Getting Around the Buyer Road Block

We’ve discussed in Call as High As You Can the benefits of talking to the CEO.

Unfortunately the bosses aren’t the ones who’re doing the buying. The Project or Purchasing Manager usually does that.

So if we’re going to get to the CEO we are either going through our main contact, or around them.

If we’ve done our selling properly – qualifying, agreeing a buy/sell process, proposing and presenting – the deal will naturally progress up the ladder. Our guy rarely makes a decision on his own so he’ll involve his management at some point.

But, there are always those who want to control everything themselves. These people are “high risk” for their business and for us. The risk is they’ll buy the wrong offer. It won’t work. And we don’t get the order.

For “risk” to be managed it has to be shared. The buyer should be looking to avoid as much risk as he can, and manage the risk he can’t. He should share it with his bosses and with us.

When we ask the buyer to help us help him, and he refuses to sponsor a discussion with his boss(es) we have to go over, under or around him.

Of course we can lose a lot of friends doing that, so we should try to be as non threatening as possible, and polish our guy’s ego.

Here are some tactics we might employ to get around him:

Ask him questions only his boss can answer.

Organize a workshop that needs the boss to participate in.

Get our CEO to call the buyers CEO asking for a meeting.

Use our social network to get the CEO a message.

Invite the CEO to a sports event, or concert, or charity dinner.

There will be plenty of others.