Your Least Credible Point of Customer Contact

It's no wonder that no matter how articulate your salespeople are, they still don't get much respect from their customer.

Last week I wrote a post about the panel I was on with Bill Friend.  I referenced my colleague Olin Thompson.  Olin is somewhat of a genius when it comes to sales and marketing strategy.  At the present time he is VP of Strategy at Lawson Software. 

For a number of years Olin ran the “Credibility Forum” for sales and marketing executives of ERP software companies.  Olin tackled the issue of salespeoples’ lack of credibility with customer C-level executives and, with a few slides, accurately depicted the challenge and posed a number of solutions.

Before we get into solutions, let’s take a look at Olin’s slide.  The Y-(vertical) axis represents the messenger—either the seller’s employee (salesperson, non-salesperson and executive), a third-party, like an industry analyst firm, consultant or the press (unknown to the customer, known, and trusted) and another customer (unknown to the target customer, known, and trusted by the target customer).  Notice that credibility increases from bottom to top. That means that, as a source of information, an executive from a company other than yours that your prospect knows of and trusts is considerably more credible than an executive from your company.

The X-axis is the medium, either internal (spoken/verbal, a brochure or a white paper) or an external media source, such as analyst reports, articles or presentations, that are unknown to the target customer, known or trusted.  With respect to sources of information, credibility increases from left to right.  So an article about your company in Fortune magazine is far more credible than the best brochure or white paper you could ever produce.

Olin asks his audience, “Where is your most frequent and least controllable market contact?”  From the customer’s perspective, the lowest credibility is at the lower-left corner of this matrix.  It’s the salesrep speaking with the customer!

Olin’s message to the participants was that they must spend time and money supplementing internally-produced marketing materials with customer testimonials, reference visits, case studies, placements in trusted media, positive mentions by analysts in their reports, advertising in trusted industry and business magazines, etc. 

Here’s the take-away.  Unless you’re one of the top three companies in your industry, training your sales team to deliver messages about your company, products, and unique value will only take you so far.  You’ve got to provide ongoing credibility support from multiple external sources as well.  This doesn’t happen without planning, funding, staffing and effective execution.  It’s another in a long list of reasons that the sales and marketing functions must get aligned.

Your CEO Suggested I Give You a Call

How would you gain access to the VP of IT at JR Simplot?

For years I’d been preaching to salespeople and their managers that getting access to the highest levels within a company was always recommended in big-ticket, complex, B2B sales.  Start at the top. Get yourself referred down.  You know the drill…

A while ago I participated in a panel discussion at a sales and marketing conference.  With me on the panel was Bill Friend.  Bill had served as the VP of Information Technology and Logistics at The J. R. Simplot Company, one of the largest privately held firms in the U.S., with annual sales of more than $3 billion.  Bill and I had worked together before.

One of the participants in the session posed a question to me.  “If you didn’t know him already, how would you recommend getting access to Bill if your business was selling IT products and services?”

That was an easy one. I said something like, “I would leverage my network and see who might have a connection to Simplot’s CEO.  I’d organize a meeting with the CEO, and, based upon the research I conducted, open a dialog about a critical challenge or opportunity his company was facing and how my IT solutions would provide significant and quantifiable business value.  I would then request a referral down to Bill, and the commitment from the CEO that he and I would regroup once I had done my initial discovery.”  Asked and answered…  (Rather smartly, I thought.)

“And Bill,” the questioner said, “what would you do when you received that phone call from your CEO telling you to work with Dave?”