Cracking the C-Suite: Finding the Right Exec to Close the Sale

Given the current economy, it isn’t surprising that many companies are experiencing slashed marketing budgets, deal postponements and generally sluggish sales pipelines. These factors make it even more important for businesses to use their resources wisely to not only market more effectively, but to reach key executives who hold the purse strings and can get projects green-lighted even in challenging times.

Now, more than ever, it’s essential to engage decision-makers with compelling reasons to purchase your product or service. One of the first steps in doing this is to discover who in the prospect organization holds the “real” buying power and when they are most likely to become involved in the purchase.

Who’s the Real Buyer?

One of the most important steps in the sales process is to identify the “relevant” executive for the opportunity. This executive has the informal power to make crucial buying decisions, but he isn’t always the formal decision-maker. Oftentimes, it’s the executive who stands to gain the most by implementing your product or service, or to lose the most if the need or challenge that can be resolved by your solution isn’t addressed.

Most salespeople target executives based on the company’s organizational chart—and often make the wrong assumption. To learn who the relevant executive is you have to talk to people within the organization and observe how decisions are made.

Key executives typically get involved early in the buying cycle to understand the issues creating the need for a solution. They will often delegate the middle phase of the buying cycle—exploring options, setting vendor criteria and evaluating solutions—to others. Executives get involved in the project again during the final phase. For sales professionals who tend to get involved with an organization at the RFP stage, this can be problematic. The better strategy is to gain access to the relevant executive early in the cycle, at a time when it is possible to actually influence RFP criteria by showcasing what your product or service can do.

Gaining Access to the Relevant Executive

Once you know who the relevant executive is, there are four approaches to gaining access: Overt, Sponsor, Referral and Gatekeeper.
• The Overt Approach commonly starts with a letter to the executive, followed by a telephone call.
• The Sponsor Approach makes use of a credible sponsor within the organization to help secure access to the executive.
• The Referral Approach relies on someone—a consultant, business associate or friend—outside the organization to make the introduction.
• The Gatekeeper Approach uses an executive’s administrative assistant or other “right-hand person” to gain access.

The two most effective ways to gain access to executives is to use a credible sponsor within the prospect organization or to treat the gatekeeper—the very person who protects the executive from salespeople—as a resource. When surveyed for “Selling to the C-Suite” by Nicholas A. C. Read and Stephen J. Bistritz, executives said 84% of the time they’d be willing to schedule a meeting with a salesperson if that request came from a credible sponsor within their organization.

Establishing Credibility

Credibility is a non-negotiable component of a vendor-client relationship, and today it’s more important than ever. There are two elements to establishing credibility: capability and integrity. If you demonstrate capability, you will be perceived as “an extra pair of hands” and an “expert” for hire. If you demonstrate integrity, you will be perceived as reliable and trustworthy. The goal is to operate well on both planes over the long-term.

Aligning Sales and Marketing for Greater Revenue

Up until now, we’ve talked about how to get through to the relevant decision-maker within a prospect organization. But there’s another facet—and perhaps an even more fundamental one—that’s required for closing an optimum number of sales. It lies in the need to create greater alignment between your own internal marketing and sales organizations, particularly with regard to what defines a “quality” lead.

To say that sales and marketing rarely formally agree on lead generation would hardly raise any hackles, and yet such an agreement is exactly what must take place if you want to crack the C-suite and close more sales opportunities. Without this alignment, marketing falls back into the “cost per lead” mentality and sales will focus on revenue generation but not do it very productively.

The sad fact is that lead management is broken in most organizations today due to this misalignment. Research from PointClear shows that 79% of the leads generated by marketing are ignored by sales. Of the remaining 21%, 70% are discarded for other reasons. Only 6.3% of the total lead stream is worked to a viable conclusion.

Getting it Right

There is a right way to manage lead generation programs and then there’s the real way—the way most companies do it. In these companies, marketing departments embark on campaigns designed to generate large quantities of leads. They look for ways to bring down the per-lead cost, and then turn over raw, undifferentiated leads to the sales team. Sales professionals view these leads as having little more value than business cards heaped in a fish bowl, and treat them accordingly.

On the other hand, the right way to approach lead generation is to first pinpoint a target market, craft resonating messages designed to engage qualified companies, and then turn over only the “developed” opportunities to sales.

The fix to the problem is for marketing and sales to sync up their efforts from the start by agreeing on what defines a lead; how to segment the market; how to find the relevant executive; what message to use, how to use it and when to use it; and then how to track and measure the conversion of leads to revenue. It may require your company’s own relevant executive to step in and initiate this change in approach.

Think Long-Term

Closing the gap between sales and marketing further requires both parties to recognize that qualified opportunities are ready buyers with the potential to close within one or two sales cycles, and that only a small portion of new leads will fall into this near-term category. Longer-term leads need to be nurtured through a multi-touch campaign that can last weeks or months.

The good news is that even C-level executives respond to this type of campaign, as it builds familiarity and increases the chance of reaching him or her when the need for a solution is high. For example, a CFO at one of the largest U.S. utility companies was “touched” 42 times before calling back. That deal closed after six months for a billion dollars. That was a 28,000:1 ROI and an excellent example of how a “multi-touch” strategy for long-term executive leads can ultimately yield valuable prospects. In fact, time and again, companies that focus on nurturing longer-term leads consistently achieve greater overall sales revenue.

Stephen J. Bistritz ([email protected]) is president and founder of SellXL. Dan McDade (http://blog.pointclear.com) is founder and president of PointClear.