As sales leaders and presales professionals, how often have you seen this outcome? As a sales representative, how often have you chosen it? Having represented almost every aspect of sales over the course of my career - as a rep, as a sales engineer, as a consultant, and even as a Chief Revenue Officer - it has always left me with a combined sense of amusement and dread as I watched opportunities die on the vine after several months and hundreds of resource hours invested.
In a previous article, I wrote about three types of languishing customers. It is our own fear of rejection and uncertainty that inspires us to prolong engagements with customers who lack the authority, influence, or strategic motivation to make a deal happen. And yet we persist.
Part of the reason we persist extends from our fear. We persist because honestly appraising the direction of our engagement means facing the likelihood that there's nowhere left to go. We persist because we don't want to draw the ire of our sales leadership. We persist because we prefer our chances with a lukewarm audience over the greater uncertainty of prospecting.
In more than 20 years of contributing to, supporting, leading, and advising sales teams, one thing has remained constant: the most successful sellers are the ones who can articulate value at every level of the organization. They realize that people's first priority is to advance their own political and economic self-interests within the organization. The most successful sellers realize that they are not the heroes of the story. Instead, they frame their audience and customer champions the protagonists.
I was recently supporting a salesperson in a discussion with a few middle managers at a major retailer. As our customer outlined their plans, the salesperson soon realized that the customer had no immediate need for the products he wanted to sell. Lacking an immediate opportunity, I encouraged the rep to outline how his products would support the customer where they need to be, not just where they were in the moment.
Unfortunately, the salesperson brushed the idea off as too high-level and "fluffy," and he abandoned his efforts with the customer entirely. Six months later, we learned that the customer had embarked on the exact strategy we would have included in the point of view! In this case, his opportunity didn't die on the vine. It died before the seed could even sprout.
The problem in my salesperson's case was that he was relying entirely on departmental or tactical selling. While tactical selling is necessary to earn the attention and allegiance of departmental buyers, it carries higher risks and greater price pressure than executive-level sales. This is because department heads are more likely to engage in vendor bias. There is also a myopic focus on features and tactical benefits like "ease of use" that provide little differentiation, especially with late-majority solutions and "replacement markets."
The most successful sellers are the ones who use departmental selling to earn the allegiance of aspiring leaders who can co-develop and advance your strategic point of view higher in the organization. The most valuable department leaders are the ones with the Authority to advance a position, enough Influence in the organization to have their ideas heard by middle and upper management, and the strategic Motivation to see beyond their immediate scope of work.
Once you've identified your AIM participants and their big ideas, you can begin co-developing a point of view. I encourage salespeople to work alongside their departmental leaders to define:
Now comes the fun part: advancing your point of view. This differs from most sales engagements because your approach isn't as overtly product-specific. Done properly, your strategic point of view begins with the departmental leaders' "big ideas," and uses your selling points to advance and expand the big idea. Your challenge as a salesperson will be to work alongside your departmental stakeholders to advance your joint perspective with upper management.