Managing Stakeholder Dependency In Your Sales Cycle

According to a CIO.com report in January 2016, the average tenure of a CIO is slowly increasing, and currently stands at 6 years and 6 months, which is about 7 months longer than the same report showed in 2015. At larger enterprises, CIOs tend to come in below this average, with 5 years and 8 months being the current trend.

https://core0.staticworld.net/assets/2016/01/14/2016-state-of-the-cio-executive-summary.pdf

One way or another, for all of us who have sales aspirations with CIOs at organisations of any size, we must realise that the time will come when all the hard work we have put in to nurturing that relationship will be up for renewal.

Sure, if a CIO is moving from company A to company B, and you also sell in to company B, then you might have a new advantage. If one of your colleagues sells in to company B, then you should do the right thing and arrange for a professional handover, and be willing to be on hand for the first 3 months to ensure the new relationship gets off to the right start. Yes, it is an investment of your time, but it will pay back in due course.

But, as many of us have experienced, the departure of a key decision-maker/approver seems to happen on the cusp of a buying decision being made. Suddenly the large deal that was forecast to close this quarter, is pushed out indefinitely, pending the decision-maker’s backfill. And when the new hire has been confirmed, there is no guarantee that they will immediately pick up your sales cycle where your previous decision-maker left it.

Which means that you can often be starting from scratch, needing to re-prove all the great reasons why the new decision-maker should buy from you, and make a buying decision now. It can be even more tough if the new person is an ardent fan of your competitor.

What can you do to mitigate the impact of your primary contact departing at just the wrong time for you to close that large deal?

If you are working on a large deal (several million dollars), then the value of what you want to sell must have an impact on your customer’s business strategy at some point. Very few companies, these days, spend that much budget on anything that is a “nice to have.” As sellers, we are inclined to be focused on those measures made available to us by the companies we work for, things like ROI calculators and TCO tools. These are OK when working with a middle- to senior-level IT stakeholder, but the metrics that they focus on are likely to mean little to a line of business stakeholder.

Let’s consider a Chief Financial Officer. There is an assumption that a CFO will look positively on a proposed deal if it shows how the deal can save him money. That is our assumption, so that is what we invest time in proving. But this is flawed thinking. Having spoken to many CFOs it is very clear that they care less about just saving money and far more about how to invest their budgets wisely, to help grow their business. You need to have THAT conversation with a CFO, working either top-down with the right executive-level introductions, or bottom-up by landing and expanding with sponsored meetings from your lower-level contacts.

How about the Chief Operations Officer? Who is this person? What do they do? The COO is one of the most powerful CxOs in a company. They oversee all operating aspects of the entire organisation, and they are ultimately responsible for ensuring the business runs effectively and efficiently, in a way that is not only profitable, but also achieves growth goals. It is a HUGE role. It is like the human version of an Enterprise Resource Management system. What can you offer to help the COO’s big, complex role, become just a little bit easier and more successful?

Then there is the Chief Marketing Officer. I love CMOs. I absolutely understand what they are trying to achieve and what they need to do to meet their goals. The Marketing function must create awareness of a company and what the company is selling, generate demand for the products and services, and effectively manage the customer experience to grow market share and boost customer loyalty. No small tasks here. At the same time, the CMO must cater to the demands of their internal customers, who are largely you and me, the sales teams, to give us the leads, information, and direction we need to position our products to the right potential customers at the right time. What can you offer a CMO that will help them be more successful in achieving at least part of what is expected of them? What can you do to help the CMO be accepted by internal customers as being a trusted business partner?  And how can that translate in to helping the CMO with their business performance metrics?

Those are just three examples of where you need to be spending your time, in addition to the relationship you build with a CIO or their equivalent. Why is this so important? The better job you do of working with other senior level stakeholders to convince them that you have their success at heart, and you have the best product/solution to meet their business needs within an agreed timeframe, the better job you do of helping minimise any negative impact or delay from a departing CIO. Don’t forget that the CIO exists to serve the business. If you have convinced a CFO, a COO, and a CMO that you have the right solution, now, to help each of them achieve something significant, it is unlikely that they will let a departing, or new CIO hold up their success.

This is not meant to recommend that you work around a CIO – you really do not want to burn that bridge. But you should not be satisfied with having a CIO as your only primary decision-maker. You need to appeal to a wider audience which will increase the urgency for getting a solution agreed and deployed, will help find budget to pay for higher cost deals, and will help ensure you can bring those large deals home according to your sales manager’s expectations.