What level decision maker can you access?
If you want to sell to a specific type of company, you need to have access to call, talk and meet with the appropriate level of decision maker at that customer – whatever it takes to sell your product to them. Maybe you need to have access to CFOs of financial services organizations to sell your compliance solution.
While you may have many years and dollars worth of experience selling to financial services firms, you might find that you have no way to get your foot in the door of the C-suite, if your company never worked at that level before. That’s not to say that this marketing and sales capability cannot be acquired or developed – just that you need to know where you’re starting from and identify the gap as quickly as possible.
The “access” issue can go the other way, too. In the product development process, larger software developers often end up creating simpler versions that they try to sell “down market” to smaller customers. Yet, they don’t know the smaller customers (SMB) – the way they function, and what’s important to them. They often do not really know how to access this smaller customer (as in the Cisco example above).
It isn’t primarily a product issue – it is simply that a company that has been selling to Fortune 500 companies will face the same challenge connecting with decision makers in a $50 million dollar manufacturing company that a SMB focused company would have calling on GE. Movement – both up or down market – is possible and many companies manage to do it successfully. However, many more have failed or have had to make many learning runs till they got it right (e.g., Microsoft moving up-market in corporate IT with server software).
Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.
Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino
