Note Most bruised egos occur with uninterested or hostile gatekeepers or advocates when you contact the FDM after making initial contacts with them. With neutral and negative customers, you might as well start where you need to end up—with the FDM. Finally, let FDMs or advocates—not you—confer authority, responsibility, and importance on people and positions.
However, gatekeepers and advocates will be pleasantly surprised when you tell them that you discuss only broad goals, systems of evaluation, and measurable benefits with their bosses, not specific products. After all, that is their job.
Get the Top Five Buzzing
If you still are not sure whom to contact, use a top-five approach. Go to a prospect’s Web site or call the receptionist and find out the names of the top-five positions or C levels that would most likely benefit from goals achieved by your unique strengths. Send the same letter to each one outlining potential goals, measurable benefit, and systems of evaluation. Include references from similar companies by positions. Put a cc on the bottom of the letter with the names of the other people you sent it to. Put in the letter to the top position the date on which you plan to make a follow-up call (two weeks from the delivery date). In the other letter, reference the date of your follow-up call.
Your goal is to create an internal buzz (“Hey, did you see that letter from … ?”) Call the highest position first and see what happens. Work your way down the list (if need be) but always refer to the letter and the others to whom it was sent when you start your follow-up telephone calls. At worst, they know you did your homework and have an understanding of their industry.
Note Without measurable details, it is difficult to distinguish between decision makers’ roles. Verifying vague and general information will not cause any differences between decision makers to surface. The more details you receive, the more you can determine a decision maker’s authority and influence.
Complete, Start, Budget, and Decision Dates (Prerequisites)
Each of these four dates provides you with insight into a customer’s sense of urgency to achieve his or her goals. You should ask the dates in the following chronological order for these reasons:
Complete dates are when customers want to finish achieving their goals. Once you know the customer’s targeted completion date, ask him or her when to begin.
Start dates are when they want to begin the process of achieving their goals. Again, no firm start or complete dates means customers have not assigned a cost to doing nothing. Their goal motivation is definitely low. Yet, you are now in a position to ask the customer whether he or she wants to start on this date and what date the budget needs to be approved by to accomplish this deadline.
Budget dates are when money becomes available to accomplish these goals. If customers have not budgeted money yet, it means they do not consider these goals priorities. They have not assigned a dollar figure to doing nothing. Focus your selling efforts on helping them to calculate these lost opportunity costs. For instance, if they set a goal that could save them $1,000 per day in labor costs, then every day they do not achieve this goal is costing them, in effect, $1,000. When the customer’s complete, start, and budget dates are known, ask him or her when a decision needs to be made.
Decision dates are when customers decide whether to achieve a goal. The date when customers want your proposals is not always a sign of their sense of urgency—or when they will make a decision. One thing often has no correlation to the other. You, and especially your sales support team, discover this difference when you push everything aside and tie up everyone’s time to get customers full-blown proposals by their so-called must-have dates. The reward for your efforts is that customers tell you thank-you, as they use your numbers to put into next year’s budget (maybe).
Note Make sure customers agree on a signature or decision date that enables you to meet their completion dates. This date is extremely important if you work with long lead-time products or you contract outside services. Customers understand you cannot commit resources to these start and completion dates without written purchase orders.
Funding (Prerequisite)
The amount of money the customer has allocated to achieving goals raises five questions:
Has the customer set aside money to achieve these goals? Like budget dates, it illustrates the customer’s sense of urgency.
Can the amount of money set aside achieve the customer’s goals? You need to decide whether the customer has filet mignon taste with a hot dog wallet. Also, the larger the amount, the greater the chance is that the gatekeepers, advocates, and FDMs are separate people.
Who allocated the funding? This information points you in the direction of the FDM.
How did the customer arrive at the dollar figure to budget? Find out if the customer has specific products in mind. Did competitors supply the product selections or furnish a budget number? This information tells you whether to consider a customer to be neutral or negative.
Is the money to fund the goals coming out of an operating budget or is it a capital investment? Goals funded from an approved operating budget lower decision-making levels while capital investment raises decision-making levels. Operating budget funding can turn gatekeepers or advocates into FDMs. This can either help (if you are trying to protect positive customers) or hinder (if you are trying to win over negative ones).
In addition, operating budgets speed up sales. If customers move funding for a goal from a capital investment to an operating budget, you shorten the time frame. They do not need to request funds or seek approvals; they already have both. Your pricing strategy and how you structure the payment schedule influence whether it is a capital investment or an operating budget expense. For example, you might spread payments over two fiscal years for a positive customer to fund a sale out of an operating budget. These payment terms lower the approval level, thereby allowing the advocate or gatekeeper to make the decision.
Keys to Previous Successes/Failures (Influencer)
Customers and you review the reasons why they pursued or abandoned projects with similar goals in the past. This analysis provides both of you with reality checks on whether their goals are achievable and the extent of their interest levels. You should not focus on why they did or did not buy a product or you will end up in the “What did they do for you?” trap. If they deem goals worthwhile, they want to make sure they repeat their formulas for successes while avoiding the mistakes of the past.
This filter also tells you which role you are working with. Gatekeepers usually do not know why previous attempts to achieve specific goals failed; advocates and FDMs do. Information on failed attempts also furnishes you with the type of cost justifications and measurable benefits customers need to say yes.
Attainment Measurement (Prerequisite)
For both customers and you, this filter is the single most important piece of information you need to have. It is how you and customers know how they measure the attainment of their goals. You have discussed with customers many details concerning the previous eight filters. You combine and summarize the decision makers’ prerequisites of dates and funds with their SOEs and measurable benefits. This summary forms the attainment measurement (often referred to in sales vernacular by using the more general term critical success factors) and sets the conditions for achieving their goals. This summary also provides customers with the opportunity to confirm (or add any missing ones) that all the requirements that need to be satisfied for achieving their goals have been identified.
Sounds familiar? The attainment measurement encompasses Column 1 and Column 2. Again, by packaging the measurable benefits with price and delivery, you can offset lower competitive prices or value-justify your own price when there is no competition. You also use the measurable benefits to offset competitors’ quicker delivery dates, existing relationships, or costs of change. For instance, if your product takes longer to deliver, you will need to show customers (if possible) that even with the delay, your products will produce more measurable benefits than competitors over a six- or twelve-month period.
Example
The goal of Ralph Cortez, the vice president of production, is to increase manufacturing capacity by 25 percent. Alan Robbins sells high-capacity production equipment and has found out the following data to help Ralph define his attainment measurement:
A 25 percent increase means going from 2,000 to 2,500 units per hour.
Ralph uses units per hour as his SOE. Production runs 5,000 hours annually.
Each unit generates $.04 per hour of profit.
The completion date is October.
Funding is $50,000.
Measurable benefits are $20 per hour (500 more units x $.04).
Mark summarizes Ralph’s attainment measurement as the advocate/FDM as follows: