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We all recognize the importance of gaining access to senior executives and other
decision-makers. According to a Hewlett-Packard survey, "eighty percent of senior
executives become involved in key purchases early in the decision cycle." But what
are the most effective ways to reach these buyers? Should you call? Or write an
introductory letter and then call? Should you arrange an introduction through business
executives you both know? The most effective way is to be referred by someone from within
the executive’s own company. According to Hewlett-Packard:
- Eighty percent of respondents would "never" or "only occasionally" grant interviews to someone making cold calls.
- More than 50 percent of executive respondents prefer not to be introduced to sellers by
people outside their own organizations.
- An inside recommendation is the most effective means of getting on an executive’s
calendar. Eighty-four percent of respondents indicate they would "usually" or
"always" grant a meeting with a seller who was recommended by someone inside the
respondent’s firm.
Sounds like you’d better identify and cultivate someone inside the company to
arrange your introduction.
The only hitch is that two of the most hallowed marketing techniques—networking
and cold calling—will be of little use in identifying and cultivating these
individuals.
What’s wrong with networking and cold calling? Cold calls are not only calls made
to people you don’t know, but also include any sales call based solely on "I
want." For example, calling your best client with "I want to introduce you to my
tax partner" is a cold call.
Networking is too random, takes too much time and effort, and yields too little in
return. Making an acquaintance does not constitute a sales opportunity. Even though your
new contacts may like you, they really have no reason to meet with you or accept your
calls until they are ready to buy your services. Before that, they see any contact from
you as benefiting primarily you.
As the Hewlett-Packard survey shows, these tools just don’t work. They won’t
get you in touch with decision-makers in a way that positions you for sales success.
I like to make a distinction between suspects and prospects. A suspect is a person whom
you have reason to suspect has a need for your service. You cannot sell to a suspect. Only
when the suspect confirms your suspicion by acknowledging his need does he become a
prospect. You market to suspects and sell to prospects.
How many of you have suspects right now whom you feel need your services badly, but
don’t recognize the need and won’t see you? How many of you, trapped at too low
a level, lose sales because you can’t get to the decision-maker? These
decision-makers don’t want to see you because they see you as a self-interested
outsider.
Meet your new best friend: the guide. Below, I’ll define guides and show how to
identify, cultivate and embolden them to simplify your selling life. But first,
here’s how the sales game too often plays out now:
Networking
- Attend multiple business networking events, playing the thin odds of meeting someone who
isn’t a competitor and who needs your services.
- Follow up for weeks or months waiting for the incumbent counsel to stumble.
- Send letter/literature.
- Follow-up, i.e., make the dreaded "did you receive…, did you read…" calls.
- Repeat or return to number 3.
- Sell the appointment.
- Present your service.
- Try to close.
- Learn that this prospect is a recommender, not a buyer, and that others are involved in
the decision.
- Fend off recommender’s offers to present to buyers on your behalf.
- Try to figure out a non-suicidal way around recommender.
- Wait, then restart follow-up cycle.
Cold Calling
- Make approach calls, playing the thin odds of getting through.
- Sell the appointment.
- Resell/reschedule the appointment.
- Repeat three times.
- Assess buyer’s needs.
- Present your service.
- See 8-12 above.
Why do you go through these frustrating, time-c0nsuming processes, presentations and
proposals without getting anything in return, not even a decisive "no"? Because,
in the absence of any reliable intelligence about your chances of making this sale or even
how to go about it, you feel obligated to go through the whole nine yards.
Collapse Factors
Sales efforts collapse because you fail to identify:
- The source of funds.
- The action imperative, i.e., why the buyer must act.
- The source of buyer urgency.
- Internal opposition.
- Internal support/sponsorship.
- Your competition’s relative strengths and weaknesses.
- Deal killers.
- The cost to the buyer of doing nothing.
- Blocking conditions.
- The buyer’s financial limitations or preferences.
- Solution limits, i.e., the "realm of the possible."
- The buyer’s personal emotional needs ("What’s in it for me?").
- The buyer’s basis for deciding among competitors.
If you had reliable inside knowledge about these collapse factors, your chances of
making the sale (or withdrawing before you wasted a lot of time and money) would increase
dramatically. It’s hard to get inside knowledge because the information you need is
fragmented among many people, and those people aren’t going to volunteer to share it
with you. But mostly, it’s because you don’t ask.
