Just what persuades an executive to buy your product from you may seem like a mystery when you’re out there pounding your head against wall after wall. But take heart, Robert Miller and Gary Williams, who run San Diego-based customer research firm Miller-Williams, have extensively researched the buying behaviors of executives. Their new book offers strategies based on real intelligence gathered in the field. But before letting you in on the secrets of selling to the top brass, Miller and Williams want you to be aware that times have changed.

If any sales professional out there has not heard that manipulative selling techniques have gone the way of the dodo, please raise your hand. Now leave the room. The rest of you, probably 100 percent of the sales profession, have probably also heard that prospects and customers come in a variety of personality types. As do the sales pros selling to them. But often salespeople forget to think about the customer as a person with likes and dislikes, habits and character traits. Now, if you’ve been missing some of the sales you thought you had nailed, perhaps you’re not tuned in to the different personalities of the prospects and customers you call on. Perhaps you’re simply thinking of their offices as places to dump off tons of information while you go for the close.

“Businesspeople are much more sophisticated today. They know all the canned sales techniques,” says Margaret Anderson, who teaches persuasion at Rice University and also consults to business. Variations on, “Do you want the red tie or the blue?” are a fast track to turning off buyers today. A big reason for this: No matter a person’s job title, he or she may do a little selling and probably has been exposed to sales trainings, says Anderson. The era of the gullible buyer is over. Buyers see through the packaged techniques as easily as you see through a freshly cleaned windshield.

“We’re overloaded with information today,” says Maura Schreier-Fleming, a Dallas-based sales trainer and author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results. That is bad news for salespeople – and there are millions – who stalk their quarry with PowerPoint shows, PDF files, glossy brochures and Excel spreadsheets. Too many salespeople – who know that manipulation is out of fashion – have turned to data dumps, but hear this: Nobody in a position to buy wants yet another ream of information. “We don’t get persuaded by information. We just get bored,” says Kevin Daley, chairman of Communispond, a New York-based communications-training firm.

“Buyers are more cautious. They are focused on risks,” says Skip Miller, president of M3 Learning, a Los Gatos, CA, sales-training firm. Face this scary fact: there’s dramatically less risk for a prospect to tell you no than there is in saying yes – at least in today’s marketplace, where corporate bean counters are scrutinizing every outlay – and pity the manager who okays substantial purchases that fizzle. When buyers are scared – primed to scream “no” at the first moment – salespeople come into the persuasive dynamic facing odds stacked high against them. “You are going to need a lot more sales tools today than you needed three years ago,” says Miller, who adds that in the late 90s many successful sales executives confused asking for the order with persuading the customer to buy. Five years ago asking often was all it took to get a signature. Now asking is just one step on a lengthy trail that is best walked by the highly skilled.

Skepticism is rampant, and in selling that means “Persuasion must be rooted in relationships, in trust,” warns Andy Birol, a Solon, OH, sales trainer. Why? “Over the last five years we’ve learned we weren’t persuaded, that in fact we had been fooled,” says Birol, and an upshot of the avalanche of scandals – involving major corporations, financial analysts, religious leaders – is that our default position is disbelief. A “respectable” corporate name no longer is enough to persuade buyers that an offering is legit.

“Buyers have much less time,” says Paul Hennessey, an executive vice president with Larkspur, California-headquartered BayGroup International, a global training organization. It’s a by-product of the reorganizations and mergers of the 1990s: fewer hands are on deck to do the work. That means every executive is doing more, with fewer helpers, and you better believe this translates into a mushrooming unwillingness to meet with you. When an exec does put you on his or her calendar, “you have to go into the meeting knowing you have much less time to make your case, to persuade this executive you come bearing value.” Speed, says Hennessey, nowadays is the essence of selling. But he ominously adds, “Many salespeople just don’t have a mind-set that allows them to cope with 21st century changes.”

And then what? If these new realities add up to a wholesale rejection of the 1990s selling approaches, just what is left for a salesperson to do? Scary thought, but into exactly that vacuum stepped Robert Miller and Gary Williams, who authored Paths to Persuasion, a new book that’s rooted in extensive research into buying behaviors of executives.

But first, Robert Miller – co-author of several sales classics including Strategic Selling – wants to hammer home the frightening reality that, in selling, everything is different today: “In the past it often was good enough to be well-versed in your product, to understand a client’s business, and to show the map between the two. Somebody who tries to sell that way today digs himself into the ground. No longer are salespeople hunters who go out, bag game, throw it over the wall and let others clean and dress it. That does not work anymore. There has been a huge paradigm shift.”

A second reality in the Miller-Williams world: One-size-fits-all selling is a goner. It’s a sure path to blown opportunities. Why? People buy differently, and the techniques that would persuade a Bill Gates will be blown off by a Jack Welch or a Ross Perot. Isn’t that obvious? Maybe – but how many salespeople include this reality in their pitching? Say almost none and you are on the mark, but that is what Miller and Williams are out to change. The basis of their theory: detailed research over two and one-half years with more than 1,700 executives. The question Miller and Williams put to these people: How do you like to buy?

