According to Stephen Bistritz and Nicholas Read, selling to senior-level, or ‘C-Suite’, executives requires different skills and strategies from the more traditional departmental-level sale. Above all, It’s all about timing. Here are 5 lessons from Bistritz and Read to better sell to C-Suite.
Understanding What Executives Want
To motivate senior executives, you need to understand the company’s key business issues and what drives them to create change. The authors tell us to immerse ourselves in our customers’ world to help us rise above the competition and be recognized as a real contributor to their success. To do that, we have 3 tasks.
Task 1. Get Into the Game
We need to get into the game and not wait for customers to approach us. This task gives us a new mantra: “I will maximize my value to my customer executives this year by learning all I can about them, their company, their competitors, and their industries, and bringing them new ideas that they will then pay me to implement. The more I mean to them, the more they will mean to me.”
Task 2. Work backward
To create value for executives, we must first find what our customers want to achieve, then figure out how we can help them achieve that. What makes us valuable is our ability to work backward and uncover useful information that our customer’s own company hasn't thought of.
Task 3. Ask Lots of Questions
When we research our customers, we are allowing ourselves to have the conversations that an executive wants us to have. Eventually, the conversation will move toward how we can help them achieve their goals.
What Drives an Executive Decision?
Many factors affect an executive’s decision and each of these factors needs to be weighed up by both vendor and buyer. The authors believe the following are the most important.
- Financial Drivers: executives are under pressure to perform too. We gain executives’ attention by showing them we can positively affect their financial drivers
- Operational Drivers: If you can help executives do a better job of making, quality-controlling, selling, and delivering their business plan, you’re in
- Supplier Drivers: If an executive is on the selling side of the supply chain, their concern is first about winning the contract, then about preserving quality and margins with buyers. Executives on the buying side are concerned with the reliability of supply, quality, economies of scale, inventory turnover, warehousing, and distribution technologies. Understand where you address these concerns
- Customer Drivers: Maintaining and growing their existing customer base, creating and enhancing loyalty, and delivering value are most important to executives. Again, where do your products and services fit in?
How to Gain Access to the Executive Level
Gaining a meeting with executives is relatively straightforward. It is gaining return access to those executives that is the real hard part. The key is to remember that executives don’t want to waste time on people who don’t add value.
Be sure to find the right executive. Calling the wrong executive is a waste of time and resources, as well as possibly damaging your credibility. Identify the relevant executive for each sales opportunity and take the time to make that sale work. Be sure to look for the people who are the ones who create value, have a decent track record, and above all, are connected to the sale we wish to make.