The #1 Rule of Selling to Big Teams: Always Make Your Contact Look Good to Their Boss

Good Morning. It's National Superhero Day. And just like superheroes, every sales rep has an origin story. If you’re like me, yours probably starts with "I couldn't code, accounting sounded miserable, and someone said I could make six figures in sales." Not exactly bitten by a radioactive spider, but here we are. Now, let's get into today's Follow Up. (:

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The reason someone buys a B2B product is simpler than you’d think. 

They buy it because they believe it's going to make their life better, make them look better, or take something off their plate. 

The better you understand that, the better you'll sell.

A study from CEB, Google, and Motista surveyed 3,000 B2B buyers across 36 brands and found that personal value has twice the impact of business value on purchasing decisions. That’s 2X.

That means the buyer sitting across from you cares more about how this purchase reflects on them than they do about the ROI for their company.

And 71% of buyers who see personal value in a product will purchase it. 

When they don't see personal value, that number drops to 22%.

Here’s how to make sure your sales pitch shows that personal value.

Think about why companies hire agencies. 

A marketing manager might be responsible for a marketing campaign, yet they’ll hire an agency to actually run it. 

That work technically falls under their responsibilities. But they don't have the bandwidth, the expertise, or the team to do it all themselves. So they bring in outside help.

The agency does the work. The marketing manager presents the results in the quarterly review. Everyone wins (when the results are good).

Your product should work the same way. When you're selling to someone on a team, you're selling them time back in their day or results they can show their boss. 

If you can frame your product as something that makes their existing job easier or their output better, you've won half the battle.

And this all started with the discovery call. 

Find out: What they’re spending too much time on? What's falling through the cracks? What would make their next performance review easier? That's what you're really selling.

The moment your product starts delivering results, your champion should be the one who gets credit for it.

When your champion looks smart for choosing you, they renew and become an internal salesperson for you.

The data backs this up. Research on champion retention shows that when a customer champion leaves the company, there's a 51% chance the account churns within 12 months. So, your champion's success and your revenue are directly tied together. 

The company has a budget, a procurement process, and a list of requirements. But the person on the other end of your call has a career they're trying to build, and a boss they're trying to impress, and a to-do list that's too long. 

If you can make their job easier and make them look good doing it, the deal takes care of itself.

Let’s say you sell for an agency that runs paid ads for a B2B company. Your main contact is a marketing manager, and she bought from you because her team is stretched thin and she needs someone to own the ad spend.

You could just run the campaigns, send a monthly report, and call it a day. Or you could send her a one-page summary every month that's formatted so she can drop it straight into her leadership update. Include the metrics her VP cares about. Highlight the wins. Frame the results around the goals she told you about in the kickoff call.

Now she walks into her quarterly review with data she didn't have to put together and results she can take credit for.

That alone can make the difference between a vendor she tolerates and one that she’ll fight for. 

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.