Josiane Feigon is presenting May 7 teleseminar on Selling to the People with the Power to Buy as part of the upcoming Sales Stimulus Package - an intensive two-week program to help you get more prospects in your pipeline - quickly!
Click to learn more about the Sales Stimulus Package now.
According to a recent study that surveyed more than 1,500 sales organizations, 48.7 percent—almost half—say their reps close the deals in their pipeline forecasts. They lose 30.1 percent, but 21.2 percent end up a “no decision.”
What happened? When a deal is lost because of “no decision,” it’s usually because the salesperson has aligned themselves with the wrong person. The solution to this common problem is an often overlooked but vital skill: navigating.
Navigating is one of my favorite skills to coach, and one of the most revealing. Most reps rarely admit they need to work on this skill because it deals with gatekeepers— and they believe that talking to gatekeepers and getting past them is a no-brainer: you either have access to get in, or you get shut out. But very often, they mistake a high-level gatekeeper for someone who has real power.
Wrong! Those people who are so happy to talk to you and promise everything are what I call No-Po’s: people with no-power to close the deal. They are only there to waste your time and keep you from connecting with the people at the top who can actually make the buy.
It’s easy to surrender to the No-Po’s offer of false hope because, after dialing hundreds of calls, you’ve finally found someone who’s actually happy to talk to you! The hardest part is admitting to yourself that you’ve wasted time on a No-Po.
But once you do, you can finally start making headway in an organization. With skillful navigating, you can learn to quickly separate the No-Po’s from the power buyers and narrow down your prospects to the people who can make it happen. All it takes is a little digging.
Understanding How Power Works in a Sales 2.0 Environment
The noisy, constantly moving Sales 2.0 landscape can hide real power and make No-Po’s look like shining stars. A deep understanding of the nature of power in today’s companies is basic to finding it. Fortunately, there are only three things you have to remember:
Power moves.
Power hides.
Power Is Invisible
Does power reside at C-level, with the CEO, CFO, and all the other chiefs? Or does a person with the much more humble title “external management consultant” who may actually influence the budget? It’s often hard to tell.
The explosion of impressive titles is a big part of the problem. Corporate culture is very status-conscious, and almost everybody sounds as though he or she might have power. Mergers and acquisitions create additional layers of management, new positions, new titles, and new roles and responsibilities.
Add to this the fact that every organization doles out titles on its own terms, and you have a confusing mess. A Director of Marketing at one company, for example, might be a harried and powerless project manager. But the same title at a different company may have several million dollars at her disposal.
The key? Don’t go after titles for their own sake. Find out where the power truly lies first.
Power Moves
Mergers, acquisitions, hiring and firing, corporate theft . . . The pace of business is now so fast that power relationships can shift in the course of a single sale. As companies merge and adopt Web 2.0 technology, the product and service offerings broaden—so a solution targeted at IT may now spill over to Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Operations.
Power Hides
The fast-moving Sales 2.0 gives power many organizational hiding places. The reasons fall into a general category I call “too many.”
1. Too Many Names to Choose From: Popular software tools make it deceptively simply to find the names of people to talk to in a given organization. For example, if you search Apple using the Jigsaw pre-call search tool, you’ll find lots of potential contacts—883, to be precise. Using Spoke, you’ll get 167 in the Sales category alone. How are you supposed know which of these literally hundreds of people is the one you want to contact? You have so many names to choose from that your chances of connecting with a No-Po—and getting strung along by false promises—are enormous.
2. Too Many People Involved in Decision Making: Today’s sales reps must persuade four to six more people for each sales opportunity they pursue. As the buying process becomes more complex and technical, procurement departments often consult IT or other areas of the business before making buying decisions. This brings more people into the process, and introduces more layers of management. More people are involved in making decisions—and fewer people with access to budgets.
3. Too Many Educated Buyers: Today’s Internet-savvy customers are more informed and knowledgeable than ever. They can check out corporate Web sites and use search engines to compare solutions. As a result, you may find yourself engaged in long, technical discussions with people who can’t qualify the sale. In fact, a prospect with too much technical knowledge may be a red flag for a No-Po: it’s usually the decision-maker with the broader view who has the money to buy.
4. Too Many Distractions: Once upon a time, before the Internet, desktop distractions consisted of a few wind-up toys. As we saw in Chapter 1, information overload has made productivity one of the biggest challenges for sales reps. But you’re not the only one suffering. Desktop distractions also leave decision-makers with less time to carefully consider your solution and make the appropriate decision.
Josiane Feigon, is President of TeleSmart and blogger at www.tele-smart.com/blog. Her upcoming book, Smart Selling on the Phone and Online (available Fall 2009) will become the sourcebook for inside sales. She is a global thought leader in the inside sales community and recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on inside sales teams and management talent.
*According to the Executive Summary of Miller Heiman’s 2008 Sales Best Practices Study.
I think you are spot on with the concept of “No Po’s”. It’s just too tempting to engage, when someone offers to listen. In addition to losing the deal to indecision, the problem results in inaccurate forecasts and wasting valuable selling resources like: sales engineers time, travel budget and the involvement of customer references. I’ll be interested to learn more about your recommendations to reach power. I think the keys to this are: reading signs of power correctly and effectively using quid pro quo of selling resources to secure access. I’ve recently started following your blog and look forward to additional posts in this area.
Posted by: Josh Horwitz | 04/22/2009 at 03:36 PM