Blog #50 What If It’s Not The Decision Maker?

By First Approach

October 30, 2013Edited by Admin

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Blog #50 What If It’s Not The Decision Maker?

How do I know if it’s the right person? Do they make the decision? Will it be a waste of my time?  Sound familiar?  If you’re a sales professional, then you’ve probably pondered these questions many times as it relates to your willingness to add someone to your prospect list. If you’re a sales manager, then you also hear these questions all the time or more likely, are the one asking the question, telling your charges not to waste time on the “wrong” prospect.

Prospecting is a process, and that process begins with populating a list of potential target prospects. Ask any professional sales person, and they will tell you that this is no easy task. The bigger the organization, the bigger the challenge. Finding that right person, the needle in the hay stack, has become increasingly difficult and largely speaking, technology hasn’t helped.

There is no dearth of directories and service providers, all of whom profess to have the “best in class” or “most accurate” data bases to help sales people zero in on this most elusive quarry, the “right contact”. This is generally defined as the absolute decision maker, or someone with profound influence over the authority to buy, or not to buy. Problem is, these providers generally don’t deliver on the promise, instead offering stale, incorrect, or abysmally less than accurate data.

With a few decades under my belt in the B2B selling space, I can tell you with complete confidence, that if I had a dollar for every sales person that chose not to pursue a meeting with someone because they “weren’t sure if she was the decision maker”, I’d be richer than Mr. Gates.

Equally, if I had another dollar for every debate I’ve adjudicated between sales people and their managers over, “who is responsible for supplying the right contact information”, you could add Mr. Buffet to my list.

Truth is, there’s no easy trick or solution to establishing a worthwhile prospect list. The key lays in who belongs on the list and most importantly, the attitude of the sales person compiling the list.

Prospecting is an inexact science. That being said, one can apply process and structure so that it becomes as close to science as possible. The place to start is by prioritizing action over perfection. Execution over analysis paralysis.

The key isn’t spending countless hours, days, and weeks deliberating over who has the responsibility to correlate the lists, or squandering further time on ensuring that every meeting is with the “right person”. Instead, focus on process, execution, and walking the walk that is impossible to substitute should one wish to generate more new business meetings, opportunities, and relationships.

Often, perhaps very often, an initial meeting may not be with a decision maker or influencer, but rather with someone who can help you suss out who the right person actually is. This isn’t a task easily accomplished over the phone. As discussed in previous posts, people behave differently in person than they do on the phone. In person, most people let their hair down, drop their guard, and are far more approachable when they can actually see someone, engage in eye contact, and establish comfort. Hence, information flows.

While you might not always meet the ultimate decision maker in the first meeting, those who get on with the task of infiltrating a new target company will get to the finish line first. Initial meetings are very often just that, initial meetings. They almost always lead to valuable and useful information and most importantly, reveal who all the players are.

Those that dither and dally spending countless hours ensuring that each meeting will be the “right” meeting, wasting none of their “valuable” time attending meetings that won’t immediately convert into discussing a deal, will finish last. While they’re pondering the path of least work, wasted time or worse, participating in meetings that are beneath them, smart sales people have already attended a bunch of meetings, secured a follow-up meeting with the right person and not surprisingly, a meeting that is usually brokered by the “person who didn’t count”.

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