Use Your Boss to Help Manage Sales Cycle Collateral Damage

Use Your Boss to Help Manage
Sales Cycle Collateral Damage
By Paul DiModica

When selling prospects, things happen: middle-level managers waste your time, executives miss appointments, Requests For Proposals get delayed, and entire sales cycles get frozen because management prospects will not call you back.

How to Use Your CEO (or Senior Executive Team Members) as a Sales Tool to Sell More

Selling in today's market is a complex, planned process where salespeople need to use every sales technique and sales approach to close business. One sales tool not used enough, or sometimes incorrectly, is the deployment of your senior management team (i.e., CEO, CFO, COO, SVP, general managers) during the sales cycle to help you control sales cycle collateral damage.

When correctly deployed, using your management can be a successful sales tool that can move frozen sales opportunities forward, jump-start complex negotiations, or mitigate political issues which occur often with prospects.

When incorrectly deployed, using your management team can end your sales cycle, lose your commissions, and eliminate future sales opportunities before they start.

The goal is to manage your sales cycle by trying to create a peer-to-peer relationship with your targeted buyer. So, if you can't do it yourself, sometimes your management team can help.

This peer-to-peer sales approach communicates your business value up front in three ways:

It positions your firm's commitment from executive to executive, not just from salesperson to executive.
It affords prospects an opportunity to voice their needs again to help them feel heard.
It opens the door for additional "planned negotiation" by the vendor's management team that does not invalidate the sales negotiation parameters used by the salesperson.

To increase your sales success, use your management team as a prospect selling tool, but use them sparingly and strategically.

14 Guidelines on How to Use Your Management Team as a Sales Tool

When bringing senior management into your sales cycle, always give them typed talking points to keep them focused on your sales cycle needs. Have them say what "you" want them to say, not what they want to say. Remember, it's your commissions.
Never use senior management with a prospect who has a title less than Vice President. The goal is to establish a peer-to-peer relationship. Vice President to Vice President, CFO to CFO.
Communicate to your senior management the action step you are seeking to accomplish with this meeting (move toward a proposal, be placed on a short list, close the deal, negotiate the current price, etc.).
Try to go with your senior executive if it is a live meeting. Introduce them and let them carry the meeting based on the talking points you discussed.
Don't let senior management meet your prospects without your approval. The goal is to manage the meeting.
Prepare a typed prospect overview for your firm's executive that provides them with the background on the prospect before they meet with them.
Don't invite your CEO or senior executive if he is a loose cannon. Their presence is supposed to help move the deal forward, not backward.
Keep the executive meeting to less than one hour. Short, specific, and to-the-point is the operating model for management.
Take detailed notes based on all conversations. Don't expect your executive to remember everything.
Plot the follow-up steps for your CEO to complete after the meeting (phone call, email, etc.).
Have your CEO or executive send the prospect an email immediately after the meeting stating what was agreed upon.
On really important or difficult deals, do not use your VP of Sales as a management selling tool. Although the VP of Sales position is an important executive position, some prospects still see them as just another salesperson.
When your senior manager has completed the interaction with the prospect peer, make sure they roll back the sales process to you--it's your sale.
Only use CEO's and senior executives for important or stalled sales cycle issues. Prospects always play to the senior management title in the room. As soon as you bring in management, you personally lose some control. Prospects defer to the senior title in the room (just like salespeople), so be cautious and make sure you use your management team as a selling tool as a step in the sales process, not during the whole sales process.

Remember using your management to sell management prospects is a premeditated sales process approach. Anticipate during your sales cycles when and who would be the most appropriate management sales tool to help you leverage your sales process most successfully.

Selling is a premeditated sport. Use management as a planned sales process and you will sell more.

To your success!

Gerhard Vierthaler
CEO, Value Strategy Group LLC
907-222-2703
Business Growth
Acceleration Specialists
www.valuestrategygroup.com

About the Value Strategy Group LLC

Gerhard Vierthaler is CEO and Founder of the Value Strategy Group, LLC. We are a managing partner of the Value Forward Network and have consulting partners in five countries making us one of the world's largest management consulting groups focused on helping companies increase corporate revenue capture.

We work with senior executive teams to integrate sales processes, marketing methodology, corporate strategy and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program to increase corporate revenue. We do this by assessing the value your customers see and the value you think you have and then measure the "value variance" gap between the two. Once we have identified the "Value Variance" between the two, we then make appropriate strategic and tactical recommendations on your corporate strategy and marketing programs to close the gaps. When this is completed, we then train your sales team to sell to management more effectively using techniques that are linked to our recommendations.

Top-performing organizations are increasing their companies' revenue, within a constricted economy, by investing in our revenue capture strategies. For more information call Gerhard Vierthaler directly at (907) 222-2703.