Whose Job Is It To Care About You?

Who cares about you?One of the frustrations I hear most frequently expressed by salespeople has to do with prospecting for new business and the challenge of finding the right person to talk to. One problem is that most organizations are opaque to outsiders. Even using social media and other sales enablement tools, it can be a challenge to identify the right person to talk to.After all, who is the right person your should talk to?I remember running into this issue early in my career when I was selling infrastructure networks to large Wall St firms. Our product touched many different departments within a company and while there was an executive with ultimate approval authority, what I needed to do was identify who I call the actual decision maker, who would also be the chief internal advocate for my product, was not always easy.Simple Advice To FollowMy boss at the time gave me some simple advice: Find the person at a buyer that has the biggest vested interest in the value that your product or service provides. In other words, find the person who cares the most about the value that your product or service will provide.This could be the person who has operational responsibility for your product. Or it could be a manager who is accountable for the P&L line item that encompasses your product or service. Or it could be a person who just cares the most, or is most passionate about the value your product or service provides.Focus your value-based selling on this person and he or she will become your most passionate and effective internal advocate. For me, it wasn’t the same person in the same role from company to company. Sometimes it was someone in finance, sometimes it was someone in marketing, other times it was someone in network operations.It requires some thought and extra effort to locate that person. If you're operating on autopilot you’ll focus your efforts on the person with the same title or responsibility in every company you're selling to. And, you'll miss out on a lot of sales.Who's Accountable For Outcomes?Keep in mind that you are not necessarily looking for the person who nominally makes the decision. Instead, you need to find the person who’s accountable for the outcomes provided by your product and service and the value it can create.For example, I have one client that sells a low-priced service to large companies. Their average order size is roughly $150. But, one of their bigger customers orders about $250,000 a month from them. In this case they have more than 30 buyers on given day within this single customer. The decisions to purchase their service are at made multiple locations, in multiple divisions and multiple departments, at pretty low levels throughout the customer. In their case, they found that the person who cared the most about the value their service provided was Joanne, an executive assistant in the CEO’s office. (If they didn’t do a good job it was quickly visible at senior levels in the company.) Now if anyone in the customer organization wants to buy a service like my client’s they need to clear it with Joanne.As a seller you have to learn how to accurately identify the Joanne within your customer’s hierarchy. Start by asking two questions of your initial contacts at a new prospect. What are the outcomes they expect from their investment in your product or service? And, who owns those outcomes? Whose job is it to care about the value created by your product or service?At some level it is always someone’s job to care. As a seller, if you want to determine where to most effectively invest your sales time, you need to find out who that is.