Gatekeeper, Influencer, Decision Maker & the Champion


Have you ever met a decision maker who cannot make the decision to buy?

I do. All the time. It seems that the bigger the corporation, the less likely the buying decision is done by one single individual. Every multi-million project that initiates from the CEOs office must go through rigorous buying process. It must be veted by the domain experts, then presented to management, and sometimes, pass through one or two rounds of user-testing, before being presented back to the decision maker... hopefully for the sign-off.

Decision makers do not decide until his team members have done thorough analysis of the purchase. In short, decision makers do not decide alone.

If that is the case, why is "decision maker" the holy grail of every lead-gen exercises?

Perhaps it is because it is more comforting to make ourselves believe that just because we lined our products infront of as many decision makers as possible, we will sell more. The more senior sounding titles in each sales campaign the better. CIO, CTO, COO, Regional Director, Country Manager, Network Director, SVP of Infrastructure... All big sounding titles that we wish for in every campaign.

Am I saying that decision makers are not important?

Not at all.

In Strategic Account Sales, these are the "common" types of people.
  1. Gatekeeper
  2. Influencer
  3. Decision Maker
  4. Champion

I find that while decision maker is very important, there are two other groups of people who are equally, if not more important. They are the influencer and the champion.

Influencer is easy to define. Basically every worker in the organisation who are in the loop of the buying process. They may be the users, the managers, the in-house domain experts, or the purchasing manager (person with the budget). These are the people who will breakdown every proposal you wrote, every presentation you gave, and every quotation you sent. They will ask you every questions imaginable from every angle possible. Answer one question wrongly, and you might be out of the game.

So who is this "champion"? I define the champion as anyone in the organisation who is able to "champion" your cause. Basically, they are your sponsor. I believe in every major sales, there must be a champion within the organisation who is on your side, and believes in your product or service. This champion can be anyone from the influencer group. Or he can be out of this group, but with direct connection with the decision maker, or key influencer. Or this champion may be the decision maker himself!

Whatever the case, I believe that conversion of champions is the key of any major sales.

p.s. What about Gatekeepers?

In my personal experience, Gatekeepers are only important for Cold Accounts. I.e. you need to do a cold call in. They might be your first contact with the company.

So here, I propose a Sales Objective for Strategic Accounts:

  1. Get pass the Gatekeeper and identify the Influencers and Decision Makers as soon as possible.
  2. Identify potential candidates to convert into your Champions.
  3. Sell.

0 comments:

Post a Comment