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Editor’s Introduction:
Shred-It, an $81-million shredding and recycling company in Ontario, has successfully sold to top management on numerous occasions. One recent significant sale was to a major insurance company. When Jeff Martin, vice-president of national sales for Shred-It, got word that one of Shred-It’s branches had landed some business from a local branch of the insurer, he and his national accounts manager saw bigger potential. They contacted the insurer ‘s corporate headquarters and spoke with the vice president in charge of compliance, suggesting that the insurer might want to expand the program to all of its branches.
“Whenever a local Shred-It acquires a client, that paves the way for us to go to the top of the organization,” says Martin. “We don’t have to convince that top executive that we’re the most secure service, because that’s already been done at the branch level. We can say, ‘Why should you believe us? Call your employee and find out.’” The larger task is to convince top management that it would be profitable for the entire company to deal with Shred-It.
Martin and his team spent months pursuing this particular contract, making presentations to top-level committees in human resources and marketing. With the HR vice president, he emphasized security of employee records; with the marketing vice president and his staff, he mentioned how the security of documents could be positioned as a customer benefit. Dealing with people at this level, he knew he could raise corporate-wide issues, such as how sensitive documents falling into the wrong hands can lead to public-relations crises and lawsuits. After nearly a year, he closed the deal, worth $2.5 million.
Siemens, the multinational telephone and electronics company, also finds that opportunities emerge when it enters a prospective client at higher levels. Thus when Mark Daley, southeastern region consulting integration manager for Siemens, learned that one of his sales representatives was targeting a director of information technology at a robotics company, he felt the approach should be higher up. He sent a “brunch basket” filled with breakfast treats to the chief information officer of the company and requested 20 minutes of her time.
The CIO agreed, and in those 20 minutes, Daley used a simple technique to learn about the company’s problems and its “business ecosystem.” On the strength of his staff’s research, he produced a chart and asked her to point where her company ranked, division by division. “She knew that we knew that some of her divisions were in trouble, so this was painful to her,” says Daley, noting that there there’s a purpose to the tactic: “The idea here is to put the prospect in pain, real pain; let it linger, then take the pain away with your solution.”
The brief call produced a wealth of information and an invitation to return and make a presentation. At the presentation, Daley introduced a quote from the robotics company’s annual report, in which the CEO asserted that all business units must be No. 1 or No. 2 in their respective fields or risk being sold.
Impressed that Daley and his team had grasped these larger issues, the CIO offered detailed information about her business. Until then, recalls Daley, “she did not realize that our solution could have such a positive impact on the bottom line. She said something like, ‘I thought you guys just sold phone systems.’”
Then Daley proposed a novel deal: Let Siemens buy the communications hardware from the company and give Siemens a contract to manage the servers. The CIO liked the proposal so much that she asked Daley to make the same presentation (in shorter form) to her boss, the chief operating officer. Three months later, Siemens walked away with an $8-million contract.
Addressing critical issues. In approaching many customers, it’s crucial to direct the sales effort toward the CEO, the CFO, and other high-level executives. Selling to top executives brings several rewards. Consider some of them:
1. Your salespeople will receive more attention and better treatment when connected to the top. If they are successful in landing an appointment with a top executive, the gatekeepers they have skillfully maneuvered past will now work on your behalf. Your salespeople’s time with that executive will be uninterrupted.
2. Even if your salespeople are referred to lower rungs in an organization, their presence will have the stamp of approval from a higher-up.
3. Your partnership with the client company will be based on broader issues and will last longer than if your salespeople had penetrated at lower levels. This is especially true with large multidivisional companies. “You know there’s an opportunity in one department or one part of the business, but if you call on a high-level executive, you’ll gain knowledge about long-term prospects across the entire organization,” says Ed Burke, executive client manager of Educore, a sales training firm.
Getting your salespeople to know top-level executives could mean joining the right club or excelling at golf. Whatever it takes, salespeople making their first presentation in the executive suite will find that it’s a different world. For one thing, the talk must be short and to the point, because top managers are always on a tight schedule. For another, your salespeople must quickly show that they speak the CEO’s language and can address the kind of issues discussed in the boardroom.
Having a detailed knowledge of the company’s business is obviously a requirement. So is knowing the industry, especially the competitive position of the company presided over by your high-level target. Done right, the preparation should pay off. Besides approving all major sales, C-level executives are the ones who can open doors for you throughout the organization.
Selling to top-level executives isn’t always appropriate, however. One sales manager from a consumer paper goods manufacturer kept pushing his sales representatives to call on the highest executive levels at retailers that carried his product, until he realized he didn’t need to. Calling on buyers and merchandisers who made chain-wide decisions was just as effective.
The time frame is different. Mid- and lower-level managers tend to focus on short-term issues. But “high-level executives have a strategic mission associated with their responsibilities,” says Cheri Levitan, business manager at Educore. Lower-level managers want to know how vendors can improve their performance in the next three to six months. Top-level managers look five to 50 years ahead.
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