In my last two posts (this one and this one) I described a framework for progressing larger sales opportunities that I have had a lot of success with. It is a process described in Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman’s book “Strategic Selling” (now called New Strategic Selling.) In this framework there are four types of people involved in a sale.
- The economic buyer
- The users
- The gatekeepers
- The coach
I described these four types of people and gave you some tips on how to find the fourth type of person a “coach”. The “coach” is the one type of person you don’t get for “free”. Having a coach is one of the most important factors in winning bigger deals.
Knowing how to sell to a “buying committee” like this is becoming more important as getting in the door gets harder and every opportunity more critical.
Cover the bases
If you don’t know all the people that play the first three roles above (the economic buyer, the users and the gatekeepers), you are taking a risk with your sale.
The first step to increase your chances of winning a bigger deal is identifying the people involved. If you don’t know about someone that is involved in influencing your deal, you have no way of selling them.
Helping you find these people is one of the key roles of a coach. Since the coach knows the inner workings of the target account, they can tell you who is involved in buying your solution. (Being in the internal information flow of the account is part of the definition of a coach.) The coach can tell you who will be the ultimate signing authority (economic buyer), who will use your product or service (users), and who will be charged with vetting it (gatekeepers.)
If you are not confident that you know who the economic buyer is, who the users are, and who the gatekeepers are, then issue yourself a “red flag” for each information gap. Brainstorm an action item to remove each “red flag”. These are the actions you need to take to proactively sell your deal–and maximize your chances of winning it.
The other way to earn a “red flag” is not understanding the needs of one of the members of the buying committee and addressing those needs with your proposed solution. To eliminate these red flags, you need to sell each member of the buying committee.
Note: There can be many users of your solution in a large company. You may not need to sell every user, but you probably do need to sell certain key “representatives” of the users. For example, if you are selling a CRM solution, you may not need to sell to every salesperson, but you probably do need to sell to the head of sales and maybe one or two salespeople they ask to evaluate your product.
In practice, you may not be able to eliminate every “red flag” but for each one you eliminate your chances of winning the deal go up. Fortunately many salespeople that work for your competition will “single thread” their deals through one champion. Hence they will likely take large risks with losing the deal to you. Even if you only sell a few of the people in the buying committee, you will likely be well ahead of your competition.
Summary
- To increase your chances of winning bigger deals you need to find the three types of people that come with every opportunity: the economic buyer, the users and the gatekeepers.
- Once you’ve found these people, you need to sell them to maximize the chances of winning the deal.
- Each time you don’t know who someone is on the buying committee, or you are not sure they are onboard with your solution, issue yourself a “red flag” and brainstorm an action to remove it.