When linking your solution to a benefit, remember to ask yourself what the customer is always thinking: “So what? What does it mean to me?” Failing to answer this question leaves the job of linking your solution to the client’s business pain up to the client, which results in a loss of control and perceived value of your solution. You need to make sure to sell strategic benefits to strategic buyers and sell technical benefits to tactical buyers.

How you qualify a prospect depends on the number of opportunities in your pipeline and your available resources. The first question you should ask yourself when qualifying a prospect is, “Will this business happen for anyone at all?”

Many deals are lost to “No decision.” This is so for two reasons: Either the business pain that you solve is not urgent enough to act upon or there is no political sponsor strong enough to push it through. The pain needs to be strong enough and emotional enough to drive change and create a source of urgency, or else the deal will sit on the forecast.

The next question should be, “Is this a good opportunity for us?” Keep in mind that in many evaluations the client has already decided who they are going to buy from.

There is a wide range of preference in complex sales ranging all the way from disclosure, where the client is telling you what you need to know to help you win, to the highest level, trust, where they’re buying whatever you’re selling. There is also a spectrum of negative preference, which ranges from skeptical to even open hostility.

In the last 20 years, some methodologies also have taught building preference with everybody. We disagree. First of all, there isn’t time. Second, it isn’t necessary. Third, it can actually be counterproductive. Not that we should ever alienate anyone, but based on the decision-making process and the roles people play, we can win the business by focusing our preference-building efforts on the people who have the most impact on the decision.

Building preference in all directions, without a strategy, is a waste of time. Selling to everyone equally not only spreads your efforts too thin, but it can help the competition. For example, the people down on the hostile end of the scale are probably too far gone. The other problem is that they often don’t act hostile. They may be very nice to you, when, in fact, they are taking everything you give them and passing it straight to the competition.

In account strategy sessions, we see people pounding away on these antagonists in the hope of winning everyone’s vote, sending pounds and pounds of literature and wasting sales calls. Based on the decision-making process, if a complete consensus is not required, we may be able to win without their vote. They may not even have a vote.

And don’t confuse access or politeness with preference. Just because they will meet with you and are nice to you doesn’t mean they will sponsor you. The quality of relationships, from the salesperson’s view, is the most frequently misread and overestimated part of a salesperson’s plan.

You need to know not only if people are for you but also how strongly they are for you. When the pressure builds, you need to know if they are going to fold their cards.

To build competitive preference in an opportunity, you have to establish the political point of entry and then effectively differentiate your company and solution and build positive mindshare with key influencers — before your competition does it.

At the account level, building preference in the long run means overdelivering on what you sold them. Then you need to move from loyalty to trust by never giving them a reason to go to anyone else. You have to make your sponsors look good for having chosen you.

Before you can drive an effective strategy, you have to understand the client’s decision-making process. This is different from the client’s evaluation process. It is also different from the approval process (see Figure A-1).

As most competitive evaluations progress, there is a point where they turn from logical and rational to emotional and political. This is typically because the principals have not reached a consensus and have divided camps. Because they can’t find everything they want from a single vendor, they often can’t agree on what their priorities are. Sometimes the result is a power struggle, where multimillion dollar deals flip in a matter of hours.

We use the metaphor of the canyon and the crucible to describe this dynamic. The canyon is the narrowing list of vendors with only one survivor (it’s not a funnel — gravity, nor large numbers do anything for you). The crucible, as in chemistry, is where political pressure builds, the decision process melts down, and tempers often explode.

In other cases, clients can find a solution from several vendors, and the issues shift to non-product differentiators. Some evaluations stall out altogether from increased risk, low value, or lack of sponsorship.

As one of our clients said, “They don’t decide how to decide until they can’t decide.” Things move fast in the crucible, which means that strategy revision should be daily and dynamic.

Decisions in a buying committee often are reached by what we call algebraic democracy. Although most people have some sort of vote, some votes count more than other people’s votes. While some votes count x, other votes count 5x, and some votes equal the sum of all other votes plus one. This is a blind spot in most sales plans. Other decisions may be by department or autocratic or may be twotiered.

In an organization, power is both invisible and dynamic. Some power comes from positional authority, but many people hold personal power and influence without a powerful title.

To make things even more complicated, people within a company gain and lose power every day. You have to be able to identify power in a prospect account and win the prospect’s support early on in the sales cycle. Start early figuring out multiple navigation routes to powerful people. If you can build preference and win the hearts of the powerful people, they will help you win the votes you need.

You also can borrow power from one person to gain access to someone else. In the very beginning, start asking questions about political power so that you can find out who has it and where you should spend your time.

Some methodologies have defined strategy at only the account or opportunity level — frontal (price and product superiority), flanking (changing the pain, process, or power), fractional (divide and conquer or take a slice), and timing (delay or accelerate). These are important models, but without a plan for how to win the hearts of each individual stakeholder or to live without their vote, you have a strategy in name only. You have the what but not the how-to action items to execute your plan.