Covering Your Bases

There is a core concept in the book New Strategic Selling, by Heiman and Sanchez, that every person making complex sales must understand. Every sale of nebulous professional services is certainly a complex one. Especially when the effort is, as this blog hopes to help you accomplish, to secure high paying, expert dependant bet-the-company work.

To review, clients that have mission-critical work often need expertise found outside the firm on a temporary basis, to help them achieve a tremendous opportunity or avert a disaster. This may include achieving the best possible result in a multi-million (or billion) dollar lawsuit. Consummating a highly lucrative acquisition or sale of all or part of a business. Recovering from financial crisis. Addressing fraud or corruption within its domestic or international operations. Achieving greater revenues and exponential growth through focus and discipline. The situations are endless.

Heiman and Sanchez point out that every complex sale involves multiple buyers within the target, or perhaps tangential to it. Failure to create real wins for each of these critical buyers generally results in failure to secure the opportunity. Even if the contract is secured, failure to gain the support from all influencers within the entity will make it extremely difficult to succeed in the work or obtain any future work with that firm. A blessing from the top is seldom sufficient.

The four buying influencers are:
The Technical Buyer
The User Buyer
The Economic Buyer
The Coach

More than one person may fill each role and one person may completely or partially fill multiple roles. The objective is to identify who, within the target, holds the power to say no to your proposal, what their role is, how much influence do they really have, how to get to them and create a win for them so that they do not undermine your efforts. We will address coaches in the next post as they are extremely important and unique in their role in this process.

The Technical Buyer
This role is often filled by a gatekeeper. Often they are younger professionals whose job it is to find the individuals or firms who can be shown to have the necessary credentials to qualify as experts for the project. The role of this influences is to find objective proof that you are the right expert for this project.
Prior work experience – case studies.
Education, certifications, credentials.
Testimonials and references.
Thought Leading Articles, Speeches and White Papers.
Anything else that objectively proves you know this stuff better than anyone else.

The Technical Buyers role often is to narrow the field to the few top experts in the field. You have to stand out to make the cut.

The User Buyer
This role is filled by the individuals whose careers ride on how you perform. Once you have been approved technically, these influencers want to know whether they can work with you, whether you fit the culture of the organization, whether you can work as part of their team. Will you present well to critical third parties such as a jury, judge, Board of Directors, their client, etc.
We know you have the credentials at this point, but:
Are you well-spoken? Are you too well-spoken?
Do you have the right accent for work in Texas or New York?
Do you dress appropriately?
Are you attactive or fit or tall or not, which may be as important?
Do we seem to mesh on a personal level?
Does my team like you?
Etc.

This evaluation tends to be more esoteric and comes down to whether the person who is responsible for the success of this hugely important project can count on you to make him or her look great in front of the people most important to him or her.

The Economic Buyer
This is the person who writes the check to pay you for your work. The greater the support you have from the Technical and User Buyers charged with the success of the project, the more likely the economic buyer will give you the go ahead.

Never, however, take this influencer lightly. The person making this decision is also on the hook should the effort fail. If they do not know you, they may decide that it is safer to choose a highly regarded known quantity. The old saying is very relevant to this person, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM.” The big name, highly regarded and much more expensive option is also the safest for the economic buyer, even in the face of support from all other influencers. If you fail to create a win for this critical influencer, you have made a critical error in your efforts.

Wins
The goal of your sale cannot just be to secure the work. You must identify each person with influence over the sale and the ultimate work and create a real and positive win for that person within the company and in their lives. You must show each buying influencer that you will make them look great in front of the people most important to them.

If you fail to do this, even if you secure the sale, the path will be fraught with pitfalls, the likelihood that you will fail and be blamed for the poor result and perhaps sued because of it, increase dramatically.

As they say,
“Hell hath no fury like a buying influencer scorned”

or something like that.

Complex sales are complex. It is important to work the whole puzzle. You are not finished if there are still pieces sitting on the table.