3 Ways to Make the Sale to the "Man Behind The Curtain"

In the classic movie, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends are too terrified to bargain with the fire-breathing apparition of the Wizard - up to the moment that Toto uncovers the real "man behind the curtain", who's not at all who they thought they were doing business with. 

So many times in business, we're negotiating with our own "man behind the curtain", but Toto's not there to reveal him, and we make the mistake of thinking that the person in the room is the person who's making the decision. Not so! 

Once, a sales colleague was communicating via email with an engineer in San Diego. I looked at the email distribution list, and knew immediately that the actual decision maker was not that engineer, but someone who was being copied on the ongoing correspondence. I told the sales person, "You need to know who's making the decision, and what his expectations are. Then, you need to put yourself in his shoes and provide answers to his potential questions." I knew that the engineer's technical questions had all been answered, but that might not be sufficient to make things clear to his non-engineer VP, whose okay he needed to close the deal. And we'd never get a chance to pitch our product to him face-to-face.

How do you make the sale to the man behind the curtain? 

1. Figure out what he wants to know. In this case, the man behind the curtain wasn't interested in the technical details. He wanted to know that our product would work; that it was being offered at the lowest cost; and that it would be delivered in a timely manner. 

2. Beware of making assumptions based on long email exchanges. By the time you're down to brass tacks in a negotiation, you've covered a lot of ground already. Don't assume that the man behind the curtain has the patience to go thru all of those emails; make sure that you write a final clear and concise summary so that when it's forwarded to the decision-maker, everything he needs to know is right there on the front page. 

3. Know who's going to be using your product, and how. Often our deals begin with an RFQ from a purchasing department. While I need to deal with the buyer's concerns about price and delivery, it's also important that I know who the end users of the product will be, like our award-winning three roll mills, and how they are going to use them, because these people (usually engineers) are who will ultimately make the purchasing decision. The engineer's neck is on the line if she doesn't get the job done in a timely manner; she's less concerned with the cost than the buyer is. What she needs to know is that we can supply her with the right equipment to get the job done, and that we understand what's required. Our communications with the purchasing department have to include that information, because in this situation the engineer is the "woman behind the curtain", even though she's not in the room. 

Make sure in your communications that you always give the absent negotiators their due respect. Give them a lot of room, and give them a lot of information, because it's often the man (or woman) behind the curtain who's the real decision-maker.

Adapted from the Amazon Best Selling book: FROM START-UP TO STAR by Ken Kuang, Joyce Zhang, and Eileen Han