A few weeks back a client of ours was working very closely with an internal contact to finalise a deal. They had been going back and forth with the account to finalise the details of the solution and the roll-out/implementation plan. Everything was sorted out, and the sale was in the sales team’s system at 100%. However, it turned out that while the customer contact fully believed that she had the authority to make the decision, other parts of the organisation had more than enough power to block it. In this case, IT was brought in as part of the implementation planning, and they blocked the whole thing.
The deal is now, essentially, back at square one, with the supplier needing to work with IT to understand the needs of IT, and to demonstrate the potential value creation for the organisation as a whole.
Clearly, this episode resulted in a lot of wasted time and effort, and we were brought in to look at the situation in terms of improving salesforce efficiency. I’ve seen it happen a few times at other accounts recently, so this is not a one-off situation. Especially in our post-GFC world, many organisations have changed the way decisions are made, and who has the authority to make them. The result is that salespeople waste a lot of time selling to the wrong people.
In my analysis and research, there are two typical pitfalls that sales teams fall into, both of which are easy to avoid:
1. Not asking about the buying process early in the sales process. Successful sales people confirm very early in discussions what is the buying process, who needs to be involved, who really owns the process and, importantly, who makes the decision. Less successful people tend to find people who think the idea is interesting, and immediately start trying to craft a proposal.
To avoid this, build this step into your own process: once you have an opportunity to create value for the account, and the contact has validated her interest, ask about how decisions are made. It’s an easy step. Team managers can easily coach around this topic as well, by asking team members “Who makes the decision here?” Simple stuff!
2. Not helping the contact to understand their internal risks. Later in the buying process, when you’ve been selected as the supplier, there is often still work to be done before you can get the account to a signed contract. Helping your contacts to manage their internal risks is a great way to add value to the client, even when it seems like the signature is imminent.
To do this, you can help them to think about the things that might stop their purchase progressing. There is a balance here, of course: you are not looking to introduce new risks and worries to the decision-making process that might scare them away! Rather, you are trying to open up the conversation to reveal their worries, and to help them think the situation through more effectively.
Consider using questions like:
· Who else is involved in this decision? Does anyone else need to be on board?
· Are their people or groups that could block your decision?
· Have things changed in the organisation since the GFC? Are more people involved in the decision than before?
It isn’t always the case of a contact pretending that they have the authority to make a decision when really they do not. In fact, from my observations, that is usually NOT the case. So what we have here is a great opportunity to add VALUE for the customer, as well as improving our own efficiency and effectiveness. Going into the process with a positive, customer-centric approach is likely to produce results.
As with much of successful selling, it comes down to being comfortable enough to ask questions to open up discussion. In this situation, questions this can help to do two key things:
- Open up the conversation around what the contact knows about the process, to make sure they are sharing as much as they can, and
- Force the contact to really consider what needs to happen, internally, to get their decision through.
If you focus on understanding the decision-making process earlier in your discussions, you’re likely to improve your effectiveness and efficiency, and create value for the customer. Of course, don’t forget that things do change over time, so these discussions may need to happen both early AND often!
