This is how I get a “green light” and referrals:

1. Contact the executive’s support person.

2. Acknowledge that you haven’t spoken before & offer to send an executive briefing by email.

3. Call back a week later and ask to arrange a 45-minute telephone conversation, even if you’re in the same city.

4. An optimum outcome from that conversation is being sent to a member of their team.

This is called getting a “green light” referral.

Sales focuses on getting a yes/no answer to “are you ready to buy?” in each interaction.  Sales also assumes that if you get to the “top” or the “right person”, a deal can be done.

Major account development takes into account the fact that there are multiple stakeholders in decisions and each stakeholder group has a different view of the business challenge.

The route to multiple assignments (and a dependable revenue stream) is becoming a preferred vendor enterprise-wide. This means that any department or business unit in the enterprise can retain your firm since all required documentation as a vendor has been satisfied.

If you are a sales manager, major account executive or are responsible for high-value client relationships, you may have noticed that subject matter experts  are most effective in peer-to-peer discussions, where a defined scope of work has been established. 

Internal experts who can nix the decision to hire you are:

user groups

project implementation people

vendor relations departments

 They seldom have final budget authority.  
If you are a specialist practitioner, it is likely that your access and affinity is with the “implementer” role. This may be where your network takes you.

However, a single point of access and visibility with a single stakeholder is not enough to become a preferred vendor company-wide.

I have discovered that broad-ranging “discovery” conversations, held with players in each of the 3 stakeholder roles BEFORE a project is defined  is the most effective way of differentiating yourself:

Meeting everyone in  the role of check signer, influencer and implementer reduces nasty detours after you’ve submitted your proposal.  People in these roles have the power of veto and you may not have found out who they were before you drilled down to a solution with the subject matter experts.

More and more business is conducted virtually rather than by face-to-face meetings, so major accounts can be supported by smaller businesses.

Smaller businesses are vulnerable if they cannot provide coast-to-coast support when the project is running. Being able to respond quickly, right across the nation is a great asset, so demonstrating that you use alternative ways to reach nation-wide can set the stage favorably from the first contact.

This is why we suggest doing all early contact with major accounts by phone rather than face-to-face.  In addition, it is easier to schedule 45 minutes over the phone with a national team rather than waiting to get everyone into the same room.

Concepts like virtual delivery (you don’t have to be in your clients’ place of business to deliver your goods or services) are liberating small businesses from home-town thinking.

Smaller businesses cannot afford long sales cycles or expensive client acquisition processes.

Anyone starting a business today can play in the global marketplace. This is a long way from a storefront business model where geography limits the ultimate size of your business.

Do you deliver quick turn-around for your clients?

Deliver creative responses to client demands?

Service narrow, specialized business needs?

This is true for one of my clients who delivers specialized training. They had done a couple of projects in consumer banking when they hired me to help win major accounts in the US marketplace.

After scanning industry publications, it seemed customer experience was a hot spot for the industry. Banks were worried about losing clients. With mergers going on, banks needed to take action because the name on the front door may have changed and clients were likely feeling less loyal. 

Today, my client is a preferred vendor to 3 of the 25 largest financial institutions in North America.

By the way, their cost of sales is 12%.  

The business services industry cost of sales averages 32%.

* get into the minds and hearts of senior executives

* avoid being spotted as an amateur

(for the record, amateur in French means “admiring of” or dilettante)

Jill Konrath and Paul Dunay have influenced my thinking and are my heros