Opening the Road to the Decision Makers

Продажи
	Sales.com
		Getting....

by Diane Sanchez, Stephen E. Heiman, and Tad Tuleja

We've been improving people's sales process for nearly twenty years. In that time we've received our share of fan mail from clients who have used our principles to sort out key players and then target them individually on the basis of their roles. We've never had a thank-you that was more gratifying than the one we received from Robert Turfe. Rob is currently a management consultant with Diamond Technology Partners, Inc., a Chicago-based strategy and information technology consulting firm. When we first heard from him, however, he was a captain in the U.S. Army, stationed in the former Yugoslavia under the auspices of the United Nations.

As a logistics officer with the Corps of Engineers, Rob recognized soon after his assignment to the UN mission that a certain stretch of road along the Serbian border was extremely hazardous for soldiers escorting refugees. In rain and snow, especially, the surface became so slippery that the passage of emergency vehicles was seriously impeded, exposing them for prolonged periods to potential mortar fire. The road could be fixed, but it would take mission money, and attempts to sell this idea to United Nations headquarters had consistently met with budgetary disapproval.

Fortuitously, just before going to Yugoslavia, Rob had read Strategic Selling; , which outlines the buyer identification process. "We can use this," the young officer said to himself -- and he proceeded to target key "buyers" on the basis of its principles.

"It wasn't too hard to identify the economic buyer," he told us. "The repair allocation we needed would run over $3 million, and money like that had to be okayed from the top. Approval had to come from the Fund Certifying Officer at UN headquarters -- a guy who had vetoed the idea several times before. The odds were against me, I knew that. But I had to try."

Rob's try started with the identification of the other decision-makers that, he knew, would also have to give their approval. "There were so many buying influences with personal agendas," he said, "that I felt I really had to get things down on paper. I set up these charts to outline the decision-making process, and I used the players who shared my views about safety to get through to the ones who were more resistant."

Among the players who didn't have to be sold were the military personnel who used the road every day. These "user" buyers were directly concerned with performance: it was the people they were responsible for -- soldiers and civilians -- who were being put in jeopardy by the impassable road. Another user buyer was the region's surgeon general. He liked the idea, Rob admitted wryly, both for professional and for personal reasons. "Opening the road meant that medical supplies would reach sick locals more readily. But it would also be a boost to his individual reputation -- and, coincidentally, to his chances for reelection."

The "technical" buyers were harder to deal with, as these screening, gate-keeping buyers often tend to be.

"There were two major blocks that we had to contend with," Rob recalled. "One was the person responsible for recommending all military projects to UN headquarters. He had identified our sector as the lowest of priorities -- a view that the economic buyer had unfortunately bought into. The other was a Corps of Engineers planning officer. She resisted the project because her people hadn't thought of it. It was an obvious example of the 'not invented here' syndrome."

One factor in turning these negative influences around was Rob's skill in bringing the planning officer on board by suggesting that they add her name to the project report; that move gave her the recognition that she had been seeking, and it turned her from an impediment into a sponsor. Rob also developed a sophisticated coaching network to help him demonstrate to the fiscally conservative economic buyer how an improved road system would vindicate the outlay of UN money. That network began with Rob's own chief of staff at the regional headquarters, who arranged an introduction to the fund-certifying officer. It included the surgeon general, a natural sponsor, and the troubled region's hands-on minister of defense, who was impressed by Rob's commitment to use local contractors to infuse money into the troubled economy, and who used his influence with those contractors to keep the price fair.

The result was that the long-resisted project got funded -- and 90 percent completed before the arrival of the devastating Serbian winter.

The reason that Rob succeeded where others had failed had virtually nothing to do with the value of his "product". The improvement project had always been a good idea; what had repeatedly killed it were roadblocks in the decision-making process. What Rob had done was to survey the complicated field, isolate the many separate players who had to get to yes, and use coaching to "open the road" to final approval.

He couldn't do that alone. You never can in complicated sales; there are just too many players and too many variables for a single seller to handle everything directly. That's why Rob did what every successful seller is forced to do today: he put together a team of results-oriented professionals to help him cover the field of moving targets.

The surgeon general, the minister of defense, the company commanders whose men were in danger on the muddy road -- all of these coaches became members of Rob's selling team, and each of them was "assigned" to cover one or more individuals whom Rob, as orchestrator of the sale, could not handle personally.

That's perhaps the primary lesson of Rob's story. To identify and cover all the players in a complex buying organization, you need to develop a team that is just as complex -- just as varied, well-focused, and finely tuned -- as the people whose solution images you are trying to fulfill.