Target Opportunity Selling by Nicholas A. C. Read

Author:Nicholas A. C. Read
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2014-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Decision Makers

Decision makers listen to the recommendations of the evaluators and so form an opinion about each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses. The questions they ask and the capabilities they choose to grill you on may be informed by what the evaluators have dug up on you. Decision makers are usually senior in rank to the extent that the task of committing their company’s funds to a vendor is something they own the budget and authority for.

Sometimes salespeople report being confused about who the final decision maker actually is because it looks like there are multiple players who serve in this capacity. This occurs when the evaluation committees are led by one or more project managers whose role is to coordinate everyone’s efforts and facilitate consensus. These people may be from outside the prospect’s organization chart: hired guns from industry bodies or independent third parties such as consultants, project management firms, or other prime contractors who are involved when your sale is a smaller part of a larger overarching initiative.

So how do you identify the ultimate decision maker? Ask. It shouldn’t be a state secret. There is usually one person with the responsibility of saying that the decision to appoint you—and all the success or failure that follows this decision—was their call. That person is the one staking their reputation on this decision. Even in the most egalitarian of work cultures, it eventually comes down to one person who asks for everyone’s recommendation and assurance before committing to buy from you. Follow the money to find whose budget is being spent, or look for the person in charge of the department that will be involved the most with your company after the contract is signed and the installation or implementation begins.

Evaluators are legion, and their interests are diverse. Decision makers are singular, and their interest usually boils down to the equation of risk versus capability. If they don’t believe in you—if your social capital and business credentials don’t add up in their book—even if the evaluators recommend you, the decision makers may go another way, especially if your competitors have bridged and bonded to them in your absence. You must know who casts the final vote and if they decide on logic or emotion!

Let me share an example from my own experience that echoes what top executives and sellers confirm about this. My team was working on a million-dollar deal to provide consulting and change management services into a prospect’s national sales and marketing function. What we were recommending was visionary, and because it required the type of change best implemented from the inside, we were going to embed our staff into an on-site project office for half a year to keep everyone on track during the setup phase and remove the customer’s risk of their people getting distracted and running out of steam.

When it came to evaluating the project feasibility and planning how to make it work, there were about 20 competing voices at the local, regional, and global levels.

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