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Creative Leisure News
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Mike's often irreverent, thought-provoking analysis of the industry-- with an occasional guest columnist. The 8 Drivers of Executive Decision-Making Improve sales by understanding how key customers think. by Nicholas Read (April 19, 2010) How does the board of directors or management team of a small or mid-sized business think about reversing a (Note: Nicholas Read is president of consulting firm SalesLabs (www.saleslabs.com) and co-author of Selling to the C-Suite (McGraw Hill, 2010). He is the former executive director of Ernst and Young's revenue growth and risk management practice and senior partner advisor at KPMG, For more visit www.cxo-selling.com.) Today’s executives expect you to have done your
homework before meeting them. They don’t want to educate you on
information that can be readily obtained from the Internet or a
subordinate. And they expect you to commit them to take action as a
result of your call. Prepare yourself for those career-defining
executive calls by studying your client’s internal or external
business drivers. This helps you put in context how your products
and services can make a contribution that’s better, faster, or
easier than the approach presently used. What do these drivers of
executive decision-making look like? Every executive is under financial pressure to
perform. At the most basic level, executives must do one of two
things to produce a profit: increase revenue or reduce costs. For
salespeople to build business value for an executive pressured by
financial drivers, they must ultimately help them move the needle on
profit or cost, and to do so in a way that’s consistent with how
their industry measures success. If you are an executive on the buying side of
the supply chain, your concern is about reliability of supply,
quality, economies of scale, inventory turnover, shrinkage through
loss or theft, warehousing and distribution technologies, demand
forecasting, and many of the same issues that trouble executives on
the selling side of the supply chain. There’s very much a level of
interdependence between the buyer and seller, so approaches to
real-time data sharing, shared infrastructure, and shared-risk
management remain compelling to discuss, especially when a
salesperson can cogently present how any of their solutions in these
areas do the job faster, better or with less risk, than how the
executive does it today. Your customers may even now be evaluating their
business partner relationships in light of changing business
environments. This represents another opportunity to create value by
demonstrating an understanding of their pressures and offering
solutions by orchestrating relevant introductions to your company’s
network of people, partners, and affiliates who have value to add.
Solutions are sometimes about the relationships you help broker more
then the product or service you sell. Maintaining and growing their existing customer
base, creating and enhancing loyalty, and delivering value are of
prime importance to most executives. But how do you target the right
customers? How do you anticipate their needs? How do you develop new
products that will be ready when the market starts to demand them?
As a salesperson, if you can demonstrate how your product or service
can add value in these areas, you will be seen as a resource who can
help create a competitive advantage, and executives will want to
talk to you if they recognize they have a problem in this area. While executives immerse themselves in their
own company affairs, the fact that you sell to many companies places
you in a unique position to have something those executives always
look for: insight into marketplace trends. So share your ideas and
help them see beyond their silo walls to how other companies are
solving the same competitor drivers they face. One caveat: don’t
disclose specific competitor names – these may also be your
customers, and their activities with you should remain confidential
if you don't want to lose credibility. Instead, interpret the trends
you see across companies, and help your customers see the future. Globalization impacts executives in a variety
of ways. As they face competition from cheaper labor and production
abroad, they risk losing market share. Consequently to remain
competitive they must drive cost from their domestic infrastructure,
or outsource production and services to low-cost offshore providers.
Either course of action creates risk as well as opportunity. How do
they find the right production and distribution partners? How do
they drive risk out of an extended supply chain and hedge for
multiple currencies? How do they recruit and keep the right people?
If globalization means closing domestic factories, how will they
manage labor laws, public relations, and finances? Do they have
products that appeal to multiple markets? In response to corporate scandals that have
plagued the headlines in the past decade, governments, industry
regulators, and shareholders are demanding greater accountability
and transparency from corporations. Companies must operate under new
regulations designed to maintain stability in financial markets that
are already under pressure, and to protect shareholder interests by
restoring investor confidence. (To read previous Business-wise columns, click on the titles in the right-hand column.) xxx |
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