Sales calls should be made as high in the customer organisation as possible. The sales call to the CEO will save time and take the initiative away from the buyers.
Why is it that people selling things like to deal with the doorman? Ok so, that’s an outrageous exaggeration, but it grabs the attention and illustrates an interesting point – when we’re selling something we tend to feel subservient, as if not worthy of serious consideration. We don’t want to upset anybody by being too pushy. So, we try to sell the doorman, the receptionist, middle managers – anybody but the boss. Obviously this doesn’t apply to people selling to individuals or professionals. They can only talk to the boss, but they still adopt this subservience, and waste time and money.
Well here is another outrageous statement – middle managers almost NEVER push new ideas upstairs. If the boss isn’t already thinking it, then the people who work for him aren’t going to get behind it. Why should they, its too risky? “Get some support and work your way up the hierarchy” must be some of the worst advice to come out of training courses. CEOs invariably share the same characteristics. They are polite, direct; interested in ways to run their business better, and struggling with staff who don’t tell them what is going on and won’t take responsibility.
The job tenure of CEOs is shorter than any other in the organisation. If they can’t change the business then somebody changes them. They need our ideas. Our challenge when selling to organisations lies in attracting the CEOs attention. If we can do that and get their support, we’re pretty much home and dry. Of course they’ll want their people to go along with the new idea, but that’s much easier to achieve when the staff know the boss is in favour.
If we’re going to work with CEOs, we’re going to have to change our mindset. Instead of thinking like subservient sales guys we have to think like business people. We have to think of our product or service in terms of the value it creates for the customer, the way we assure return on investment and the way we mitigate risk. We have to see ourselves, and present, as peer business managers. Forget the slick marketing presentations and clever sales tactics- they don’t have the time to waste while we try to impress them. Offer them a business proposition. If they like it they will buy, if they don’t they weren’t going to anyway, regardless of who we talked to.
Ideally we’ll go into the account right at the top, get support for our idea and license to promote it in the company, and an invitation to report back to the boss on progress. If we can’t do that, for example, if the operations manager invites us in, we have to find a way of getting to the CEO. There are numerous tactics which can work – see our knowledge base, but the best approach is usually to think and act like a CEO. If we make the CEO level presentation to the operations manager he will often sponsor a meeting with the boss. We should ask for the introduction on the basis our proposition warrants a CEO decision. We shouldn’t be intimidated by these people, we should do everything we can to engage them, and everybody we meet along the way are just opportunities for the introduction we need.
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