Read the article in our Week 3 Folder \"Making the Consensus Sale\" (POSTED BELO

Question

Read the article in our Week 3 Folder "Making the Consensus Sale" (POSTED BELOW). This article makes reference to the challenging group dynamics that have become prevalent in today's complex selling environment. Identify at least three parallels between the Buying Influences framework of Strategic Selling and the challenges of making a consensus sale as detailed in the article. For example, is there a parallel between a Coach and a Mobilizer? Draw on the specifics of the Strategic Selling framework and the Consensus Sale article to justify your answers.

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MAKING THE CONSENSUS SALE ARTICLE:

Section:

Making the Consensus Sale

You have to align all the decision makers

Sales reps have long been taught to seek out the executive who can single-handedly approve a deal at a company. But whether they're selling to a customer with 50 employees or 50,000, reps today rarely find a unilateral decision maker. More often, they discover that the authority to make decisions rests with groups of individuals -- all of whom have different roles, and all of whom have veto power. Reaching consensus and closing deals has become an increasingly painful and protracted process for customers and suppliers alike.

To understand the impact of buying groups on sales, CEB recently conducted four surveys of more than 5,000 stakeholders involved in B2B purchases. We found that, on average, 5.4 people now have to formally sign off on each purchase. Complicating matters, the variety of jobs, functions, and geographies that these individuals represent is much wider than it used to be. Whereas an IT supplier might have once sold directly to a CIO and his or her team, today that same firm may also need buy-in from the chief marketing officer, the chief operating officer, the chief financial officer, legal counsel, procurement executives, and others. The people on buying teams have increasingly diverse priorities, and to win them over, suppliers must bridge those differences. The upshot is longer cycle times, smaller deals, lower margins, and, in the ever more common worst case, customer deadlock that scuttles the deal. (See the exhibit "Group Size Matters.")

Innovative suppliers, however, are finding effective ways to create consensus in these buying groups. This article describes how those companies prime groups with a common language and shared perspectives, motivate internal champions to advocate for their firms' solutions, and equip those champions to help groups reach agreement. As we'll see, accomplishing all of this requires some novel approaches and a new level of collaboration between sales and marketing.

Understanding Customer Consensus

CEB's surveys spanned a wide range of industries, geographies, and go-to-market models and an even larger array of issues associated with group purchases -- everything from buying-group demographics to purchase-process dynamics to individual behavior. Three key conclusions emerged from the responses:

1. Personalization can backfire. Conventional wisdom holds that the more personalized a message is, the more effectively it will drive a sale. And indeed, CEB's surveys found that individual customer stakeholders who perceived supplier content to be tailored to their specific needs were 40% more willing to buy from that supplier than stakeholders who didn't. Marketers understand this: In another survey, 95% of nearly 200 B2B CMOs identified "better tailoring of content" as a top priority. But personalization has a dark side. When individuals in a buying group receive different messages, each one stressing that an offering meets his or her narrow needs, it can highlight the diverging goals and priorities in the group, driving a wedge between members and hindering consensus.

The implication for suppliers is clear: The best way to build customer consensus isn't to do a better job of connecting individual customer stakeholders to the supplier but to more effectively connect customer stakeholders to one another.

2. Achieving consensus is hardest early in the buying process. To help groups reach decisions, it's critical to understand where in the purchase process they run into trouble. Our research divided the typical process into three phases: problem definition, solution identification, and supplier selection. We then asked customer stakeholders to look at both group and individual decisions and say which phases of them were most difficult.

Two results stood out: B2B buyers found group decision making most difficult twice as often as individual decision making. More important, the phase they seemed to experience the most challenges with was identifying a solution -- agreeing on the best course regardless of supplier. Most suppliers are focusing on the wrong stage of the buying process, falling all over themselves to persuade customers to choose them, rather than helping customers settle on a solution.

Our data shows that customers are, on average, 37% of the way through a purchase process by the time they reach the solution-definition stage, and 57% of the way through the process before they engage with supplier sales reps. So all too often customer consensus has fallen apart before reps even arrive on the scene. If suppliers aren't anticipating and proactively overcoming disconnections among stakeholders before sales engagements, they're probably losing many deals -- without even knowing it.

Achieving customer consensus presents not just a problem for sales but also an opportunity for marketing. Marketing departments are well positioned to foster consensus for two reasons: They have tools that can reach customers more effectively than sales can during the critical consensus-building process, and they can combine customer knowledge from sales with their own market research to identify patterns of customer behavior and broad customer insights that they can translate into scalable marketing approaches and materials.

3. Willingness to buy and willingness to advocate are not the same. Because a supplier has limited access to buying-group members during the early stages of the process, it needs the active help of an advocate inside the customer organization. We call these people "mobilizers." Mobilizers come in many forms, but the best are motivated to improve their organization; are passionate about sharing their insights with colleagues; ask smart, probing questions; and have the organizational clout and connections to bring decision makers together.

