitting around the table making the Action or Course Decision, may have been a loyal customer of one of your competitors at their last company. Heck, they might even have a brother-in-law who works for them! We can’t assume that all vendors will be on a level playing field when it comes to the more strategic, higher-level decisions, even if we win the source battle and are recommended by the selection committee.
One of my clients shared a story with me about a $50 million contract his company had lost at the very last minute, when their prospect’s CEO decided that it was less risky to go with my client’s competitor because of brand recognition and reputation. This happened despite a brutal eighteen-month selection process that cost my client hundreds of thousands of dollars to win. No one from my client’s firm had ever met their prospect’s CEO. Their prospect’s CFO had convinced them it was not necessary, and that the CEO would yield to the recommendation of the committee. Ouch!
9. Where Are They in Terms of the Action Decision and the Buying Process as a Whole?
To properly plan and execute a successful campaign, we need to know more than just the criteria for selecting the best vendor. We need to know:
What facets of the Action, Course, and Resource Decisions have already been decided?
What questions are still on the table?
What specific hurdles of the Action, Course, and Resource Decisions will be left until after the Source Decision is made?
The Source Decision is always a subset of the larger buying process, and the final Action Decision always comes later. If we can’t get an understanding of what it will take to win the Resource and Course Decisions, as well as what else has to happen before they can decide to take action and buy, winning the Source Decision could be an exercise in futility.
10. Are They, as an Organization, Willing to Work with Us?
We have talked about the importance of selling your buyer on a Process of Mutual Discovery, or a plan to help them get from point ‘A’ to point ‘C.’ But we need to sell that plan at a high enough level so that we have some assurance that once we reach point ‘B,’ they will, in fact, buy and continue on with us toward point ‘C.’ Let’s realize that without buy-in at the executive level, any commitment made by a lower-level decision maker is unreliable at best. A manager or director may be empowered to speak for a senior executive, but they are very seldom given the authority to commit for one.
So you see, it might not be that the manager or director you are selling to won’t tell you what you want and need to know to properly qualify an account and mount a successful sales campaign. Much of what we really want and need to know is never told to them in the first place. The problem here is that it’s OK for them to operate without knowing these details. It is not, however, OK for us.
A director of finance can invest his own time as well as the time of the people on his staff, several from IT, one or two from HR, and even an outside consultant or two for the next twelve months in order to make a well-informed and bulletproof Source Decision. If they, as a committee, make their recommendation to senior management, and then senior management decides to wait six months or to go in some different direction entirely, no one is going to be upset with that director of finance or anyone else on the committee. They were just doing their job.
Unfortunately, if we invest the same twelve months of our time, the time of our pre-sales consultants, business analysts, and sales managers trying to make the sale, only to find out the executive team had no intention of taking action on this initiative at this time, we’ll probably be fired. Or, at least we should be. Gaining access to, selling to, and qualifying at the executive level is paramount to our consistent sales performance and success.
I have watched too many sales professionals over the years become frustrated and even angry when they hear that, after all their hard work, ‘The CEO (of their prospective client’s company) decided to put the project on hold for six months.’ I have been that angry rep myself, too many times. Our customers don’t purposefully lie to us or waste our time-well, other than one or two I’ve met along the way. More often, the circumstances surrounding the Action Decision simply changed over time. Or, maybe we operated on the assumptions of a lower-level player who ‘coached’ us based on bad information, while all along the CEO had a very different perception of Urgency, Motive, and Consequence.
One could argue, ‘But they should have asked the CEO and made sure before they wasted our time like that!’ Probably so. But let’s not forget that their motive to understand the CEO’s decision criteria and perception of value is very different from ours. They don’t stand to get fired or miss their quarterly quota when the CEO delays the purchase, the same way that you or I do. It is ultimately our responsibility to reach that CEO, or whoever will make the final Action Decision, and try our best to understand how she thinks and what she thinks about. Any choice we make to take someone else’s word for it is at best a risk, and at worst downright foolish.