Selling at C-level for Dummies - #2/12 (more or less)

In the last edition of this newsletter we covered:

• What is C-level anyway? In this context, the highest possible person or people who experience the business issues you can help with - or the consequences of not addressing them - and who make or approve the final decision to buy from you.
• Why Sell at C-level? Heaps of reasons but essentially if you can sell the the people at the top you have a much better chance of winning a deal AND do it with less effort. Plus you'll make it much more likely you won't have to haggle over price.

It used a sea level picture taken during my trip to Hartlepool in April - as does this one, a picture of the Heugh Breakwater, as seen in several episodes of Vera (very close to the Heugh Battery where the first serviceman was killed on British soil in 1914 in World War One during the bombardment of Hartlepool).

Maybe I'll use a picture of Bondi next edition, we'll see.

On to this edition, which covers:

Targeting the right companies

Getting a sales meeting with a C-level or other senior executive in a company that you believe has a need for what you sell is relatively simple. That's what this newsletter series is all about.

But while it's simple, it isn't easy.

It requires thought, strategy, planning and effective execution of your strategy. If the potential pay-off from winning a company as a new client (or, for example, selling to a different division or branch of an existing customer) is worth $500k+ then it's worth making the effort.

But it isn't worth the effort if you target a company that isn't going to buy from you in a month of Sundays.

So the most important thing in your quest to sell high value offerings to senior executives is targeting the right companies.

Many vendors - the vast majority in fact - target far, far too many companies using mass emails and high volumes of cold calls to find existing opportunities. This doesn't work, as evidenced by the very high percentage of companies and sales reps that don't make their quota.

It's like using a trawl (a large net, conical in shape, designed to be towed along the sea bottom) to catch tuna - you may get one or two tuna but you also get lots of rocks, old boots and lots of other fish that you kill unnecessarily.

This leads to overfishing - just as mass marketing leads to prospects that ignore calls from numbers they don't recognise, trap marketing emails with spam filters and ignore any that get through. And to others that waste your valuable time because they'll never buy from you.

If you're after big fish like tuna you use different tactics. And if you're after big fish like senior executives in companies that will spend upwards of $500k with you you can't just do what everyone else does.

So the first thing you need is:

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Obviously you already have an Ideal Customer Profile - don't you?

I sincerely hope so but sadly many companies, sales leaders and salespeople don't (and there are different ICPs depending on who you are, as I'll cover in the next section). Or if they do it's flawed.

Before I go into how to define your ICP let me give you an example of a couple I used to have when I sold ERP software 25 years ago.

ICP - an example

The Sydney-based company I worked for (1993-2008) had 15 employees when I joined and about 60 when it was acquired by a larger company in 2005. It was a private company and the three directors had a philosophy of growing using retained earnings.

In other words, there were no investors with massive buckets of money to throw at sales & marketing. Every cent we spent came from last year's profits. It limited my options when it came to sales and marketing (I ended up in charge of both worldwide).

Out major competitors were different. They were mainly huge US based or European based ERP developers with big sales forces, thousands of customers worldwide & heaps of cash to spend on sales & marketing..

We had about 11 customers when I joined. Of those five were book publishers and three were consumer electronics distributors. I started as a Business Development Rep & my boss asked to call different companies to see what potential there was (remembering that changing or implementing an ERP is a huge disruption with major risks for any company).

I ran into two significant hurdles. One was geography. Australia has three reasonably big markets - Sydney (NSW), Melbourne (Vic) & Brisbane (Qld) - with Perth (WA) literally an outlier, being smaller and 3,300 kn (2,050 miles) away. We only had an office in Sydney.

Companies buying an ERP want to know they have support on their doorstep. So the chances of anyone outside Sydney buying from us, versus from a much bigger company with many more customers and a local office, were slim. Unless we had a significant edge.

Companies also want to know if an ERP can handle their industry-specific requirements. For example, food distributors need "use-by" dates; motor distributors need to be able to handle dealerships and so on.

When I called a company that wasn't a publisher or consumer elextronics distributor & they said "can you do x?" and we couldn't, I'd say "we can program that in for you, we're the developers."

But from their perspective, why should they buy from a 15 person company that couldn't offer them something that was critical to their industry when our competitors were 100 times bigger and had customers all around the world in all kinds of industries?

After a while I said to my boss, John Bedwany "why don't we just focus on book publishers and consumer electronics distributors?" We had customers in both niches, we had specialised modules and features that were unique for both niches and all three of our directors had experience & connections in those industries.

