Core Level Managers within our Accounts

The next level of account management within our accounts is called the Core Level. The department managers that we will be calling on in our accounts are found in this level. Some of the examples of these departments are manufacturing, plant operations, environmental services, security, food service, and sales, to name a few. These department managers are required to accomplish the goals that come down from the C-Level above, especially in the areas of increasing productivity and decreasing expenses. They constantly hear that they must “get more done with less.”

The primary concerns of Core Level managers are solving problems in their operations NOW! They must find new ways to become more productive, yet stay within their operating budgets. Many of these department budgets are often severely cut depending upon the results of the company.

Department managers are always looking to their suppliers to find new ways to help improve overall operations. Innovation is important to them. A department manager is thinking, “If you have a way to help me get more done with less, then I need to speak with you.” Sales calls on these department managers should focus on solving the challenges faced by the managers. Our questioning needs to hone in on issues that they are dealing with on a daily basis. Stay away from product-based questions initially, and concentrate on what is happening out on the floor that adds to delays, interferes with productivity and causes waste.

Some of the best sales calls I ever had with department managers were the ones where I used a “team selling” approach. I have brought marketing people, R & D managers, as well as technical people from the customer service department into accounts from the home office to meet with my clients. I would introduce both people to one another and set the stage by reviewing my last sales call with this manager. Not only did this bring my home office person up to speed, but it also brought the department manager up to speed. (Remember, we are not the only sales people that this manager sees each month. While they will remember who we are and who we represent, our exact conversation from a week or so ago is not fresh in their minds.) Once these introductions are completed and a review is conducted, the sales call is “turned over” to the home office person and my customer, while I become an involved-spectator. I have always had very positive results using a “team selling” approach.

Please visit my web site at: www.mccannmotivations.com or email me at john@mccannmotivations.com.

 

Three Primary Concerns of C-Level Buyers

Our C-Level buyers are always dealing with three primary concerns. They are constantly thinking about how they need to accomplish the following:

1. Increase revenues,
2. Increase productivity, and
3. Decrease net operating expenses.

Whenever I conduct a sales training session, I ask my class how companies can increase revenue. In every session someone speaks up and says a company can increase revenue by cutting costs. That is totally not true. The example I often use is a simple math example.
Suppose a company last year brought in $ 1.0 million in revenue, and they had $ 400,000 in expenses. This would provide $ 600,000 of gross profit. But let’s suppose that this year they still only generated $1.0 million in revenue, but lowered their expenses down to $ 300,000. Now their gross profit would have gone up to $ 700,000 but revenue remained the same. The challenge that C-level buyers and managers are always dealing with is how to increase revenue to $ 1.5 million or higher, and be able to lower expenses down to $ 200,000 by increasing productivity or other cost-cutting methods in its operations. This would be the best of all worlds for an organization.
If you are like most sales people, you no doubt have many different types of industries that you currently sell. You could be selling to manufacturing, health care accounts, and educational institutions within your markets. Let’s take a minute and think about your different customers and what they might be trying to do to increase their own revenues. A manufacturing operation must produce more widgets or sell their current widget line to brand new customers. Another option is to create a new type of widget to sell to all their customers or to sell to a totally new widget market. With this idea of new widgets, if they were to continue to sell their current widgets to their current customers, the net effect will be to increase their revenue.
Educational accounts need to find ways to put more students in more seats within their institutions. A friend of mine has a business where he works with colleges to recreate their marketing materials in order to increase the number of students attending the schools. His goal is to make the school look as attractive as possible to new students trying to fill more classroom chairs in order to increase revenue for the school.
Today health care accounts must find ways to attract more patients to their clinics to increase their daily census. Twenty years ago it was almost unheard of to see billboards marketing hospitals and their service. Today hospitals are on billboards, radio and television all to market that they are “# 1 in heart surgery” or “the top cancer treatment center in the region.” This is all designed to get more people to come to their institution for treatment and therefore, increase hospital revenue.
Competition is strong in every factor of our economy and it’s a major concern for everybody at the C-Level. Larger institutions are buying smaller competitors and even the other way around, in order to gain more market share. The CEO Level is charged with finding new approaches to increasing revenues, cutting costs in their operations, getting more done with less, all to gain a competitive advantage over others in their industry. When we call on C-level buyers, we must think like C-level buyers! We need to be thinking about ways that we might be able to help C-Level buyers accomplish their company goals.
Please visit me at www.mccannmotivations.com

Buying “Levels” within Our Accounts

There are many different people within our accounts that can have some degree of control over our sales process and our sales results. At a minimum they can have a degree of approval in the decision making process of whether to buy our product or service or not, and even whether to buy it from us and our company. That’s why we need to be, what I call, “positively positioned,” within our accounts with all of these levels of buyers. The larger, more complex the sales opportunity, the more critical this statement becomes.

