The Economic Buyer – The Toughest Influencer of All

Make sure the person writing the check for your services will want you to be the provider of those services. Failing to create a true Win for the Economic Buyer can end in a complete loss of a hard-fought effort for quality work. (Read New Strategic Selling, by Heiman and Sanchez.)

Technical Buying Influence: If you have paid your dues and done your homework and have become a true expert in an area about which you are truly passionate, getting past the technical buyer and creating a “Win” for her if you are chosen becomes easier and easier. If you are truly great, then her choice of you will make her look great in front of the people who are most important to her, and that is a Win for her. Keep that up and you are golden with her.

User Buying Influence: If you have perfected your craft, are personable, speak and write well, provide exceptional delight-the-customer service, and are a true expert, you will make the user buyer look great in front of the people most important to him and he will seek you out and pay you more to do it over and over.

Economic Buying Influence: The trickiest buying influencer is the “Economic Buyer.” This is the person who writes the checks. The Economic Buyer may be the User Buyer as well in the case of an attorney selling to the GC, but often the GC answers to the CEO or CFO as additional and important Economic Buying influencers. It is risky to fail to make sure that all those with Economic Buying influence are not addressed in your sales process and that you have created a Win for each of them.

Early in your relationship with the User Buyer, the Economic Buyer is just as important and a great deal more difficult to get to. If the Economic Buyer is comfortable with the User Buyer’s use of another professional, their fee structure, how they are paid and may even have set up eCommerce payment mechanisms, this may be one of the most difficult obstacles to tackle in convincing the User Buyer to change professionals. She may like you. She may even prefer you. But she may not be willing to go to bat for you with the Economic Buyer. In the end she will comfortably go with the professional her Economic Buyer boss is comfortable with and blame the decision on the boss. “I am so sorry. It was just out of my hands.”

So it is up to you to convince her that failure to use you will make her look bad in front of the people most important to her. There is nothing she can afford less. This is her future. This is all that matters to her. How can you make her look great in front of that Economic Buyer IF you are chosen as the professional for this opportunity? Figure that out and you will have a motivated advocate with the Economic Buyer.

Once you have convinced the User Buyer that you are the best option for her, begin to mold her into a coach for you with the Economic Buyer.

She is in charge of this project for a reason. The company/firm/client respects her enough in this field to put her in charge. If she believes that you will create a Win for her. Using this you can guide her through the process to get her to argue for you or even allow you to present for yourself.

User Buyer, “This is my area of expertise. I am ultimately responsible for achieving outcome A. You are relying on me to achieve outcome A and it is important to you. We need a H-type of professional to achieve result A. I have reviewed the credentials of and interviewed several H-type professionals. I believe that professional X is going to help us achieve result A, and do it in the most efficient manner. I realize that we have historically used professional Y, but in this case professional X will provide us the true expertise we need to achieve result A.”

You can see how important it is to the User Buyer that you will deliver. If she is not 100% sure, she will not make this speech.

Work with the User Buyer to understand the things that the Economic Buyer truly cares about. Provide the User Buyer with all the necessary ammunition to follow up on the speech above with undeniable proof that her assessment of you and your competitors is accurate. It is up to you to sell yourself.

If you can convince her to allow you to present to the Economic Buyer, that is ideal. No one sells you like you.

Plan A – Be Prepared: Even if the User Buyer makes this speech in your support, the Economic Buyer may choose to require the use of professional Y for a myriad of reasons, so it is best to get yourself into the same position with the Economic Buyer as professional Y is.

As soon as the opportunity is identified and the Economic Buyer can be identified (often using the Coach), considered directly or through another sales person in your firm, begin to market your services directly to the potential Economic Buyers. It is dangerous for you to appear to be going around your User Buyer, so having another sales person make the entreaties often makes sense.

Many firms have individuals dedicated to selling services designed for corporate buyers (CEOs, CFOs, GCs, etc). They also have individuals selling other services to professionals whose clients are corporations. It is appropriate for the corporate sales team to begin to include the corporate clients of a target professional in their sales and marketing efforts so that when the opportunity arises to provide services to the professional representing a client or target corporation, the Economic Buyer has at least a passing knowledge of our services if we are not already at or near the position previously occupied only by professional Y.

If the firm provides one service within a corporation, use that person as an internal coach to secure opportunities with other parts of the corporation.

Create many coaches. Coach your coaches. Ask good questions. Find out who the Economic Buying Influencers are. Find out what would be a Win for each Economic Buying Influence. Understand what level of influence each person has. Use this information to help the User Buyer and Technical Buyer who believe you will make them look great in front of the people most important to them, convince the Economic Buyer you will provide a Win for them as well.

Bottom line: Do not forget to cover this base. The Economic Buyer is critical to many decisions on complex professional sales.