Barriers to Success | SellXL - Selling at the Executive Level

Barriers to Success in Selling to Executives

Stephen J. Bistritz, Ed.D.
www.sellxl.com

Interviews with top salespeople selling to executives confirm their fear of calling on senior-level customer executives. Fear of failure is often cited as their primary concern. They are absolutely right when they view this type of executive call as a high-stakes game and blowing a call at the executive level can deny them return access for an extended period of time.

Their second fear is lack of self-confidence. This is hard for many salespeople to admit. Their ability to review the technical details of their solution at lower levels in the customer organization is typically beyond reproach; however, they are, at times, intimidated calling at higher levels. The fact is that many salespeople are out of their comfort zone selling to executives at the top levels of the customer organization.

The third fear is their lack of equivalent position. At times they feel they have to be of "like rank" in order to call on senior-level executives. To compensate, they bring one of their company's executives without briefing them beforehand. The result is a "glad-hand" call that simply wasted the time of the customer executive.

The three fears cited above can all be mitigated by effective preparation for that critical first call on a customer executive. A salesperson, in selling to executives, should focus on three areas of acquiring knowledge about the customer; namely, the customer's industry, the customer's company and the customer executive. Knowing how to access and acquire this information on the internet is today's new skill that is a requirement of being a professional salesperson.

When the Chief Information Officer of a large technology corporation was asked: "Why would someone at your level meet with salespeople?" his reply was, "because salespeople can often offer solutions to my business problems that even people in my own organization can't address. I want to meet with them because of their experience in solving problems in other organizations and the subsequent value they can offer to me."

Only when salespeople demonstrate that they are willing to understand and listen to the executive's key business issues, articulate the business value they can deliver to them and demonstrate a consistent ability to be perceived as a trusted advisor can they begin to overcome their own fears of calling on and selling to executives at that level.