In each of our accounts, no matter the size, there are always three levels of buyers. The first and most important top level is called the CEO Level – often described as the C-Level. Every C-Level officer within a company falls into this group, from CEO or owner of the company, to CFO, CTO, CIO, etc. (These are Chief Executive, Financial, Technology, and Information Officers.) We don’t necessarily need to be on an extremely intimate level with these people, but we do need to know who they are and what they do within the account.

These buyers also need to know us, who we represent, and what we can do for their organizations. There is nothing more powerful in an account when meeting with a lower-level buyer, than to have a C-Level buyer walk by and give us a personal greeting, which we can return in an equally friendly manner! (“Good morning, John.” “Good morning, Bob. How are you doing today?” That short interaction with a C-Level buyer will carry a lot of weight with our lower-level buyer, if they witness it. Don’t be surprised afterwards if you get a question from your buyer asking how you happen to know the CFO of the company.)

When the time comes to bring the higher-level buyer into the selling process, if needed, then we have to be what I call “positively positioned” with them prior to this point in our sales process. Otherwise, any competitor who is selling the account from the Top – Down, has a definite advantage over us.

Next, let’s talk about the concerns of C-Level buyers and how to use those concerns to our benefit in selling the account.

How to End an Initial Meeting with a Top Level Buyer

A “top – down” approach to selling our accounts will allow us to manage the account in two directions. In a vertical direction, we can flow from one level of company officer to another with little to no difficulty. In a horizontal direction, we can easily flow from one department manager to another also with little difficulty, due to the fact that we started at or near the top of the organizational chart when we first penetrated the account. If I know the owner or President of a company and that person suggests that I introduce myself to his or her Vice President or Operations Manager, this starts me on the road to sales success in the account.

Granted, it’s more difficult to penetrate accounts at the top, but while it may take longer to accomplish than if we were to introduce ourselves to someone in Purchasing, it is much more rewarding. Our average sales will be larger and our margins will be equally larger, due to the fact that our selling occurs at the proper level within the account. Ultimately we will be selling to department managers who use our products on a daily basis and have the specific challenges that our products and systems address. At this level, price is less of a consideration, because it is normally offset by a customer’s need for quality and performance.

Whenever I am attempting to meet top-level buyers in my accounts, my initial approach is a simple one. I am usually asking for ten minutes of their time so that I can introduce myself and my company to them, describe how I work with my customers, and show them how we are different.

My purpose here is to be personally introduced to lower level buyers within the account – the people who actually use our products, but who are often very busy and could be difficult to get to see. When I’m introduced to any lower-level buyers as a result of a contact with upper level management, there is NEVER a problem getting in to see them. At the end of this introductory meeting, I always tell my buyer that I would like to maintain contact with them from time to time. I ask them which method they would prefer that I use to contact them: phone, or email, or personal note. (You will see how I use this piece of information in another blog that will talk about conducting a sales meeting with a lower-level department manager within the company.)

Next up, I will review the different types of buying influences that exit in all of our accounts.

Get Invited Back!

To follow up on my last entry, if you are talking to an Executive Vice President of Operations of a retail chain, (or any industry, really) chances are pretty good that if this Vice President ever did have any experience with your products, it was many, many years ago. Over the years, products have changed dramatically since the days when this Vice President used them. The reason that I mention it is because if we were to give a detailed presentation about our products to this level buyer, we may cause them to become embarrassed because they may not know what we’re talking about.

We would be better served if we presented the specifics about our product line, no matter what we sell, at another buying level within the account. However, this is where “selling experience” comes in. We may be in a short introductory meeting with a high-level buyer and find out that this person really does want to talk about our line. I have found that this does not happen very often, but when it does, you can really make a strong connection with this buyer by continuing the conversation. Just remember that it doesn’t happen very often and selecting the right person for this conversation comes with experience and a bit of luck thrown in for good measure!

Products usually have little to do with the day-to-day activities and responsibilities of these high level buyers. They are most likely the responsibility of people lower down on the organizational chart. These other buyers are the people that we will talk to about our products and services because these buyers are dealing with the problems and challenges that our products and services can solve.

I may have left the wrong impression in my last blog when I stated that “our goal is to get in to our accounts at the highest level possible.” That always should be a goal of ours, but one of the things I learned when selling large retail accounts in my Johnson Wax days, was that our goal on a sales call was “to get invited back!” We always need to have a reason to return to the account to meet with our buyer, so before we leave the sales appointment we are on today, we need to schedule a follow-up appointment. Pull out your calendar before you leave and set a date and time to meet again, and provide a short agenda of what you propose to cover during that next meeting.

Next time, we’ll discuss how to end this meeting with our high-level buyer.

Please visit my web site at www.mccannmotivations.com and “like us” on Face Book and Linked In.