Guides can help you solve this problem because they are insiders who have, or can
obtain, the inside knowledge you need, and they are motivated to share it with you.
Cultivate these insiders to guide you to the sale that they want to help you make.
What’s a Guide?
Except for the source of funds, i.e., the financial buyer, no one plays a more
important role in the sale than the guide who, motivated by self-interest, wants us to
make this sale. By giving you unique information about the buyer and sale situation, the
guide shows us what is really going on and how to make the sale. Without a guide you are
left guessing about the most important elements in the sale: who the buyers are and their
needs, internal politics and sponsorship, competition, timing, and how your solution
should be configured, positioned, expressed and presented.
Not everyone can be a guide. The guide must be someone who trusts you and who, in turn,
has credibility with the financial buyer.
Potential Guides
Anyone who fulfills the self-interest and inside-knowledge criteria mentioned above is
a potential guide. They can be found within the client company, within your own firm, or
outside both. For example:
- Client company executives or counsel with whom you have worked previously or had
meaningful contact.
- Lawyers in your firm who have strong relationships with company executives.
- Bankers, CPAs, consultants, and others that make up the target company’s trusted
advisory network.
- Executive secretaries or administrative assistants. You might initially perceive them,
and usually correctly so, as barriers or obstacles, but get on their good sides and they
can light the way to the financial buyers.
For specific examples of guides, see step 7 of "Eight Steps to Simpler
Selling" below. Then get creative and try to identify as many stakeholders as
possible.
Eight Steps to Simpler Selling
The following eight-step model will upend many traditional selling notions and simplify
the selling portion of your life.
- "Size" the problem. Quantify your annual business origination goal.
What kind of work is worth investing your limited selling time? Divide your goal by the
average annual billing per client for such work to see how many clients you need to meet
your goal. It will be a smaller number than you think. You now have the right to be
selective. If you only need to be right 10 or 20 times per year, you don’t have to
sell everyone, which means you don’t have to talk to everyone, present to everyone or
endure everyone’s sales processes (and costs).
- Define what value your clients get from buying your service. Define the effect you
have on their businesses. (Hint: Ask those clients who love you most. This is a very
enjoyable discussion, very good for the soul.) Be very clear on your value.
- Identify your "demand triggers." Demand triggers are the objective
situations or business conditions that create demand for your service.
- Develop a list of companies exhibiting your demand triggers. Again, talk with your
most successful clients for profiling advice. Once they’ve told you what problem
prompted them to buy from you, ask them how prevalent the triggering is, i.e., "Are
these circumstances unique to your company or prevalent in your industry?"
- Determine the level at which purchasing authority usually resides. Ask your clients
whether it is unusual for someone in their position to buy this service, or whether they
believe it is fairly standard.
- Make a list of those with purchasing authority. Follow up the previous question
with, "Which of your peers likely face similar challenges?" "How would you
go about compiling a list of peer-level executives?" Associations or trade media may
sell or rent such lists.
- Depart from the norm. Here is where you might ordinarily write to those executives,
or hang around business, civic or charitable organizations in order to network with them.
Or do some fruitless cold calling. Or network, but not find direct prospects. Instead,
conduct an intelligence-gathering effort. Learn the secondary corporate effects of your
target’s demand trigger. What other corporate departments are affected? How? Why?
For example, if your expertise is crafting specialized benefit programs for key
employees, you might seek access to HR executives at technology companies, knowing they
face an acute shortage of technical and sales talent. You know that your creative
approaches to compensation for key employees can be an effective tool to address the
competition for talent-—and ease the pressure from CEOs demanding to know that the HR
folks are doing about he shortage. The problem is that every other employment lawyer is
bombarding those same HR executives with literature, seminar invitations and phone calls.
As a result, it’s nearly impossible to get their attention, much less get in the
door.
- Get creative. Who else is interested in this issue? How about marketing and sales
executives in those companies? They feel the shortage before HR does. What about
engineers, for the same reasons? How about investors or bankers who depend on financial
results from a new product launch or a key sales territory? What about the sales people or
engineers or other peers that must do the extra work resulting from the headcount
shortage? How about strategic allies, suppliers, distributors or downstream retailers who
are also concerned about the company’s ability to compete?
This list is far from exhaustive. You need to look for all possible stakeholders in the
problem and in the outcome you can deliver. You will find reliable self-interest in many
places. Each of these stakeholders is an insider with the credibility to gain the ear of
your target buyer, and each is motivated to bring credible solutions to the table.
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