So we did. And it worked. By the time the company was acquired by a larger Swedish company we had a heap of big consumer electronic distributors as customers in Australia (companies like Sanyo, Pioneer, JVC, Homedics, Sharp, Makita) and the publishing version of our software, Bookmaster, was the mst widely used ERP for book publishers in the world.

Initially our ICP for book publishing was this.

• Revenue greater than $10 million - it wasn't cost-effective for smaller publishers (no SaaS in those days)
• Must do their own distribution or be a specialist book distributor (many publishers use third party distributors)
• Ideally based in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane in that order (there were a lot of publishers in Melbourne so we hired someone there to provide local support)

That worked very well for a while. But there were only 50 or so book publishers in Australia that fit the bill. And as companies typically change ERPs every 10 years or so it limited our opportunities, especially once we'd signed half of them.

So we looked overseas and ended up with offices or partners in Singapore, the UK, the USA, South Africa and the Netherlands and book publishing customers in 22 countries. We also developed additional modules including subscriptions, which opened up a new niche for us (legal publishers like Lexis Nexis).

But we never wasted our time chasing, for example, retailers or car dealerships because we knew there were other companies with solutions that were a much better fit.

Developing your ICP

The whole point of having an ICP is to make your life easier, to save you wasting time chasing "opportunities" that will never close or that you'll never win and to help you win more, bigger deals by focusing on the C-level and what they really care about.

But it's YOUR ICP that's important. Whether you're a Founder, a CEO, a Sales Director, a Sales Manager or a Sales Executive you have a "patch". You have a territory - it might be the entire world or it might be Oklahoma or Nepal.

If you work for a large global company it's likely your head office marketing department will tell you what your ICP is. But the specific companies in Oklahoma are different to those in Nepal - different sizes, different regualtions, different language, different cultures, different procedures, different customers.

And what works in Vegas probably doesn't work in Salt Lake City.

About six years ago I spoke to someone selling SaaS based in New York. I asked him some questions.

Q. "Was is your territory?" A. "All of the USA." Q. "What industries do you sell to?" A. "Any company with over 100 seats (users)." Q. "How many companies in the USA fit those criteria?" A. "Many thousands." Q. "How many can you approach directly (and effectively) at any one time?" A. "Maybe 50."

My advice was simple. There were over 500 companies in New York that fit his criteria. I told him to pick a niche where his company already had customer references, ideally in or near New York, and focus on them, 50 at a time.

Sure, if another company approached him by all means talk to them and assess his chances. But when it came to approaching C-level executives (rather than waiting for them to come to you) why not make life easy for yourself?

If you can, start with targets that are close to where you live in niches where you already have references and customers. It's not rocket science - but how many salespeople chase deals that don't fit either?

(I've been guilty of this, chasing a big publishing company in Korea that approached us. Looking back we were never going to win that business, too many barriers - distance, language, culture. Luckily we qualified out after a few meetings. But sadly I never got to go to Korea.)

So don't just follow Head Office's guidance when it comes to your ICP. Instead....

Develop your own ICP

Here are two scenarions:

A. You're a Founder, CEO or Sales Director and your "territory" is the world.

You have a product that anyone can use and you seek world domination in your niche. Here's my advice. Start at home. If you can't dominate the market on your doorstep what chance do you have with one a long way away?

Unless you have investors with very deep pockets and a high tolerance for risk, don't try to sell to the world. (Remembering we're talking products and services valued at over $500k lifetime value of a customer, not a $50 per month SaaS product)

If you want to expand overseas do it region by region in conjunction with a local partner.

B. You're a Sales Manager in charge of a geographic region or a Sales Executive with your own territory.

Work out which states/cities/areas have the most potential - and ideally are as close to home as possible.

Work out which industries and niches exist in your region/territory where your solution is as close a fit as possible to their unique requirements and where (ideally) you have local customers who are similar.

I say industries and niches because a prospects' perception to where they sit may well be different to yours. For example.

In 2012 a major global software vendor approached me to help them get C-level meetings. I suggested an industry approach & they said "Sure, let's do Travel and Entertainment" - which was one of their target industries.

I asked "How do you define Travel and Entertainment?" "Oh, airlines, cruise ships, theme parks, travel agents, hotels." I had to point out that, from the perspective of the CEO of an airline he doesn't run a theme park and the CFO of a hotel chain doesn't think he works for a cruise line.

Travel agents have very different needs, problems and processes from airlines and conflating the two is, to use a technical term, bloody stupid.

So whatever your territory, work out your own ICP(s) - you can have more than one (in my ERP example I had two, one for book publishers, one for consumer electronics distributors).

• Where are they physically located? Are they down the road or half a continent away?
• What's their revenue? Can they afford you? Can you make a decent profit? Are they so big they'll squash you or ignore you?
• What industry and niche are they in? From their perspective. Do you have references and/or customers in those niches. Do you understand them & their likely issues?
• Who are their customers? If you already have customers that sell to their customers you probably have a reasonable understanding of some of their issues.
• Is their industry/niche booming or shrinking? That will affect their current priorities.
• Where are their headquarters based? If you're in France and the head office is in Japan you'll have a lot less luck than if it's in Lyon or Strasbourg.

If you define your ICP intelligently and there are 1,000 companes that fit (see next issue for more details on how to find these companies) you have plenty to focus on. You can rank them, focus on the top 50 - always start with the low hanging fruit - and add more as you win some as customers, qualify out of others and put the rest in the "not yet - nurture" basket.

When I was at school in the late 60s I worked at Harwell, Oxfordshire, picking fruit during the holidays. Strawberries, raspberries, apples, pears. It was piecework (paid by the box).

Some apple trees were short - 6 feet or less - and packed with fruit. I could fill two boxes with no effort. Others were tall with much less fruit. I needed a ladder and a death wish to fill one box and it took me three times as long. If I'd had a choice (I didn't) I'd have gone for the much easier small trees every time.

YOU do have a choice. Focus on fewer, higher quality targets at a higher level (i.e. C-level) and you'll sell a lot more with a lot less effort.

Your ICP is, to quote Hemingway, A Moveable Feast. It will change over time as you win new customers, run out of low hanging fruit or circumstances change.

But you should always, always, pre-qualify who you approach by focusing on companies that fit, or are close to, your ICP before you approach them.

Next issue

OK, we've discussed your ICP. You probably already knew most of that. Next issue we'll talk about the somewhat harder, but equally essential step of finding the companies in your territory or region that fit your ICP.

(Incidentally if marketing sends you "leads" of people who have attended a webinar, or reached a certain number of points in your prospect scoring table, or visited a landing page, or whatever, and have shown "buying signals" the first thing you should do is to check out the company and see how close to your ICP it is. If it's too far away tell marketing "thanks but no thanks."

The second thing you should do is check out the individual who is the "lead" (all "leads" are people, not companies) and see what their role is. If they aren't a senior executive (and they hardly ever are) then you need to think carefully about your approach.

It's very easy to get trapped in the lower layers of a prospect many levels from the people who make the decisions. So if you're following up on a "lead" the way you approach them is very different to the way you'd approach a C-level executive. More of that in a later edition.)

The money shot

In case you didn't know, I specialise in helping senior sales executives & sales leaders sell more effectively (and sell more) to C-level executives and other senior decision makers.

There are four ways you can work with me.

1. If you'd like me to conduct a customised two day workshop (potentially one full day, a break to put the ideas into practice then a follow-up day, but I'm flexible) customised for your company, your customers, your prospects and your offerings, contact me. It can be done for up to 8 people (perhaps more at a squeak - more by discussion) and it can be conducted on-line (North America & Europe) or in person (Sydney only). The price starts at US$12,000.
2. I'm putting together an exclusive Sales Leaders Mastermind Group. It will meet fortnightly for 60 to 90 minutes, focus on selling at C-level and also cover other topics to be agreed. Members will help each other as well as me helping them. It will be US$750 per month and there's a limit of six members, from North America or Australia only (purely due to time zones). Contact me for more details.
3. Fred Copestake & I have developed a modular "How to Sell at C-Level" video course. It covers everything I've mentioned here in much more depth and also talks about HOW to do it as well as WHAT to do. (When you subscribe you'll also get a free copy of my book, see below.) Contact me for details. Price US$195 or ￡150.
4. I self-published a book, "How to Sell at C-Level - the transcripts". It isn't pretty - it's just a PDF I edited myself with screens & pictures I (mainly) made myself. It consists of the transcripts and slides from 20 podcasts, keynotes and webinars featuring me with some of the world's leading sales experts'podcasts/webinars and/or Jacques Sciammas, who graciously gave me access to his brilliant material. One of them features another friend, Martin E. Stevens - one of the world's top cold-callers who focuses on senior executives - in a podcast with Marcus Cauchi . It's 367 pages long and is packed with (if I say so myself) brilliant insights into Selling at C-Level. You can only get it directly from me and it costs US$75. If it helps you get one C-level meeting (which it will) you'll get a 1000% plus RoI right off the bat. Contact me for more details.

And last of all - a favour

I hope you've found at least some of this valuable and/or interesting. If you have, please click through to LinkedIn and "like" my post and also comment - it all helps get more eyeballs.

And if you have any questions and comments I promise to answer them to the best of my ability.

Cheers, Steve