Selling to C-Level Executives

Some of you have seen this article. If you haven't, it's a quick read and definitely worth your time.

High tech has to speak C level language
By Peta G. Penson

Charleston Regional Business Journal 03/12/2001

A friendly chief executive officer told me the other day she figures top executives listen to about 50 dot-com sales presentations a month. “How do the good ones cut through the noise?” I asked.

“It’s all noise,” she replied.

With all the current sparks flying about dot-coms — who will and won’t make it — I found myself wondering if dot-coms have moved so fast selling their cutting edge ideas that they haven’t realized the market is not on the same pace. Just because they are jazzed about their technology and innovations, they assume the market will start buying as fast as they would like to sell. That’s a pretty big leap of faith when you are asking people to do something they hate to do -- change.

It’s relatively easy to make the first sale when you’ve got the first-ever of something. What’s more difficult, as dot-com’ers are discovering, is making the 100th, 1,000th or millionth sale when you have to penetrate deeper and convince the higher echelon to invest in your products.

I tracked down a sales training expert, Skip Miller, president of M3 Learning in Silicon Valley and author of ProActive Sales Management, and asked him what we can learn from the experience of dot-coms in selling new ideas. I got an earful.

The biggest problem, according to Miller, is that marketing and sales people are not taught that there are multiple languages spoken in an organization — it’s different for managers, vice presidents and the “C” level of chief executive officers, chief information officers, chief financial officers, etc.

“Too often the emphasis in sales strategy is on product knowledge,” Miller says. “When the salesperson has the features/functions down pat, they think they are ready to go out to sell it by talking about how it is quicker, smaller, bigger or cheaper. That’s appropriate if you are talking to a prospect who is a manager whose main concern is how the product is going to make their lives easier, but it’s not the right message if you are at a higher level.”

Give that sales pitch to vice presidents, Miller says, and you are likely to get a response like “Wow that’s great, but if it doesn’t boost revenue or lower cost why am I talking to you?”

If the salesperson is lucky enough to get the ear of someone in the top tier — the C-level — then the message has to be entirely different. C-level folks don’t care about features and functions benefits like managers do, and they only have a passing interest in keeping within a budget. What captures their interest are products and services that bring about market share gains. They speak the language of value.

“Top sales people must learn to speak all three languages to be effective,” Miller says. “It’s like learning to speak the right language to the right person in the right country. If you are fluent in Chinese, you are not going to understand Russian. If Russian is how you communicate, you are not going to understand Greek. You have to master all three if you want to be heard and understood by each.”

Miller, who teaches seminars throughout the U.S. for the American Management Association, as well as his own sales school in California, has identified five ways a sales person can convince a prospect at the C-level that a product or service will create lasting value:

Return on their investment: It’s trendy to talk about selling “solutions” and it may be effective at the management level, but at the C level they want to know the money they spend will come back as increased revenue and profits.

Time: As in time to market. Uptime, downtime, overtime – people will always pay for time.

Risk: This is by far the most viable language to use with the C level, according to Miller. Make the customer’s decision less risky and they’ll pay for it.

Motivation: Also known in the sales biz as “pain and pleasure.” Find out their motivational direction. Is it towards pleasure or away from pain? Talk in those terms and they will hear you.

Brand: How it will make them look better to be associated with it. People will always pay more for little horses on their shirts or a Mercedes Benz symbol on their cars.

Dot-coms, like many companies that have come before them offering whiz-bang products, have quickly run through the early adopters at the manager and VP levels. If they are going to sustain their sales and grow, they are going to need to talk effectively with the C-level about their products and services.

“Remember, C-level executives have promised to grow the market or they lose their jobs,” says Miller. “What they need to hear in a sales presentation is what value this purchase will provide in getting to this end result. Delivering anything other than a value message is a waste of the sales person’s time.”

So, what is the message to all of us, whether we are selling for a dot-com or a bricks-and-mortar company?

“We all want to close business fast, at Internet speed,” Miller advises. “We need to make sales as quickly as possible, while the window for our products and services is still open, and the only way to do that is to know how to speak the language of the decision-maker at each level of the customer’s organization.”