I want to share with you a tale of woe.
One of my customers emailed me and mentioned they just lost two of their biggest clients. Their sales rep didn’t see it coming and had no idea there was going to be a change. Thus, we investigated as to why that happened. We discovered both accounts had one thing in common: the sales rep was only dealing with a single point of decision-making.
The Most Dangerous Number in Sales
Indeed, that sales rep didn’t have any influencers to build support with and was only in contact with one decision-maker. And when that decision-maker left—in one case, it was a retirement and his son took over the business; in another case, he moved on to another company—the new person brought in their friends, suppliers, and partners, leaving my client out of the business. What’s the lesson here? One is the most dangerous number in sales.
Build a Groundswell of Influencers
You need to build out a groundswell of influencers underneath your decision-maker that will support you when there’s a change—that will say, “Hey, you can’t get rid of that company. We love doing business with them.” You need to always know who the backup, likely successor, or other decision-makers are so that you can shore up your defences and risk mitigate against losing the business.
I have never seen a sale lost because one had too many contacts inside the account, but I have seen millions of business go away because one had too few.
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Very true. Multiple contacts within a Co. generates upto date Information about internal / external events and happenings.
This is a first hand news, rather than retrieving it from a third party at a later date. This immediately helps one in taking quick counter-actions to re-adjust / correct oneself in these situations. Otherwise the client may just disappear at a huge expense. A free gift given to the competition. Thanks for your prompt advice.
How to initiate those additional contacts during the prospecting phase? Reach out on LI, I guess
This one hurts! We constantly go over multi-threading within an account as the scenario above still happens today with us. It hurts as its preventable. It could be they would of left or not bought even with other contacts, however, by multi-threading in the account we’ve seen the positive spin with those relationships and them introducing us at other companies as well!
Great to hear from you Maggie! I hope you and the team is doing well.
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