Cracking "The Inner Circle"

I recently started doing research on a restaurant franchise in Baltimore. There was an article in the paper about ownership buying some property in northern Baltimore and opening another branch of their highly successful franchise. This is the perfect opportunity for me and I know there will be a need for my services. I made several attempts to find the right person to speak with but had no luck. I mentioned this to a business partner of mine who said they had recently met someone from that company and gave me their contact info. This person was kind enough to inform me that she was not the right person but gave me the phone number and email of the right person. There is just one problem with this, I had already spoken to the right person and she hung up on me saying she didn't need anything. So I went back to the drawing board. Armed with the knowledge that I have the right person I looked to see if we had any common ground, and we did. We both know the owner of a Baltimore media company. I had connected with her through an article on Networking in SMART CEO magazine from 2010. I sent her a message indicating what I was trying to do and what my luck had been so far. Her response was very interesting. First, she told me that she was good friends with this contact and that she was NOT surprised I had such a tough time. She said the entire company operates that way, it is part of their culture. She did agree to forward my information on to her friend and said hopefully that would help.

So here is my question: HOW ON EARTH DOES THAT MENTALITY HELP YOUR COMPANY?

Look, I'm not naive, I realize that there are thousands of sales people out there and many of them are A) not very good at what they do and B) are unethical but,  consider the following:

1. It is almost impossible for you, as a business owner to know everything you need to make your company thrive. By building trusted relationships with people in fields you are not expert in, you can really drive the success of your company. So your immediate retort to this one is "okay Mister Smarty pants, how do you know they don't already have a relationship like that?" The answer is, I don't know. Y'know why I don't know? Because they couldn't take 60 seconds to speak to me get a handle on what I do and then determine if they could use my help or not. Next up "well yeah Mike, if they did that they would spend all day on the telephone talking to sales people." Not true, it's just an excuse. I cannot tell you how many hour long meetings I have been in where the customers phone did not ring once. In addition, I work for a small company where the owners office is right behind mine. In a given week, I might hear five calls come through from sales people.

2. Zig Ziglar said "you have two ears and one mouth so you need to listen twice as much as you speak." That's not just good advice for sales people but business owners too. You don't know what you don't know. So until you start listening and paying attention you are going out to miss out on key opportunities to make your business more productive.

3. Stop sending the minions out to gather information and then taking all of their information to make your decision. Either trust them to make the decision for you or do the homework yourself. Here is why. The ideal sale is a a mutual agreement between two people who have identified a need and developed a solution that fits the criteria of that need. When you add another layer you open the opportunity for that layer to cause confusion of for something important to the decision maker to be overlooked in the solution discovery process. I have worked on dozens of clients where I never met the person who signed the paperwork until long after the sale was done and they were angry about how a particular part of the product or service was handled.

I really hope you have a good relationship with ownership and when you read this, will immediately forward this to them and say "this guy has some really good points." For some reason that has never been clear to me, many sales transactions end up being a very adversarial process where the customer and the rep seem to be at odds with one another as opposed to working together. Again, I understand that there are many sales people out there who are just idiots. Politely excuse yourself from them and move on to someone you feel comfortable with. In fact, work with 2 or 3 someones you feel comfortable with and then work openly with all of them & then let the best solution win. The better sales people will recognize when a competitor solution just does the job better than theirs. Most of the time one sales rep will uncover something that the other two didn't or the customer wont put emphasis on something important to them but it just happens to be a feature that one company is focusing on right now. So while the other companies can provide the same thing or perhaps a better version of the same thing, the customer never finds out & then makes an uninformed decision.

Let's be clear, uninformed decisions never benefit the customer and almost always leave the customer and the sales rep at odds with one another.

Here's the summary,
Get rid of the "inner circle" mentality.
Listen twice as much as you speak.
Do the research yourself or trust your team to take care of it for you.

Create an open and honest dialogue with the potential companies you want to do business with.

Thanks for reading today


Mike S.

BTW, follow me on twitter @mistertelecom