Proactive preparation for the people who can’t say yes, but can say no.
It is essential for a sales team and the marketing folks supporting them to understand who their actual customer is. We’re not talking about “car dealerships” or “universities” or “software companies,” but rather who within those organizations is actually going to want to buy your product or service. Another important step is identifying who within those places actually has the money to pay for your stuff, which may or may not be the same people who want to buy it.
Once you understand who these two sets of people are, it is pretty straight forward to begin creating value propositions, sales presentations and marketing materials to convince them why you can fill a need and why it is worth their time and money.
However, in many organizations there is a third set of people that neither want what you have to offer nor have the money you want to get your hands on, yet they are often equally important in the sales process. These are the potential naysayers; stakeholders who cannot actually say “yes” to making a purchase but are empowered to say “no.”
Depending on which type of organization you are selling into, their roles may vary. If you are selling any kind of technology, they may reside in the IT group. When I was creating products for retailers, they were in the loss prevention organization and store operations. When I was creating solutions for cities, they often were public works officials concerned with angering the unions or disrupting the status quo.
In none of these cases were these potential naysayers going to pay for the solutions out of their own budgets, nor were they the people in the organization that the salespeople wanted to be spending their time with. They don’t have purchasing power, and they usually don’t make decisions on products and services unless they are directly related to and limited to their own specific areas.
Worry About What THEY Are Worried About
Like everyone else, the naysayers are looking out for their own interests. The account management team wants to license a new CRM tool, but how much IT resources will we have to dedicate to it? Will we have to do upgrades? Will we have to provide access through the firewall? Will we have to buy new servers? Will we have to increase our bandwidth? Will this be a security threat?
The questions can go on and on, and even though your CRM solution is proven to increase customer retention by 10% and has a dashboard that the VPs are drooling over, the IT department doesn’t really care. They have their own metrics and KPIs to hit and this is just going to be a distraction.
And while your “real” customers may be willing to fight for getting your solution purchased and in place, there are three things you can do to make their lives easier and shrink the sales cycle:
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Keep the Naysayers in the Loop – No one likes being blindsided, particularly at work. To avoid the naysayers being on the defensive and coming up reasons to shut the project down before anyone cuts a purchase order, make sure that you figure out who needs to know about what you are proposing and that they feel included in the process from the early stages. As soon as you start to see heads nodding in the line of business, don’t end a meeting without asking who else you should be talking to that might have questions or concerns.
Create Content for the Naysayers, Too – When creating collateral, technical specs and case studies, keep this audience and their potential concerns top of mind. They want to know that you have through these issues through, addressed them in some way (standard operating procedures, escalation paths, usability studies, etc.), and made things work at customers who they view as their peers. Most people don’t want to be the guinea pig, especially the naysayers.
Be Prepared for the Questions You Don’t Want to Answer – There are very few products or services that don’t have some imperfections, be they system requirements or tricky installations or parts that can rust. Addressing those questions up-front and proactively demonstrates you are not afraid of covering these topics and gets things out on the table well ahead of the final decision making meeting, when you are often not even in the room. Make sure you are armed (or arming your teams) with a thorough set of FAQs addressing every objection you can think of, as well as references or examples of similar customers that have already dealt with and worked through these issues.
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