Major Account Myth # 3: Get to the “right” Person
Discussions about how to win major accounts usually involves the “get to the right person” myth.
The bigger the dollar value of the service you offer, the broader the impact of your service and the more stakeholders it affects, the more people will be involved in the decision before you are hired.
As a rule of thumb, you should plan to have discovery conversations with all 3 roles before starting discussions about a specific solution:
cheque signer
influencer
implementer
I’ll give you an example from a client delivering leadership development.
I had been reaching out to executives in targeted companies for 9 months. All my development metrics were being achieved but no project had been identified:
number of executive briefings sent out
number of discovery conversations held
referrals to key opinion leaders surrounding the decision
access into multiple lines of business
One of the influencers inside the company asked my client to come to an internal conference.
We thought it was going to be a “beauty pagent” but it turned out that the subject matter experts among the implementation group (who had told us they had “no budget this year”) had been told by the head of the business line, where we had started, that if they could get buy-in from the field, a pilot could be given the green light.
Had we gone away when we were told “there’s no budget”, or stopped asking for meetings with other business lines, we might never have nudged the project into existence.
Because we had covered all the roles in the decision in 6 different lines of business (each having discretionary budgets) and because, as we argued, my client’s solution would have a cumulative effect if implemented enterprise-wide, the contract was awarded.
