If you want to secure preferred vendor status with a major account, there will be multiple stakeholders in each division or operating group. Not only are there "silos" or independant revenue groups with their own budgets, but the stakeholders have different responsibilities with respect to a decision to hire your firm.
Each stakeholder group may see a different part of the elephant (as in the fable of the blind people and the elephant) and each stakeholder represents a go/no-go point in the company's buying process. Therefore, your firm will make a "sale" to each stakeholder group.
I'll give you an example from a client project. We had set our sights on signing a preferred vendor agreement with at least one of the top 10 globally-integrated American banks.
All our development metrics for the outreach program were being achieved:
a) Number of executive briefings sent
b) Number of discovery conversations held
c) Referrals to key opinion leaders surrounding the decision
d) access into each of the business units and operating groups
Still, no project had been identified.
One of the influencers then asked us to take part in a discussion with field executives at an internal conference. We thought it was going to be a "beauty pagent".
The subject matter experts in the implementation group had told us they had "no budget this year". However, the head of the business line, with whom we had started conversations in the company had told her team that if they could get buy-in from user groups at this conference, she would approve a pilot out of her discretionary budget.
What are the lessons?
a) 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.
b) 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, preferred vendor status enterprise-wide was secured.
The next episode will discuss Discretionary Budgets.
Catherine Mcquaid is a Big Game Hunter in the Urban Jungle. Her clients are mid-sized business services firms who want to win consulting assignments with the Fortune 1000. Trained as a semiotician/literature critic, she now owns a key account development business.
Her strategies for engaging very senior executives in large companies can be used by big game hunters everywhere. She writes on Major Account Acquisition strategies.
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To contact directly: email, phone, 416.923.0877, Skype: cmcquaid
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