Today’s guest post is by Nicholas Read, co-author of Selling To The C-Suite, a new book published by McGraw-Hill:
A small proportion of salespeople always seem to drive the lion’s share of a company’s revenue. And even in today’s market, they’re thriving. What do these super reps do different to everyone else – and can you bottle it?
A new book climbing the Amazon charts holds the answers. Selling to the C-Suite (McGraw Hill, 2010) is based on the world’s largest study into executive buying behavior. Industry guru Neil Rackham hails it as “worth its weight in commission checks” because it holds empirical data collected from interviews with executives, and not anecdotal stories.
What it reveals is that executives want salespeople to call on them. They need fresh ideas from outside their company. But to gain that coveted audience, the right approach is critical.
Here’s How Top Level Exec’s Control The Buying Process
Executives reveal they get involved in their buying process when a problem or opportunity is first identified. They form a vision of what they want. If it can be satisfied internally, they leverage these resources.
But if a solution can’t be found internally, executives hit the Internet to do their own research on other options. This means that before salespeople even call, they already know what you do, what your customers say about you, and how you compare to competitors.
Based on the ideas they find online (and after talking with their personal network of advisors) executives form ideas about what they need and which companies have answers. Then they assign someone else to filter a shortlist of suppliers.
The implication for marketers is that if your websites don’t talk about the problems you solve and are merely crammed with product information, executives probably won’t find you when they type their challenges into a search engine.
The implication for sellers is that if you’re waiting to be invited to bid, the executives have already stepped away from the buying process and your window to shape their thinking has often passed.
Is this ideal? Far from it. It causes sellers get caught in a commodity comparison with mid-level managers and procurement agents whose job is to whittle down the price.
Here’s How To Do It The Wrong Way
What do many salespeople do escape this discount trap? They place a call up to the executive – and get a polite rejection (if they hear anything back at all).
It seems like a hopeless situation for many. But the executives actually have a different take on this.
Certainly they complain about being called by salespeople who fish their name off a list and call out of desperation. They don’t have time for these intrusions and so establish gatekeepers to protect their calendar. In fact, unsolicited cold calls succeed only 4 percent of the time according to the latest study.
Here’s How To Do It The Right Way
But if salespeople first network to other players in the executive’s team who have their ear, and establish a business case with them for mounting a discussion outside the normal procurement process, these influencers will recommend the seller up to the c-suite. On those occasions the executives grant a meeting with a salesperson 84 percent of the time. That’s a huge improvement on cold calling!
Executives expect salespeople to understand their business goals and be accountable for making things happen, as their ambassador into the supplier organization. Salespeople who say they must check with their manager before committing to action blow their chance of being seen as credible.
Executives expect you to listen before you prescribe a solution, and to do so in the context of their company and industry. This mandates a need for salespeople to understand their customer’s industry jargon, their business ecosystem and all the current affairs in their universe. Salespeople who only talk about their company and their product – no matter how enthusiastically – rarely visit the C-Suite twice.
The saying “people buy from people they like” remains true as ever, but executives report they prefer to deal with people they trust. When a supplier demonstrates expertise and the integrity to challenge an executive’s current thinking, they provide fresh ideas that executives love to hear.
One CEO reveals: “I don’t have any time to listen to a sales pitch. But I have all day to talk to a peer I can bounce ideas off and get real insight from. If more salespeople made the type of call where I’d be willing to write a check for their time, they’d have a better chance of winning contracts. The product they’re selling is less important than knowing you’re in expert hands.”
This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert about your products, no matter what your company’s training department will tell you. Instead, executives want you to be an expert on their business affairs. That means doing your own research on them, their company, their competitors, their customers, their industry, and attending their conferences.
Value at the c-suite is created when your questioning strategy extracts the depth and immediacy of an executive’s business issues, and uncovers all the stakeholders who need a voice in the final solution. The more pain you uncover from multiple stakeholders, the more insight you gain on what the real solution should look like.
Executives revealed that suppliers position as thought leaders when they spend time diagnosing before they prescribe. They even revealed that suppliers who engage early enough in the buying process have the opportunity to shape projects before they are handed down to subordinates who manage suppliers through a tender process, which is where a supplier’s dialog is limited to features, functions and price.
One of the most telling insights executives reveal is they typically don’t know what value their suppliers are adding. Despite all the up-front selling to establish a value proposition, few sellers ever return to the scene of the crime to audit the quantitative value delivered months or years later. Those that do so, establish credibility for the next round of sales, and enjoy longer-term relationships as a result. Those that don’t, find themselves in another round of competitive bidding for each deal.
Executives who shared these insights in Selling to the C-Suite cautioned that too many sellers think they need to sell to the top as if doing so were a rite of passage. There are legitimate reasons why decisions are delegated to subordinates, not the least being a lack of time in the executive calendar.
If a sale can be managed at a lower level, sellers should complete a political analysis of the opportunity to discern who has formal authority and informal influence. Many times a sale can be won without executive involvement at all if you connect to the right players.
Clearly c-suite expectations of sellers has changed. They don’t want you to call if the matter can be dealt with lower down the food chain. They are willing to meet if you network through their lieutenants, create new value, and demonstrate an ability to make things happen for them.
Their invitation is to be a peer at their table, and not a peddler of products. The gauntlet has been thrown down. Are you up to the challenge?
And if you’d like to learn even more from Nicholas Read, you can find him at working diligently over at SalesLabs.
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