coneblog

An important conceptual model for the PM to be aware of is the Vendor’s use of Buying Influencers in understanding how your organization makes a complex purchase. The Vendor account rep will divide his contacts in your organization into four Buying Influencer categories.

The Four Buying Influencers are these:

• The Economic Buyer: this is the person who gives the final approval for the buy. He/She has direct access to funds; releases the funds, and has veto power over the deal
  
  The User Buyer: these are the people who use, supervise, or manage the groups that will use the product or service on a day-to-day basis. These people take the decision personally, because they will have to live with the results; they are source of the benefits of the project.
  
  The Technical Buyer: the role of these influencers is to screen out or disqualify a vendor’s offering. They focus on specifications, and function as gatekeepers: they can’t say yes, but can say no – and often do.
  
  The Coach: this person provides and interprets information about the situation, the other buying influencers, and how each wins.

So how do you fit in as the Project Manager? You may have several roles. In the early going, where there is much winnowing and disqualification of vendors to do, you may function as a Technical Buyer. You are almost certainly not the Economic Buyer. Unless you are from the user areas, you are probably not a User Buyer.

The vendors will seek to enroll you as a Coach, and I believe that is a role the PM should play. You must be impartial, of course. But in your role of Coach, you can help each Vendor to present their solution in the best possible light, so that the other Buyers have the best possible information with which to make a decision.

These are powerful concepts – and are the basis of an approach called Strategic Selling. I don’t have to write the book on Strategic Selling – it has been available for almost 20 years.

Larry Cone

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Vendor Secrets to the Complex Sale

Sales of complex, highly technical products, such as application software suites, calls for sophisticated sales approaches. If you sell such products, or are tasked with leading a project to buy such a product, read this book.

Miller and Heiman quite literally “wrote the book” on complex technology sales to big organizations like yours and The New Strategic Selling is that book. This classic has been proven successful by the world's best companies, and is newly revised and updated for the 21st Century. The list of companies using Strategic Selling reads like a who’s who of corporate America.

Read this book if you want to understand how the Vendors view you, and the strategies they will use to sell to all the influences in the organization. The Underlying message is that the more the Rep knows- the less he hears "NO!".

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