in understanding your customer’s organization
JERRY STAPLETON
For SBT
We know that if you want to move as a salesperson from being a Vendor or a Problem Solver up to the level of Business Resource, you have to understand who wields power and influence at the companies you’re selling to.
Your starting point in gaining such an understanding of the customer’s true power structure is the company’s organizational chart. But how do you get it? Don’t ask outright, "So, can I see your org chart?" It’s the sort of snoopy question that puts someone on the defensive – someone who up to that point was not.
Instead, there is an almost foolproof way to get – or more accurately, build – your customer’s organizational chart. Here are the steps.:
1. Pick the right contact to ask. Ideally that person is a strong supporter of yours from inside the customer company, and preferably is someone whom you’ve had an opportunity to size up from past encounters. Even contacts whom you don’t know, however, can be good selections for the job. Just don’t pick an executive.
2. Pick the right time and place. Choose a one-on-one meeting, not a group meeting. Your meeting should be a Knowledge Call, properly positioned as one where you will leave the products at the door and go into homework mode.
3. Make a skeleton sketch. Before your meeting, on a sheet of paper hand write at least two names, drawing a box around each: the company president or CEO at the top, and the contact somewhere down the page. If you know other names and titles, put a few down in roughly the spots where you think they belong on the chart.
4. Casually position what you’d like to do. One common-sense approach that almost always works well is to tell your contact, "We just find that the better we understand an organization the easier it is to work with each other." Or, "We’ve found it’s always helpful for both parties if we know how to navigate this organization."
Pull your hand-sketched "starter chart" out and say casually, not with a flourish, "Here’s what I’ve got so far. Can you help me fill in some of the blanks?"
You need to bring just the right attitude to this step, presenting yourself as a business peer, not a Vendor looking for help. You need to believe that there is mutual value in the exercise, rather than falling into the trap of believing that your contact is doing you a favor.
At this point, if you do encounter a roadblock, there’s usually some deeper, more fundamental problem: the contact doesn’t trust you, doesn’t like you, doesn’t want you to win, or is paranoid about your contacting others in his company. (If you do this 20 times and get push-back more than twice, then you’re almost certainly doing something wrong.)
If you’ve judged the chemistry properly, however, what follows should unfold with remarkable ease. Many contacts may actually take the paper and proceed to fill it out for you, writing the names, drawing the lines, and assembling the organizational chart right before your eyes.
5. Don’t settle for the org chart alone. Here’s where you start asking about the political structure of the company. "OK, so this vice president, who hired her? Oh Bill, your new president, did. Bill’s from IBM, right? Oh, she is too? So Bill brought her over from IBM, then." Or, "You mentioned that big Alpha project – show me on here whose baby that is."
The keys to making this process work are picking a good contact, earning the right to dig deeper by doing some homework yourself to start the chart, framing your request effectively, and keeping the atmosphere casual, natural and informal.
Are you still wary that even this indirect approach to getting the organizational chart will turn off contacts? Then consider these recent encounters:
I was with a client salesperson conducting a Knowledge Call at the client’s prospective customer in Minneapolis. When we showed the contact, Jayne, our rough sketch, she didn’t just fill in the blanks – she printed out a complete chart from her corporate intranet. Even then, though, our job wasn’t done – we spent the next several minutes keying in on the most relevant of the charts she gave us to build political profiles of the players.
Just a few weeks later, I again accompanied a client salesperson on a Knowledge Call at a company in the South. We were hunkered down in the conference room with the contact, building the organizational chart, when a stranger walked into the room unannounced.
Dale, the contact, looked up, and without missing a beat, said to my client salesperson and me: "Steve, Jerry, meet our president." The company president glanced down at the organization chart sitting on the conference table, and wisecracked, "I’m glad I made it on to your chart." He then stuck around another five minutes, during which we explained we doing our homework on his company to prepare for a business presentation meeting with him. By the time the president had left the room, we were on his schedule.
This simple process for building a customer’s organizational chart is one of the top five best-kept secrets in selling. Use it, and you’ll agree.
Jerry Stapleton is president of the IBS Group based in Elm Grove; www.theibsgroup.com. He can be reached directly at 262-784-0812. For a copy of the IBS white paper, "From Vendor to Business Resource", fax your request on letterhead to 262-784-0841.
