Old clichés die hard. And in the world of selling, it’s hard to find an older cliché than, “If you’re going to succeed in sales you have to find the ‘decision-maker.'”
Cliché, you say? What’s wrong with looking for decision-makers?
Plenty! The very idea of “decision maker” belies the reality of how things really get done inside companies.
It’s politics – properly defined and understood – that drives decisions in companies. Webster defines politics as “the total complex of relations among people living in society.” Simply substitute “companies” for “society” in that definition, and there you have it.
Politics is how things get done in companies – period!
And by the way, “dirty politics” is two words. True politics is simply about the ebb and flow of power inside companies and only occasionally involves the back-stabbing that is commonly associated with it.
It’s not easy to find the truly powerful people in companies. Margaret Thatcher was right when she quipped, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t'”
Contacts with big titles and low power are everywhere and are incredibly easy to find. They come at you (and are the ones who say they are the decision-maker). But those with big power (whether having a big or small title) are elusive, very elusive when it comes to meeting with salespeople.
The following is a true and unembellished story. You will see why it was necessary to use pseudonyms. It illustrates my point.
Helen, a salesperson, works for a Fortune 500 company, a leading supplier of software and equipment for processing credit card transactions. Let’s call Helen’s firm Beta Company. For the last year or so, AlphaCard, a long-time customer of Beta, has been one of Helen’s key accounts.
Beta recently developed a significant new advance in credit card processing software, a development so new that none of its competitors had comparable solutions. Ralph, Beta’s regional vice president of sales and Helen’s boss, thought he sniffed an opportunity. He pushed Helen to set up a meeting with Jim, AlphaCard’s vice president of operations.
“Get in there and talk to the vice president,” Ralph said. “Anybody can see how advanced our new software is. We’ve got to get it in front of the decision-maker before the folks over at ZetaSoft (Beta’s competitor) come up with their own version.”
But Helen held Ralph off. He became a little annoyed. It was so obvious, he thought, that she should strike while the iron was hot. It was all Helen could do to stay firm in her conviction that the time was not as ripe as Ralph thought.
Indeed, Helen had good reason for biding her time. Over the last few months, she had been doing her homework. In particular, she had learned that AlphaCard was in the throes of change since hiring a new president one year before.
Helen learned from her contacts that AlphaCard’s board had recruited its president from IBM, and – as one contact put it – had given him marching orders to “tear down the silos, kill the country-club atmosphere and return the company to profitability.”
Helen wasn’t just absorbing random gossip. She was putting into practice her organizational savvy. She knew that her new solution had to do more than make technical or business sense for AlphaCard. It also had to make political sense.
She observed, analyzed and asked careful questions. As a result, she was able to piece together the political dynamics. Slowly, one-by-one, the new president had been quietly replacing most of AlphaCard’s senior management team with people of his own choosing – mostly people he brought over from IBM.
Further complicating the picture, most of the original people being replaced kept their jobs and often their titles. Only on very close inspection could one see that these incumbents had lost the lion’s share of the influence they had wielded a year earlier.
That was why Helen didn’t run to Jim, AlphaCard’s vice president of operations, with a sales pitch for Beta’s new software package. Yes, Jim had been with AlphaCard for many years, and most of the company’s employees worked under him. His was arguably the most strategic department in the company. And AlphaCard’s operations department was also the key end user of Beta’s new software. Certainly, any decision to commit considerable financial resources to Helen’s software package would require the support of whoever headed that department.
But everything Helen heard and saw of the changes underway at AlphaCard convinced her that Jim would not be the person to woo.
“Let’s wait a month or so,” she told Ralph. “I want to see what other moves the president makes.”
She explained her hunch that Jim would soon be history.
Ralph went ballistic! He was under pressure from Beta’s management for results. But he also knew that Helen was one of the best on his team, so very reluctantly he agreed to trust her instincts.
He was glad he did. Six weeks after Ralph’s discussion with Helen, Jim was reassigned to the post of VP of special projects, with a total of two people reporting to him. Replacing him as AlphaCard’s VP of operations was Ed, an executive recruited from IBM.
Then Helen went from biding her time to taking action. Within two weeks she was in front of Ed, positioning Beta Corp.’s new software development. She knew it wasn’t merely the superiority of the new product that would win the sale for Beta. Ed, she knew, would see in the deal an opportunity to quickly add a feather to his cap in his new position at AlphaCard.
I find that telling clients to simply stop using the term “decision-maker” is one of the best ways to start their quest to become organizationally savvy.
