April Dunford: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you're right. Oh, man. Now you totally get fired for buying IBM. I don't know what happens. The other thing you bring up is I think an interesting thing to think about too that really messes people up in these situations is that in B2B, typical purchase process, we have five to seven people involved in making the deal happen and so there's this complexity we don't have a consumer, but a lot of people I think overcomplicate that. In a typical B2B purchase process, we've got someone in that buying team is what we would call the champion. So that person is the person who's been tasked with, hey, pick us the accounting software or pick us the CRM, you figure it out. And so that person is the person that does the initial research, makes the short list, probably sits on the first calls, and then there's all these other people. Now, the other people can't make a deal happen, but they can kill it a thousand ways. So the way this works is your positioning and your pitch needs to really work for the champion, because if it doesn't, you don't even get to talk to anybody else, you don't even get to go near anybody else if you don't make it out of the shortlist and you don't get the deal cooking. But once the deal is cooking it is on you to arm that champion to handle all the objections potentially of all the other groups. So if you're the line of business buyer, let's say you're in the sales department and you're buying a CRM, IT is going to have to get involved at some point, and IT doesn't really care about the value of your CRM, but they do care does it meet the security requirements and does it integrate with the stuff we already have and how much of a pain is this thing going to be to manage, and so we're not actually pitching value to those people, we're just handling objections. And so once we realize that, then we can get really tight on our positioning in our sales pitch. What we're really trying to do is just cook the champion, get the champion, and then once the deal's going we got to arm the champion for how to handle all these objections of all these other groups so that you can get a consensus to get a deal moving forward. How do you actually do that? Is it ask them what are all the concerns you're hearing? Is it ask the individual stakeholders what your biggest concern is?…

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