For Miller and Williams a light bulb went off when that question occurred to them. Too often sales theories have been based on the other side of the coin, they say. Top salespeople are quizzed about what works, and that becomes the foundation of training.

“We approached this from the reverse side,” says Williams. “We decided, let’s go to the people who are actually making the buying decisions, and let’s figure out what they want and need from a sales presentation in order to make a decision.” The upshot: Miller and Williams generated five distinct decision-making styles common among executives – and each needs to be sold to differently.

But their message about current practices – what salespeople who don’t know about this executive typing currently are doing – will rock you. “More than 50 percent of sales presentations are done in a way that is opposite to how the person wants to be presented to,” says Gary Williams, who serves as CEO of Miller-Williams. That means many sales executives are hurting themselves by how they go into a meeting. Says Williams, “Go to a Jack Welch with a 97-slide PowerPoint presentation, and he will walk out after about slide number six.”

Cut off the show after six slides with Bill Gates, however, and he will leave the room hungry for more information and nowhere near ready to buy.

Different executives decide differently, but, say Miller and Williams, close analysis has let them divide up buyers into five distinct types – each of which requires its own special selling style. They offer thick documentation in their book – here there is room only for a taste – but this sampling goes far towards illustrating exactly how important buyer types are in achieving sales success. For instance:

Charismatics

Think Richard (Virgin Airlines) Bransom, Herb (Southwest Airlines) Kelleher.

Charismatics are enthusiastic, talkative, and definitely strong willed.

How to sell them: Turn on their imaginations and get out of the way.

Key buzzwords to use with them: proven, results.

About 25 percent of all executives, per Miller-Williams data, charismatics light up the room – any room they happen to be in.

Thinkers

Cases in point: Bill Gates and Michael Dell.

Cerebral, often aloof, usually very thoughtful.

How to sell them: Go slow because these might be the toughest to persuade. Bring lots of data. Logic and examples go far with this crowd, which accounts for about 11 percent of executives.

Key buzzwords to turn them on: proof, expert.

Skeptics

Larry Ellison is the poster boy for skeptical CEOs. Miller and Williams also cite Steve Case.

Suspicious, aggressive, they will openly dispute much of the data put before them.

How to sell them: Come in with credibility and support, buckets of it. Work to build up support from potential in-house allies before any meeting with the 19 percent of executives who count as skeptics.

Key buzzwords with any skeptic: power, trust.

Followers

Prime examples: Carly Fiorina, Douglas (Coca Cola) Daft.

Risk-averse, followers – who make up 36 percent of execs in the Miller-Williams survey – like making decisions the way they made them before. These are cautious folks.

How to sell them: Bring testimonials and references; followers like to know others have walked this trail before they will put their feet on a path.

Key buzzwords: similar to, previous.

Controllers

Ross Perot and Martha Stewart are for-instances.

About 9 percent of executives, controllers are analytical and unemotional, and they hate ambiguities and gray areas. Do not present to them unless every uncertainty has been clarified.

How to sell them: Present credible information, in a logical fashion – and hope the controller persuades himself.

Key buzzwords: power, logic, facts.

Getting the picture that indeed executives reach conclusions in wildly different ways? Mull on the Miller-Williams types and, from there, it’s a quick leap to recognizing that successful pitches genuinely must be tailored to fit. What about the canned, centrally scripted presentations that many large companies favor? They are starting points – but no more. Every prefab talk needs extensive customization before you pound on a customer’s door.

All that said, here’s the big question: just how can you gain advance insight into a company and executive’s decision-making style? That may be the secret to selling, but the surprising reality – according to Miller-Williams – is that answers are nearer than you imagine. “It’s astounding how much information you can get by surfing the ’Net these days,” says Miller. “It’s there to be had, but many salespeople aren’t willing to glue their rear to a chair for 30 minutes to find out about this person. They are still worried about perfecting their pitch, but don’t see that understanding who will be hearing it is critical to perfecting it.” One cure Miller suggests is hunting the Web for case studies involving your targets. Almost always such material details both decisions that were taken and how they got made. In the hands of a savvy salesperson that raw data can become gold.

Another tactic: Ask the exec what kind of information he wants you to bring to a presentation. And listen closely to the answers, because in telling you what he values, that executive also is revealing how to persuade him.

A last, closely related bit of Miller-Williams advice for honing 21st century persuasion techniques: Forget the 30-second elevator spiel; focus on the 30-second dialog. A stark reality is that just maybe all you will get of top CEOs’ attention is 30 seconds, and if they aren’t hooked in that time, they are gone. But, suggests Williams, trying to blurt out everything you can about your company and products in 30 seconds just may be a huge turn-off. That’s because there’s no focus on the executive you are talking to. Kick off with a statement of what your company and product do, but be terse. Then “ask a question that will let you better understand this person,” says Williams. Ask more questions so “you can find out where that person is coming from. It’s that simple.”