Train Your Sales Team, Neil Rackham tells how to gain access to decision makers

This article is based on an interview with Neil Rackham, who has been the chairman of international consulting firms and is now a highly sought-after conference speaker. His books include the classic Spin Selling (McGraw-Hill, 1988). He has worked closely with leading sales forces from such companies as IBM, Xerox, AT&T, Citicorp and McKinsey & Company. He can be reached at Nrackham@aol.com.

Who Are the Decision Makers?

Many sales reps think that somewhere inside their customer’s headquarters building is a single decision maker, and if one could only reach that person, the deal could be quickly closed. Such decision makers are largely a myth. In today’s business world, even CEOs try to reach consensus with their direct reports before making any important decision. In fact, the decision-making processes for the purchase of any significant product and service is generally split among three individual roles:

1. The Access Owner. This is the person in the organization who is prepared to talk to you, to give you inside information and access to the other decision makers. This person is absolutely critical to making things happen, because your initial credibility with the rest of the organization will be largely dependent upon his or her sponsorship.

2. The Problem Owner. This is the person in the organization who owns the problem or challenge that your product or service is likely to address. The problem owner is unlikely to be an access owner or to normally be willing to spend time educating you about the organization, because people who own problems are generally too busy to give a sales rep much time.

3. The Budget Owner. This is the person in the organization who has control of the money the problem owner will need in order to purchase a solution to the problem. Typically, the budget owner isn’t much interested in the specific problem or the specific solution, but whether the budget that he or she controls is going to be spent wisely. In other words, the proposed solution must have an easily articulated and measurable ROI.

Most major sales decisions are made if and only if these three individuals agree that it makes sense to buy a particular product or service. This happens when the access owner says, “This guy can be trusted to deliver,” and the problem owner says, “This product will fix my problem,” and the budget owner says, “This purchase makes sense financially.”

Achieving this consensus is possible only through a selling effort that moves toward accessing each of the three decision makers and that addresses the concerns of each of the decision makers in a unique way. Here’s how it’s done.

Step 1. Get Access to the Access Owner

The first step is to get access to your initial contact, who functions as the gatekeeper to the rest of the organization. Unfortunately, in today’s business world anybody who has time to see a sales rep probably isn’t worth seeing. In order to get to an access owner who has enough clout within the target organization to act as an effective sponsor, the sales rep will have to demonstrate to that person that he or she can provide significant value simply by spending time with the sales rep.

Ideally, the access owner should view the sales call as an event for which the access owner’s firm would normally pay a consultant. This presents a problem. Many sales reps know a lot about their company’s products but don’t know enough about a prospective customer to be able to add any positive value. (A product presentation, by itself, is generally perceived as a waste of time, and therefore something that subtracts, rather than adds value.)

In order to provide value to the access owner by providing some of the function that a paid consultant would normally provide, the sales rep must learn about the target company and its industry. Fortunately, the Internet offers any sales rep the ability to learn an enormous amount. However, in order to use this information as a value-adding tool, the sales rep must apply analytical skills in order to generate some insight. And the sales rep will need to present that insight in a dramatic way, so that it opens the door to a meeting with the access owner. Examples:

“I noticed that you presented a white paper on mega-widgets at the lastest MWUSA conference. Were you aware that your competitor in the mega-widget market is about to come out with a new product but lacks the money to expand its manufacturing capacity? I’d be happy to come over and share what I’ve learned and to see if there might be a way that your company could save some money in its own manufacturing processes.”

“I just read your book about electro-framistats and was wondering whether you had noticed that the market for electro-framistats seems to have leveled off after about three years of rapid growth. I think I know why that’s happened and why there will be some additional growth next year. I’d love to come by and talk with you about that, and to see if there’s anything that my company can do help you get ready for the increased demand.”

