Asking the Right People: Part Two

A few days ago, I commented on how important it was to ask the right people what their expectations were of a particular problem that may exist inside a business. What I did not say during that post was how important it was to try to find other people to ask those questions of.

Oftentimes, we can meet with one person who will give you the answer of, “Yeah, yeah, I’m the only person that you need to talk to,” and it can sound extremely convincing. However, you want to make sure that you do talk to people outside of just that one person if at all possible because if that person has either an over-inflated sense of capability or has other people that they do need to run things by in the decision-making process, then you want to make sure that you get in touch with all of those people.

Now, one thing that can help you with that is that when you move to the decision-making process, the D in Helping Clients Succeed by Mahan Kalsa, is you walk someone through the entire buying process from the time that they make the decision that yes, they do want to work with you, all the way through to a three to six month review of the project after it’s been completed.

When someone says, “Yes, we’d like to buy,” you need to prompt them where you’re asking, “Take me through exactly how a decision like this might work.” They’ll then say, “Well, I will review it, I’ll approve it, and then I’ll send it to my boss. My boss will approve it, and then from there, we’ll send you back a signed contract.”

Well, that’s how many companies might answer. What you actually want to do is get to people and dates. Try to aggregate all decision makers and make a presentation in front of all of them A presentation can be as simple as a meeting. A presentation doesn’t have to be in a conference room with flip charts and all this other stuff. It can just be that person and his or her boss sitting around their table or at lunch, after you’ve eaten of course, and you can talk about the proposal and say, “Okay, if we get this taken care of, let’s walk through the exact decision-making process. So you’re going to meet with your boss on Tuesday. Your boss,” whether he or she is in the room or not, “may say yes or no,” and then from there you can get the next date, so the date in which the boss is going to make the decision. Once the boss makes the decision, then you want to know how you’re going to get your deposit check (because you do take a deposit check, don’t you?). You then want to understand you’re going to get a signed proposal and a deposit check on a certain date, and in order to get that you’re going to meet with who?

The next step is you want to plan for your project kick-off. Now, if you’re like most companies, there’s a little lag time between the time that a project is signed and the time that it actually kicks off. So you want to leave a little leeway here and say, “We’re going to meet within two weeks of the time that the proposal’s signed to actually kick the project off, and in that meeting we’ll have people from the buyer’s side and people from your side. That is on or about three weeks from Wednesday, and once that happens here are our expected project milestones,” and you give them the date that’s in your proposal or the dates that are in your proposal. “We anticipate the project’s going to finish on or about let’s say three months from now. That would put us at January 1, and then on March 31^st/April 1^st we’re going to get together and review how the project went and if it did meet the solution deliverables that you wanted because a project can meet the solution deliverables on or around January 1, but what we really want to do though is we want to find out are those things still in effect in a few months after that.”

So keep in mind your decision-making exploration is extremely important because you’re walking them through exactly how a transaction could occur, and when you do that, it’s as if you’re part of a team, that everybody’s working together, and you’re helping your client succeed over the long term.