Also, if you have another minute or so, please check out the link below. The local cable news station, CN2, did a short video feature based on a recent front-page story that ran in USA Today about us. Our picture was featured on page 2, above the fold, and talked about how we sold our house at slightly below market in order to move into our continuing life community here in Rock Hill.

Here is the link:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v​=xSmjutXxrbs&feature=share

Start Selling at the Top of your account, not the Bottom

After leaving the training department of Johnson Wax Professional in 1996, I sold on behalf of the Corporate Accounts division during my last two years with the company. Selling for this department was totally different than selling for the distributor sales side of the business. I went from selling with and through distributor sales representatives over to selling my accounts on a direct basis.

I was selling to national retail chains who were purchasing cleaning products in full truckloads, with orders being shipped into national warehouses. Delivery to individual stores was accomplished through a distribution system owned by the stores. My accounts were companies such as Safeway Supermarkets, and Eddie Bauer department stores, located in the northwestern part of the US. If the account did not purchase in full truckloads, then I was not allowed to even call on them.

Selling on a direct basis to retail chains was my first experience with “top – down selling” techniques. Our goal was to introduce our company and ourselves to high-level buying influencers, often called “C-level” buyers. We needed to be positively positioned with them for future selling within the account. These people would have titles such as CEO, COO, CFO, President or owner of the corporation.

Today the book by Anthony Parinello called “Selling to VITO,” where VITO means Very Important Top Officer, is an excellent source of information on how to sell accounts at this level.

An important point to make here is that these C-level buyers have limited knowledge about the products that we are trying to sell to their companies. A sales person who attempts to present product at this point in the process is making a mistake. Our goal should be to spend a few minutes making a personal introduction, exchanging business cards with this buyer, describing how we work with these types of accounts, and asking their thoughts on the direction that we should take to begin selling within the account. I will have more ideas on this in my next Blog.

“Silver Bullets for Your Selling Gun!” – Top Down Selling

Of all the sales training classes that I have ever taught, by far the most popular one is my “Top – Down Selling” program. I am asked to speak about this one subject more than any other by all sorts of groups and sales organizations. Before I get into this topic, some information about my background might be in order.

Prior to starting McCann Motivations in 1998, I spent six years in Navy nuclear submarines where I served as a nuclear-trained machinist mate. Following the Navy, I spent seven years with New York Life, including five years in sales and two years in management where I hired and trained sales people how to sell life and health insurance. After the insurance business, I spent twenty years with Johnson Wax Professional. Fifteen of those twenty years were spent in the training department, which was the best job I ever had. I loved it!

My training responsibilities involved training new Johnson sales people, as well as distributor sales representatives who were selling our product line in the Northeast. That later expanded to the entire east coast. In addition, I conducted motivational speaking programs for large end user customers like Kodak, US Air and Notre Dame University.

We would offer supervisory training and other motivational programs to these larger customers at no charge as a value-added benefit for their having bought our products. As a trainer I learned a tremendous amount of information about how our products were manufactured and how they performed, and about selling techniques. I was also constantly reading books on selling and management topics in order to stay current with supervisory topics to help our customers in training their staffs. I would also speak and interact with our technical service and marketing departments so that I could learn more about all these subjects. As our VP of Sales once said, “You have to learn it before you can teach it.”

Some examples of books related to sales topics that had a great impact on my training and future sales training programs are:
“Selling to VITO – Very Important Top Officer,” by Anthony Parinello,
“Question Based Selling” by Tom Freese,
“Spin Selling” by Neil Rackham and
“Secrets to Power Negotiating” by Roger Dawson.

I have read dozens more books on selling, but these four were very impactful to my selling career.

I’m back in the Blogging business!

Good morning to one and all!

After having my web site redone by my friend Garrett Marks, here in Rock Hill, SC (www.marksmanweb.com), it’s now time to get back to publishing my blog about sales and sales training topics. Over the years many people have suggested that I find some method to provide advice or thoughts on issues pertaining to selling. A blog seemed to be the best way to do just that.

I have been in sales, or sales training for over thirty five years. I love selling and especially love sales training. My plan is to post something to this blog often in hopes that I can help people enjoy selling as much as I do and have over the years.

Let me hear back from you. If there is a topic that you would like me to address, please let me know. Maybe I can give an idea or two that will help you get that sales appointment or close that new sale. If an idea of mine helps you sell something, please let me know so that I can share in your excitement vicariously. We all love to win!

Good luck and I will be in touch. In the meantime, you can contact me through my web site: www.mccannmotivations.com or by email: john@mccannmotivations.com, or by phone 803-324-4216. My wife Christy and I moved almost a year ago from our home in Greer, SC, up here to Rock Hill, SC, which is just a short drive below Charlotte, NC. That turned out to be our final move EVER! More on that later.

I hope that you finish the week strong and can enjoy your weekend!