Hey guys!
This is Steli Efti with Close.io talking about enterprise sales and how to deal with different
stakeholders especially if one of them is trying to derail or damage your deal.
So, I got an email today and I thought instead of just answering that email to that specific
individual, I would record a quick video to answer that question which is an important
one to all of you out there.
So here is the question and the email.
“Hey Steli, quick question.
I have a customer and the admin of my software there is lazy and disinterested and never
lets me help her or encourage or solve any of the problems that she has.
Now it’s renewal time and her boss, the decision-maker is going to ask her if they
should renew.
Question, should I somehow communicate all the times I’ve tried to help this lady with
the software in the hopes that he sees that the software is not the problem.
It’s the admin that is the problem.”
That’s a tough one.
A few things that I want you to consider; first, stepping back.
I think that it’s too late or at least it’s very fucking late.
This question is a question you should have had before the relationship with the admin
even started.
Here is what I want you guys to do, and I’ve talked about this before and we’ll link
up to this.
Whenever you are doing enterprise kind of sales, a sale process that doesn’t just
involve one to one relationship, one individual, one buyer, one decision-maker to say yes and
then be happy with it but it involves multiple stakeholders and admin, some IT person, multiple
people that need to all collaborate and work together to make it work and make your product,
the purchase of it a success.
Whenever you have that kind of a process going on, you need to be selling everyone.
Everyone.
Nobody is not important enough to be sold to.
The intern in the room, everyone you need to sell to and you need to understand and
truly understand what their needs are, what their motivations are, and what the dynamics
are within the company.
So even before getting in touch with that admin or before even starting the relationship
with that admin, if I were you, I would have asked the boss, “Hey, what’s your relationship
with the admin?
What’s the best way for me to work with her?
What are your expectations on what she has to do, what her responsibilities are versus
what my responsibilities are?”
You would want to ask the person.
Like whenever a new stakeholder is introduced, no matter who it is, you want to ask the person
you know already, “Hey, tell me a little bit about that person.
Tell me what the best way for me to work with that person is, what the best kind of working
relationship would be, what should be my expectations, what are her or their deliverables.”
So you want to start gaining some intel and starting to develop a relationship.
And you know, the way that that boss is going to answer that question is going to tell you
a lot about what he thinks of her in the first place.
Maybe he thinks super highly of her.
Maybe she is his sister-in-law.
He is going to tell you something that you don’t know right now because you didn’t
care to ask the questions even before the relationship started.
Then as the next step, once you start interacting with her, you need to take the time to sell
her on your product.
Sell her on why it will be good for her life to be working with you.
Become her friend.
Make her a champion.
Don’t just go, “Hey.
Yeah, your boss bought this software.
Let me know if you need any help.”
And then when she comes up with bugs and help, just answer those questions.
No!
Take an interest in her.
Try to understand who she is.
Invest in that relationship and invest in the understanding on what she needs to succeed
and then try to find ways of how your product will relate to that and enable that and contribute
to that success of hers, not just for the boss or the company overall, but for her as
an individual.
And once you’ve done that, if then still she is “lazy” and disinterested and not
doing a good job and I’m pretty sure, I have a hunch that the reason why she was so
lazy and disinterested was that you never take an interest in her.
You didn’t invest in that relationship at all so she never saw the value in that product
and why she should care, champion it, and spend so much time with it or put in the effort
and the work required to make it work.
But let’s assume you do that and that person still is not cooperating correctly, what you
have to do is you have to bring it up softly.
You want to test the waters first but you want to bring it up.
You want to address the boss and go, “Hey, let’s check in.
We’ve been working together for a month or two.
Here is the good.
This and this is working and it’s working well.
Here are some question marks that I have.
We have these three issues.
Here is the way I communicated with the admin internally.
Here is what the responses were.
My question is, what should be my expectation moving forward?
Do you want me to take more responsibility or less?
What’s the best way for me to work in this situation because I have lack of clarity on
what the best way forward is?”
So you describe the problem, not blaming that person.
You know, between the lines, you are but you’re not directly attacking that person at first.
You’re just softly bringing up that, “Here’s what’s happening very objectively.
We’re having issues XYZ.
Here is the help I’ve offered.
I’ve never gotten a response or reply.
What’s my responsibility?
Do you want me to keep following up?
What should we do to make sure that this actually gets resolved?”
And then you see what the other person – how the boss response.
If the boss goes, “Oh my gosh!
This admin is always messing things up.
And you have somebody on your side, somebody that’s aligned with you that you can be
open about this issue.”
Or the boss goes, “Well, I don’t know.
I mean that admin is perfect and I think that what you should do is you should just find
a way to fix it.”
Right?
Whatever it is, all fair game, right?
Nobody needs to be on your side.
Nobody needs to agree with you.
But what you want to do is you want to test the water early.
As soon as you see that this relationship is not going well and you’ve tried your
best to champion that relationship, to invest in that person, to help that person, to understand
that person, to sell that person why your product is good, and that person still is
disinterested, now you have to find other people to be aligned with and you need to
ask others for help.
And if that doesn’t work, then you’re shit out of luck.
And all you can do is at some point sooner or later, flip a coin and either confront
them and go, “Hey, I have this – I have a problem.
This relationship doesn’t work really well because XYZ,” or not confront them and cross
your fingers and hope that at the end of the day, that person is not going to derail the
deal.
I know what I would do.
I would definitely confront them.
But I could see it go either way.
Now, in this specific case, this is a situation where all this has already not happened.
So this person probably never asked for help on how to deal with this person, never invested
in the relationship.
It’s renewal time and now they are worried, “What the hell do I do?
Do I bring this up or not?”
Honestly, I don’t know.
It’s really a coin flip.
It could go either way.
You bring it up.
You know so little about that person and about the boss and their relationship, you have
so little insider knowledge that it’s truly like you’re just gambling at this point.
I don’t know what gamble you should take.
It’s up to your personal style and risk profile if you want to gamble it.
Bring up if you had issues with this person or just wait and cross your fingers and hope
that person will not stop the deal from moving forward or the deal from being renewed.
Up to you.
Moving forward, all of us, let’s learn from this.
When you are selling to the enterprise, you need to sell everyone.
You need to truly invest in these relationships.
You need to ask every stakeholder you’re interacting with and get intel about the next
stakeholder you’re going to be interacting with.
Don’t just get a, “I’m going to connect you with the admin that’s going to be working
with you or the IT department.”
Go, “Cool!
Tell me more about them.
How do they work?
What do they are interested in and what do I need to pay attention to?
How can I make sure that I’m going to be serving them the best possible way and make
this a big success?”
Get some intel.
Invest in them.
If there are issues down the line, bring them up early and bring them up softly to test
the waters and see what’s up and what the dynamics internally are.
And then at the end of the day at some point, you need to call it and take the risk in my
mind and bring up the issue and see what happens.
All right.
I hope this is useful.
Please comment and let us know what your thoughts are, what your tactics, your experiences,
your past mistakes, failures, or successes have been in this regard and ping me on Twitter
@Steli and let me know what you think.
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