You walk into the office in your best suit and go to the receptionist desk and inform her of the appointment you have. This is your first sales pitch in the real world. No phone call, this is the real deal. You have up a shield of confidence and high knowledge of your product that you are selling as well as having gone through Professor Sweet’s sales class. You are ready to go as your name is called and you go to a conference room. While you wait, you are offered some coffee and await your prospect. The door opens and a man and two woman walk in, you get up to shake their hands. The four of you talk for about half an hour and the conversation goes well. It flows smoothly and you are confident you have the sale in the bag. You are landing good questions to dig deeper at the root pain and learning more and more as the conversation goes on. Finally, you feel the time to bring budget comes up. The only problem is: who is calling the shots? Who is the decision-maker in this situation? This is when you remember you missed this class. All three have shown that they could be the decision-maker but none of your questions were able to make it clear. You decide to bring the question up to the room as a whole hoping for one of them to speak up.
Understanding who is the key decision-maker in a sales situation is crucial. The difference between talking to some random office worker and the head of a project can really steer a sales pitch one way or another. By no means should you be more casual or informal with the one than the other, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty and figuring out budgeting, it is important to speak to the person in charge of how much the budget is so you can see how high or low you can go. You want to benefit the prospect as much as they benefit you so you have a customer going forward and figuring out the budget and staying within is critical for that relationship to continue.
BoweryJE22
This is definitely true for sure, talking to some random person within the company will ultimately not make the sale. Be sure to either ask when you make the call to talk to the decision-makers or to ask them during the sales conversation in general. Talking money is very important, but the person who makes that call should be involved in the conversation. Also, for this post, I really liked that you started with a story, it kept me captivated to keep reading on.
I completely agree with you and think you used a great example to demonstrate the importance of understanding who the key decision maker is. Great job!
Totally with you. You can convince all the junior level accountants, receptionists, and janitors even that your product is superior, but that will not get you anywhere. Asking the other inputs that need to go into a decision such as the one you are asking them to make is awkward maybe, but crucial if you want to close.