Sell Like the Best by Stephan Schiffman

Author:Stephan Schiffman [Schiffman, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

The Power of Twelve

(Part I)

If you have finished your first appointment with your prospect and have not been given a definitive “no,” you are well on your way to making a sale. It may not happen when you want it to happen. It may not be as big a number as you want. But unless you do something to screw it up, I would bet on you. Without even knowing you. (Just to be safe, it would be a small wager—not the entire farm.)

It’s not a lock, understand, but if the right person—that is, a decision maker or an important decision influencer—has gone this far with you, he or she is probably on your team. What do I mean by that? I mean that your prospect is amenable to change. It does not mean he will change. But, remember, it’s not your competition that you’re fighting; the enemy is the status quo. And if your prospect has expressed a willingness to move on, to consider change, well, you’ve won at least half the battle.

So what’s next? The average salesperson takes the information he’s garnered from a prospect and creates a proposal. These rarely if ever work. The reason is simple. In sales, as in everything else, information is power. And if you’ve only spoken to one person, there is little likelihood that you have the big picture—or the power that comes with it.

In fact, my experience is that if you speak to only one person what you’re likely to get is just a superficial overview. That person knows his job—say he’s the purchasing agent—but may not know the specifics of how your product is used on the factory floor. A person may know how it’s used on the factory floor but not be aware of some greater political issue.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Recently, a salesman came to my office and tried to sell me software. He asked me how fast my computers are, and I couldn’t answer him. I know what I need them to do. I press the appropriate buttons to get them to do that and that’s pretty much the extent of my knowledge. I could tell him how I use my computer and what I want it (and, by extension, my software) to do. But to find out how it does what I want it to do the salesman had to go to someone else for that perspective.

I am not a Luddite. I use computers all the time. But I also drink coffee all the time. I don’t know how it’s grown. All I care about is how it tastes.

So you want to get as many points of view as you can, as many perspectives on the company you want to sell to as possible. It’s why I coined the phrase “Power of Twelve.” That is, ideally you want to meet as many as a dozen additional people in the company (besides your cold-call prospect)—and it doesn’t necessarily matter where they stand in the corporate hierarchy.

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