How to Avoid Losing Your Foothold if Your Champion Leaves

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		November 2009, Issue 69

Sales Engagement
How to Avoid Losing Your Foothold if Your Champion Leaves
By Jonathan Vlock, Senior Business Development Executive, Bulldog Solutions

Fresh out of college, I started my sales career in cold call advertising sales for a British BtoB publishing house, selling print advertising to technology companies. Our job was to source our own leads using competitive magazines and buyers guides, call the companies, find the decision maker and pitch the hell out of them. They gave us a phone and a 4-foot-high desk, and said, "Go to it!"

Why a 4-foot-high desk? They wanted to keep us on our feet, because motion creates emotion, and you can't project your voice or sound excited sitting down.

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For all of its boiler-room antics, the job did teach me a lot about building relationships. I worked tirelessly to develop and maintain relationships with those decision makers. It often took me months to make it to an organization's high level. I incorporated numerous tactics, most of which required a significant time investment. I had birthdays, anniversaries, children’s names, and favorite sports teams in my Outlook contact list.

The Rise and Fall of the Pyramid

Like many salespeople, I was trained to develop a pyramid mentality; in other words, the higher up you get inside an organization, the fewer people you have to deal with because you are now closer to a single decision maker. We have to concentrate on one key champion rather than multiple contacts, because we assume that that one key champion will have the authority to streamline the negotiation and direct the decision-making process.

However, the pyramid mentality doesn't take into account several realities of today's market, including the employee churn generated by the recession and the increasing complexity of the buying decision.

As a result, I've developed what I call the "Persona Champion" approach to sales, a way to develop contacts across the entire buying decision process rather than only focusing on one key champion.

Getting Through to the Top

That first job of mine was entirely a numbers game—the more calls you made, the more likely you were to get a deal. During my training, the sales director told us that the phone is like an ATM machine. You type in the right numbers at the right time and money comes out. The only rule was, if the person on the other end of phone can't sign on the dotted line, don't waste your time with them: They are "kickers." The decision maker was called a "kitty." So we were trained to keep working as high into the organization as possible, get through the receptionists and executive assistants, move around PR, and develop relationships with those key decision makers.

Another anecdote: One day, a colleague of mine came over to my desk to tell me about a pitch with this guy at Oracle named Lawrence Ellison. The call lasted about 10 seconds before Ellison hung up on him. My colleague couldn't understand why the guy wouldn't talk to him and why he wouldn't want to buy advertising from us. We were so naïve, we had no idea how corporations were constructed, which in hindsight probably made us that much more effective. The fact that we were trained so well that we could get through to the CEO of Oracle tells you something.

Decision Makers Have Multiplied

Things have changed a bit. The number of people involved in the buying process is increasing all the time—I've seen reports that peg it at more than 20 people for an IT purchase. There is no one singular decision-maker, no one singular influencer. For example, here at Bulldog Solutions, a channel partner of the Eloqua marketing automation platform, I frequently have to engage Sales, Marketing and sometimes even the IT department. While it is the role of the marketing team to make the decision on whether or not to purchase marketing automation, the IT department can easily kill the deal.

To make matters worse, the state of the economy has caused a significant rise in the employee churn rate, and those senior-level executives are often the first to go. Take for example the tenure of CMOs, now said to be as short as 15 months or as "long" as 23 months. CIO tenure is even shorter.

So we salespeople are faced with a huge dilemma: If we follow the pyramid mentality, we may indeed get more leverage inside an organization, but that could be lost very easily if our champion leaves. On the other hand, if we spread ourselves out among more, but less senior, champions, we might not get as much insight or leverage into the account, and as a result, get lost in the mix.

The Persona Champion Approach

There are ways to overcome the challenges I mentioned above. The Persona Champion approach involves understanding the specific pain points and motivators of the various people in the decision process. Developing this persona can and should be done in conjunction with your marketing department; personas obviously drive not only sales hunting exercises, but marketing initiatives as well. Each engagement requires a different approach, but here is an overview.

Develop buyer personas for your targets, creating buckets for the key people in a typical decision process. Here at Bulldog Solutions, for example, we use Technical Buyer, Key Influencer, Economic Buyer and Executive. For more on buyer persona development, I'd suggest this complimentary white paper on the topic. The persona should include their pain points, what motivates them, and where they go for information and validation.
Set up a communications strategy for each of these personas. When you understand what keeps your prospects up at night, you will be able to provide information that validates their decision at each stage in the buying process.
Develop or enhance your contact lists to ensure you have the right people in each organization for each persona. This is where old-fashioned phone work and tools such as LinkedIn and appending services come in. Once you have the right names, you can begin implementing nurturing programs to make the connections.
Get yourself a marketing automation system. It's really the only way to make this scalable—doing it manually would take every hour of your day.

If you don't know where to get started, and need some help, please feel free to contact me at jvlock@bulldogsolutions.com.

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Jonathan Vlock is senior business development executive at Bulldog Solutions.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, director of Field Marketing.