Step 2: Convert the Access Owner into a Sponsor

Access owners tend to be techies. As such, they are more interested in information and insight than in the specifics of your product or service. Because of this, it’s generally a waste of time to do a traditional sales pitch to an access owner. Instead, your sales challenge is to exchange the information and insight that you’ve gathered in order to obtain access to the rest of the organization. In other words, this is not a social call! Many salespeople have customers they’ve been calling on for years and who love to see them, but who are never going to buy anything. The goal of meeting with the access owner is to trade your expertise for additional information about the prospective customer (e.g. who has the problem, who has the budget) and for access to the other decision makers (e.g. “Can you set up a meeting so that we can discuss the problem with the problem owner?”)

In this effort, credibility is everything. When you ask an access owner to act as your sponsor, you’re asking that person to put his or her own career and credibility on the line. Therefore, everything you communicate must be authoritative and reasonable. Extravagant claims and marketing weasel-words like “We turned XYZ Inc. around and doubled their profit,” or “We’re well recognized as the best in the industry,” are only going to damage your credibility. Worse, if the access owner is foolish enough to sponsor you, it’s likely that the other decision makers will see through the bluster, making a sale unlikely. Your goal is to act and sound like a real-world consultant who adds value as part of the sales process. If you’re seen as a talking brochure, you’ll just be wasting your time, as well as the time of the decision makers.

Step 3: Sell a Solution to the Problem Owner

Problem owners tend to be managers responsible for a segment of the company’s business. As such, they are interested in how a particular product or solution might solve their problem. Therefore, you have two goals here. First, you are trying to convince the problem owner that you have a workable solution to the problem. Second, you are also trying to convince the problem owner to give you access to the budget owner in order to complete the sale.

The best way to satisfy both goals is to add massive value to the problem owner by helping to clarify the problem and by proposing a workable solution, if appropriate. Ideally, this solution shouldn’t be based upon what you have to sell, but rather upon what the customer actually needs. You should strive to add so much value that the prospect will feel as if he or she should be paying for the sales call. In most cases, your product or service will be part of the proposed solution, because you have already learned enough about the target company and its industry to assure yourself that you have something valuable to sell.

Step 4: Sell the ROI to the Budget Owner

Budget owners tend to be financial types, such as CFOs and accountants. When the problem owner introduces you to the budget owner, forget about techie chit-chat or product/solution presentations. The budget owner will want to know how much your product is going to cost, whether the problem owner believes it will work, and how long it will take for your product to achieve an acceptable ROI. If you’ve gotten this far in the sales process, the problem owner and the access owner will probably be willing to help you build the ROI case in a way that will work politically inside the target company. However, you are going to have to continue to add value, in this case by understanding the potential ROI impact of your product and by having multiple, valid ways of calculating and expressing that impact.

Step 5: Close the Sale

If you have successfully worked through the previous steps, closing the sale is typically just a matter of gathering all three decision makers into a single room and confirming that the sale is to go forward. If you have conducted the entire sales process properly, the final closing is thus more of a formality than an ordeal.

Sales Manager’s Meeting Guide

Below are 10 practical steps to help your sales team learn how to get access to decision makers. This sales meeting should take about 55 minutes.

1. Prior to the meeting, create a research notebook on a target customer, preferably one to which your company would like to sell, but where your salespeople have been having difficulty obtaining access. (See Quick Tips for the information-gathering process.) Make copies of the notebook for all participants.

2. At the beginning of the meeting, explain that the team is going to work on gaining access to decision makers and that this is one of the most important skills for any sales professional to develop.

3. Take five minutes and explain how decision making is typically split between three individuals and that getting access to the “access owner” is always the first step.

4. Hand out the research notebooks. Spend five minutes describing how you researched this material on the Web, so that they can conduct their own research in the future.

5. Tell your team that the purpose of this exercise is to identify potential access owners and to come up with a creative and interesting approach that will open the door to those access owners.

6. Give the your team 15 minutes to read over the notebook material. At the completion of this step, you should be 25 minutes into the training session.

7. Ask the team to identify, based upon their reading, potential access owners. Put the names of those access owners on a whiteboard.

8. Have the team identify any significant information about each access owner that can be gleaned from the notebook. List that information (in brief) on the whiteboard, after the name of each potential access owner.

9. Have each team member attempt to craft a voicemail message (or email message if appropriate) that would intrigue and interest that access owner enough to open a dialog. Each message should promise some sort of added value to the access owner.

10. Gather up the messages and read them over quickly. Pick the best three. Read each of them aloud and conduct a discussion about whether the message would be effective in obtaining access and (just as importantly) whether the salesperson would be able to deliver the value promised in the message.

Quick Tips for Your Training Session

– The test of whether a sales call will prove effective is whether the information and insight that’s conveyed is so valuable that the prospective customer would normally be willing to pay for it.

– According to research, prospective customers do not value information about products. They value information about the industry and the competition, providing it is current and up-to-date.

– Selling to the problem owner is more effective if the sales rep can clearly articulate not just the value of the product, but also the value of doing business with your firm.

– In order to sell, sales reps need convenient access to the Internet and sales management that considers sales research as an integral part of the job.

– Companies that treat sales research as an afterthought or something that¡¦s best conducted off-hours will find it increasingly difficult to compete with companies that take sales research seriously.

Quick Tips for Your Next Sales Meeting

Here’s how to research a company on the Internet, quickly and effectively.

1. Gather Context. Go to www.hoovers.com and search on the corporate name of the prospective customer. If there is a Hoover¡¦s listing, print it out. It will have a summary of the company, its finances and a list of its most important competitors. If there is no Hoover¡¦s listing, skip to step 2.

2. Gather Background. Go the target company’s Website and print out the page that describes the company’s mission and purpose. Check through the various pages on the company’s Website. Take particular note of case studies and press releases, because these often contain the names of individuals that might be potential access owners. Print out any relevant pages.

3. Gather Deep Background. Go to www.sec.gov and click on “Search for Company Filings.” Search on your prospect’s corporate name. If the prospect is publicly held, you will receive a list of SEC reports. Examine the latest 10K and 10Q reports, which often contain detailed revenue information, the names of the corporate officers, the names of the top management team members, the organizational structure, the sales channels, the business models and even the company’s own analysis of the competitive threats that it faces. Print out any relevant pages.

4. Gather Competitive Data. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for the prospect’s major competitors. (Hoover’s identifies these.) Print out the relevant pages.

5. Gather the Latest News. Go to http://news.google.com and search on the name of the customer firm. Print out any news articles that seem relevant. Circle the names of potential contact points within the firm, as well as any analysts or experts who comment on that company.

6. Gather Personal News. Go to www.google.com and do a search on the names of potential contacts (put them in quotes, e.g. “John Q. Scientist”) along with the company name (in quotes, if it has more than one word, e.g. “General Electric.”) Examine the first few pages of results. Click on any links that might be relevant and print out any that actually are. Repeat the process with each potential customer contact.

7. Gather Analyst Information. Repeat step 5, only using the names of any industry analysts who study the firm or the firm’s industry. The names of analysts are often included in news stories about the company in question.

8. Create a Notebook. Put all of the above into a notebook with the following tabs: CORPORATE, COMPETITIVE, PERSONNEL, ANALYSIS and NOTES. (The final segment is simply two blank pages.) Use this document to study and understand the company, its industry and the market environment in which it works. Use the notes pages to record your thoughts and ideas about how to approach potential access owners.

FAQ

Q: How much time should I be spending on research prior to approaching an access owner?

A: As a rule of thumb, novice sales reps should be spending as much (or more) time researching the customer than actually calling on the customer. Experienced sales reps who already have strong industry and company knowledge can spend less time than this.

Q: Wouldn’t it be better to just sell directly to the budget owner, who has the money and is thus the “real” decision maker ?

A: That seldom works. The budget owner doesn’t care about problems or products and probably doesn’t know and trust you. In order to have credibility with the budget owner, you have to first cultivate the access owner and the problem owner as your sponsors.

Q: I’ve seen examples where there is one decision maker who takes sales calls, owns the problem and owns the budget to fix the problem. Doesn’t this run contrary to your statement that there are typically three decision makers?

A: While it’s true that those roles are sometimes combined, that happens usually in small firms. The larger the firm, the more likely it is that decision making has been split into three separate roles and functions.