It’s no news that sales executives rarely work with a single buyer. Even if they manage to get one person on board with the new vision, the champion of that vision (regardless of their seniority) still must gain broader organizational support.
One company told us that, in a recent sale, they were able to talk directly to the CEO who fully supported their solution. However, when the CEO tried to push the solution in the company, it turned out he had to present it in front of the board which significantly complicated the decision process.
What’s even more troubling is that suppliers are rarely invited to be part of the decision-making – most deliberations happen behind closed doors. This means that the stakes of choosing the right stakeholder within an account have never been higher.
Many sales organizations have long been telling their reps to look for a customer advocate or “coach” – someone inside the customer organization who can provide guidance on how purchase decisions are made and, ideally, who is willing to help the supplier navigate that process.
From hundreds of conversations with members we constructed the ideal advocate/coach profile that reps are told to target. The ideal customer contact is one who:
- Is accessible
- Speaks the truth and can provide valuable information typically unavailable to suppliers
- Is pre-disposed to support the supplier’s solution
- Is credible and effective at presenting to and influencing others
- Has some personal skin in the game (an advocate is much more likely to help if they stand to profit themselves); and,
- Can network reps with other customer stakeholders and actually delivers on commitments.
I’m guessing this sounds pretty familiar.
And it sounds great if you consider each trait individually. But here’s the problem – SEC research finds that the above traits rarely co-exist in a single person and, instead, distribute across several major buyer types.
To be precise, the full combination of these attributes occurs in the same person less than 1% of the time – it is fewer than 10 people out of a thousand.
Asking reps to go out and find this person in nature is like giving them a net and sending them into the forest to catch a unicorn. They may not return empty handed… but at best, they’ll come back with a large goat or a skinny rhino – creatures that embody some unicorn features but not all at once.
And this is the root of the problem. In the absence of the ideal advocate/coach profile, core reps go after people that have some of these attributes, but not all.
Care to guess who their primary targets are? Typically, these are the contacts that are more accessible and easier to engage. This may not seem like an issue until you consider that, according to our latest research, these contacts are unable to drive consensus within their organization – the very thing that we were hoping they’d do on our behalf.
In fact, SEC’s newest quantitative analysis has identified 7 types of customer stakeholders, three of which are significantly more effective at driving organizational action for a purchase.
If you want to learn who they are and how stars are using them to win, check out the findings from our latest research or join us for an upcoming session (either a live meeting or webinar).
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on January 18, 2012
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[...] turns out that asking reps to go and find this kind of customer stakeholder is like telling them to find a unicorn. SEC analysis found that the combination of attributes that make an ideal advocate exist in less [...]