The 4 Customer Contacts That Waste Reps' Time

In today's consensus-driven sales environment, we all agree that engaging the right customer contact is a critical linchpin in deals progressing forward. While we know the best reps lead with insight to challenge customers' assumptions, who your reps challenge can drastically change the course of a deal. So who are the right customer stakeholders to work and how can we help our reps find them?

Sales managers and trainers typically advise our reps to find a 'coach' or 'advocate' to help move a sale forward within a customer organization – preferably someone who is willing to talk, provides critical information, and who can network the rep with other stakeholders, among other qualities. And once reps find this individual it's a clear path to the corner office and a closed deal, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that asking reps to go and find this kind of customer stakeholder is like telling them to find a unicorn. SEC analysis found that the combination of attributes that make an ideal advocate exist in less than 1% of individuals – while customer stakeholders may show some advocate qualities, they just don't have it all.

In fact, we identified seven different customer stakeholder profiles that reps are potentially engaging. Of these major stakeholder types, three are effective in driving organizational consensus (we call them 'Mobilizers'), and three are likely to lead your reps on a long path to a dead-end (we call these 'Talkers'). And, if you're wondering about the last one, we like to call that one the 'Blocker', because they're just not going to talk to anyone.

Our research also found that star and core performers tend to gravitate to opposite customer stakeholder groups. Core performers look for Talkers who are easily accessible and share information because they're encouraged by their potential ability to help them navigate the sale. While these conversations are easy and pleasant, they ultimately lead to the road to Nowhere.

Star reps, on the other hand, instinctively look for healthy skepticism and reliability in a contact to make sure they're able to mobilize a deal to a desired purchase decision – in other words, stars are targeting customers who are open to disruptive insight and who can get it done.

While this strategy may seem vague at its surface, we've seen the best reps use a narrow set of concrete 'tells' to separate Mobilizers from Talkers far before a deal strays from the beaten path. To help core performers spot Mobilizers, SEC built an interactive tool to model the thought process stars use when qualifying customer contacts.

SEC Members- check out the specific cues star performers use to identify true Mobilizers with our new Interactive Stakeholder Identification Tool in our Customer Stakeholders Topic Center. Also, don't forget to register for the final Executive-Only meeting on Rewriting the Playbook: How High Performing Reps Win the Consensus-Based Sale.