Your initial contact might be reluctant to let you speak with their colleagues

Hello Subscriber,

Yesterday, we concluded that it’s your responsibility to identify the key stakeholders who might need to be involved.

But what if your initial contact refuses to let you speak with their colleagues? Your initial contact may not even be prepared to reveal the names or roles of their colleagues.

Today, we’ll put ourselves in their shoes to understand this potential reluctance. And we’ll develop a strategy to enable you to involve the stakeholders who will ideally be involved.

Why the reluctance to let you speak with colleagues?

Let’s review some of the reasons why your initial contact might initially prevent you from broadening the discussion to involve other stakeholders:

1. They want to protect their colleagues’ time, so they don’t want to involve other people until it’s sufficiently valuable.

2. They understand that other people may not welcome the changes being discussed with you, so they must take care, especially in the early stages of discussions.

3. They need to see evidence of your good intentions so that they can trust you sufficiently before risking their reputation by endorsing you.

4. Their experience tells them that they can develop ideas faster with fewer people involved in a project.

5. Hopefully, you’re discussing a new way of doing things that will bring significant benefits. Your initial contact might want to be the person who gets the credit!

First Draft Proposals

All this week, we’re looking at how best to involve multiple stakeholders in our selling situations. But now we see that extending our conversation beyond our initial contact might not be easy.

Last week we examined why our proposal process is more important than our proposal document. Now we can use that idea in a particular way.

A crucial part of your selling role is to make it easy for your initial contact to share the ideas you’re discussing with other stakeholders.

And an effective way to do this is by using “first draft proposals”. Here’s how it works:

• You suggest to your initial contact that you will prepare “first draft proposals.”

• When you prepare your proposal document, you emphasise in the title and the introduction that these are “first draft proposals”.

• Your objective in creating these first draft proposals is NOT to win the business.

• Your objective is to successfully engage the multiple stakeholders you need to be involved in developing your compelling proposal.

• These first draft proposals need not be an extensive multi-page proposal document.

• You might succeed more with a well-written email that is easier for your initial contact to share with other stakeholders.

Here’s one area of practice to emphasise today

Coaching Focus

How might your sales team leader or selling coach help you with today’s area of practice?

1. Review this email together, choose one specific opportunity that you’re working on currently and discuss how to use the ideas.

2. Think back to a recent conversation with an initial contact and role-play how you might have suggested preparing “first draft proposals”.

Reminder: One area of practice to emphasise today

If you have questions or comments, it would be great to hear from you. Just hit reply and send me an email.

Have a great day!

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