I speak, write, coach, train, and consult around building consensus. You don’t sell to companies, you sell to the people within those companies. Many of the people within those organizations often have deep disagreements about what needs to change. They need help convincing each other, and they need your help building consensus.
This week I made a short presentation to a small group of executives within a company. They began by telling me what their goals were, and I brought a slide deck with 8 ideas as to what we might do together. But before I shared the “how,” I shared a half dozen slides that laid out in great detail all of the statistics I gathered that compared their organization to some others.
At one point, I put up a single slide and one of the executives said, “Can I have THAT slide?” He didn’t offer up the reason that he wanted the slide showing how some people make decisions, but he didn’t have to. The glance he exchanged with the executive sitting across the table told me that this was the case they were trying to make internally.
I told him that he couldn’t have the slide, that I would instead provide him the whole deck.
Your clients and dream clients need help making their case. They need facts and evidence to present to other people within their company. They also need proof that what they want to do is going to work. It is your job to help provide them with what they need to justify the case for change and sell it within their own company.
- What do your dream clients need from you to justify the change that they want to make?
- When someone on their team or within their company opposes the change, what evidence and proof do they need to convince them?
- What do you know about political, economic, social, or technological changes that your clients may not yet know?
- What statistics do you have the would prove a performance gap?
- What facts and evidence can you provide them that they need to change?
What can you do to help the contacts within the companies you are working with come to some consensus about what they need to change and how they need to change it? It’s a lot of work to answer these questions, I know. Let me know how you do.
Contributor Anthony Iannarino is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and consultant. He writes daily at www.thesalesblog.com and you can subscribe to his newsletter at www.thesalesblog.com/newsletter.