Speaking in Tongues

It seems doubtful that a buyer will choose a particular solution or offering without understanding the economic or operational impact of a seller’s solution.  Just doesn’t make sense.  Most of our clients sell product, service or solution-based capabilities that if used properly, will impact multiple stakeholders on the buyer side.  Sellers tend to hamstring themselves by failing to reach those stakeholders in order to discuss usage of the sellers’ product.

A thought – if you’re going to commit your time and organizational resources on an opportunity, then it’s critical that everyone on the potential buyer side being impacted understands how, or what is likely to occur.  Ideally, each stakeholder should be capable of projecting what will change resultant from the sellers’ product or offerings.  That could be a tall order, but it must be done.

For discussion purposes, let’s assume your offering will significantly impact the directors of finance, operations, engineering, IT and sales/marketing organizations of a particular prospect.  Who will ensure that your sales team has had business conversations with these stakeholders? Where in the buy/sell life cycle are these conversations going to occur?

Here’s a thought. Prior to expending significant resources on the sales effort, attempt to negotiate a series of best practice events as part of the evaluation process. It’s an effective tactic because if an organization is seriously looking, it makes good business sense to thoroughly evaluate a potential vendor. The key is that the salesperson must ask for the events to occur. It’s a great time to exercise quid pro quo.  

One of the most important of the scheduled events should be some form of a business value analysis. Each stakeholder must be able to understand how usage of the sellers’ product will change the status quo.  The business value analysis should be conducted in the business language  of the stakeholder. This requires the seller to be skilled in multiple business languages. If a seller is speaking to finance, then the spoken tongue must be that of finance. If the conversation is conducted with operations, the seller needs to speak fluent ops. The same concept applies to engineering, IT, sales/marketing, etc.  

But wait! There’s more. It will likely become necessary that sellers understand and be able to converse in many of the sub-dialects impacted, i.e., purchasing, customer service, data processing, and so on.

So, for critical opportunities it’s important to ask good questions, and provide clear responses in the language of the stakeholders. Negotiated events in the buy/sell life cycle can ensure these conversations occur. Organizationally, sales or training leadership should provide the messaging and conversational tools that facilitate these events.