But to effectively use mobilizers, suppliers must address two challenges: the willingness of individuals to advocate on a supplier's behalf, and their ability to do so. A CEB survey of nearly 600 B2B buyers found that fully half the people who reported a willingness to buy a product or service were not willing to publicly advocate for it. This represents a huge obstacle for suppliers seeking to leverage mobilizers to create consensus.

Research shows that potential mobilizers are inhibited by the perceived risks inherent in fighting for change and promoting consensus. Up to half fear losing respect or credibility in their organization if they push for an unpopular purchase or are unable to attract support, or if the purchase they backed turns out to be unwise. Twelve percent even report that such advocacy could threaten their jobs. (The old saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" speaks to this point; potential advocates don't want to be the person who went out on a limb for the "wrong" supplier.) Fear of these consequences increases dramatically as the size of a buying team grows.

Ultimately, the decision to publicly advocate for change is driven much more by the personal value provided to the mobilizer than by the business value provided to that individual's organization. In studying what inspires mobilizers, we found that factors such as whether a solution could advance a person's career or help him be seen as a better leader were five times as potent as the offering's "business value" -- things like superior product features, likely impact on business outcomes, or return on investment.

Overcoming potential mobilizers' perceptions of personal risk requires a personal appeal, not just an organizational one. This is a deeply telling point, because the most common tools in suppliers' tool kits -- for example, ROI calculators, lifetime-value assessments, and total-cost-of-ownership scorecards -- address organizational risks and rewards but say very little about individual ones. Once again, suppliers are emphasizing the wrong things with their sales and marketing investments.

But even when someone sees the personal value to be gained and is motivated to become a mobilizer, he or she will need support. Marketing has a key role to play in both encouraging mobilizers and equipping them to build consensus.

Creating Customer Consensus

In research with hundreds of organizations and thousands of sales and marketing executives, we have identified three strategies that are key in building consensus. Below, we'll describe each of them in detail, illustrating them with selected examples of approaches that have proved effective at the companies that belong to CEB Marketing.

1. Priming customer buying groups for agreement by creating a common language and shared perspectives around a problem and a solution. The starting point in any program to build consensus is to identify common ground among stakeholders. If you're selling enterprise marketing-management solutions, you'll most likely be dealing with at least the CMO, the CIO, the CFO, and procurement, who all have overlapping but distinct and sometimes conflicting interests. Helping those stakeholders see their shared interests will set the stage for consensus and make it easier -- and less risky -- for mobilizers to advocate on your behalf.

Two approaches can help purchase decision makers focus on what unites rather than what separates them:

Language mapping. Like many companies, the network and security solutions provider Cisco mines social media and online publications to track trending terms and themes in its space. By analyzing the phrases surrounding terms of interest, Cisco captures the context of online conversations and can identify the priorities of various stakeholders as well as topics that might appeal to them. For example, in discussions of smart devices, it found that both CMOs and CIOs focused on "connectivity," though the CMOs might refer a lot to "product development" and "innovation," and CIOs to "systems upgrades" and "network architecture."

The area of overlap -- "connectivity" -- gave Cisco's marketers the raw materials to develop messaging. They crafted a range of experimental messages (such as "connectivity isn't as high as you think" and "Only 1% of devices are connected so far"), embedded them in social media, and then tracked adoption of the language in online conversations among both stakeholder groups. The marketing team then integrated resonating concepts and tested messages into collateral, such as tweets, blogs, and white papers, to help create a common language and shared perspectives among stakeholders. Cisco's sales reps report that this approach has raised interest in connectivity -- which Cisco's products enable -- among both CIOs and CMOs, increasing alignment between two often disconnected parties.

Explanation / Answer

Three parallels between the Buying Infuences framework of Strategic Selling and the challenges of making a consensus sale can be identified as given below:-

Yes, there is a parallel between a Coach and a mobilizer has both are instrumental in driving the buying process and drawing support for making the purchase decision for a given product and service. Their support is important in the respective processes for the suppliers to develop a business relationship with the organization and sharing information by communicating through the Coach and the Mobilizer.

Strategic Selling framework of Buying Influences has four key influences playing role in the buying process - Economic Buying Influence, Technical Buying Influence, User Buying Influence and Coach. Economic buying Influence determines the given product or service is as per the budgets and economic targets and benefits of closing a particular deal. Technical buying influence keep a check on the technical features, their scope and operational aspects. The user buying influence is focussed on the performance, usage, impact of the product or services and how they can help in achieving the business goals. Coach plays an important rle by acting as interface between supplier and various organizational teams, guiding on the purchase and buying process and becoming an important point of contact for exchange of important information.

In the Consensus Sale process, there are multiple stakeholders which are involved in the buying process and each of them have their own expectations from the product and service of a supplier. They are involved together in a group buying process by defining a problem, finding a solution and deciding on a product or service. It is important for supplier to have an understanding of each of them and having a mobilizer who can communicate with different stakholders and support the supplier's product based on the key deliverables.

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