Covering all the bases

When you sell business to business it is important to understand who the decision makers are in your target customers' organisations. If the organisation is large and complex there may also be "recommenders" and "influencers", people who have a major role to play in the purchasing process. Then there is the person who controls the budget and who can say "No" to the whole deal – who else in the organisation has this negative power?

Sales methodologies and training courses teach salespeople how to identify and deal with these key people, but it can take a long time to find them, contact them, meet with them and build up a relationship.

This can be especially true if there is an existing supplier of what you offer, an "incumbent" competitor. You can be sure that your competitor will have developed relationships with the key people and will be sowing seeds of doubt within your target customer's organisation about ever considering moving to a new supplier. It is what you'd do after all! Provided that they perceive they are getting a good service, purchasers in general are creatures of habit. They don't like the upheaval of moving to a new supplier. Inertia sets in. It can be very difficult, costly and time-consuming to unseat the incumbent. In day-to-day operations it is usually only if the current supplier makes a mistake or takes his eye off the ball that the opportunity arises for someone else to take the business.

Now let's look at it the other way round. You are the incumbent. Over many years you have attended to your customer's requirements, provided a good service, never let the customer down, maintained good relationships with the key people. You feel, in fact, that you "deserve" this customer's future business, because of all this effort you have put in.

Then what happens?

Suddenly your customer announces it is being taken over, or is involved in a merger. Or maybe the CEO resigns, or there is an accounting problem and new people are brought in to sort out the mess. All these are danger signals for you, the incumbent, and windows of opportunity for your competitors. The chances are that you won't know the new owners, the new management team or the new decision makers. You probably have never met the people who suddenly have the negative power, the authority to say "No". So how do you defend your position?.

Whether you are trying to unseat an incumbent, or defend your position as a long-standing supplier, you need to find a way to cover all the bases.

The importance of partners

Until fairly recently it would have been impossible for the typical supplier organisation to have a wide-ranging strategy, either to guard against upheavals within its own customer base or to launch concerted efforts to break in to competitors' customers. At best you would be able to concentrate on just a few of your larger existing customers – often called "Key Accounts" – and one or two target customers for expanding your business. The reason for this boils down to time and resource. You simply don't have enough people in your own organisation to build up and sustain meaningful relationships with all the key people in your current customer base, let alone with new owners/managers who might suddenly appear on the scene. And you certainly don't have the time and extra resources needed to wage a major broad-ranging sales campaign, knocking on the doors of all the key people in all the major companies where your competitors are currently installed.

But nowadays companies have partners – don't they?: other suppliers of products or services that complement those of your own company. You will have been building up good working relationships with these partner organisations and using their offerings, skills and resources to enhance the value you bring to your current customer base and to help you attract new customers. Your partners have become an extension of your own organisation and an additional part of your company's store of competences and capabilities. They are helping you, in effect, to achieve the aims and objectives of your own strategy.

But what if your partners could do more than this? What if your partners, because they do not compete directly against you and have a different footprint in the market, had relationships with key people in customer organisations with whom currently you have no contact at all? Perhaps even in different industries? Suddenly there is the scope to extend your influence much further than you can manage with your own resources. If you use your partners' existing relationships as a way to make contact with and influence key people, and if you use your partners' resources to target new customers, your strategy can be more ambitious. For the first time you really do have a way to cover all the bases.

What's in it for the partners?

What we have described above won't work for all partners. For a start, they need to be a partner with existing good relationships with key people in your target market, or with the resources and positioning to develop such relationships. Secondly, it is unlikely that such an approach would succeed with a partner that is also a competitor – i.e. a company that you partner with in one market and compete against in another. Thirdly – and most importantly – you need to be able to reciprocate. If your partner is going to be out there banging the drum for you, you have to be prepared to do likewise for them i.e. protect and grow their customer base as much as they are doing so for you.

However, a few far-thinking companies have now latched on to this idea and are beginning to define strategies that include, as a key element, using partners to extend their sphere of influence and either protect their current customer base or develop new customers. It is possible that you could do likewise in your industry and markets, if you gave it some thought. If you did so, the chances are that you would gain an advantage over your competitors. So it is worth taking some time to consider your options.

Partnering Points on covering all the bases

• We have talked about choosing some of your existing partners to expand your sphere of influence within your target market; but of course a company's current relationships with key people can also be a major factor when it comes to selecting a partner. Have you built such considerations into your partner selection processes?
• Before embarking on a programme to "cover all the bases", it is essential that you start off by knowing which bases you have already got covered! Carry out an audit within your own organisation, starting with your "Key Accounts" and top targets for customer development. Ask the account managers and business development managers to identify where the gaps are in their relationships with key decision makers, recommenders, influencers and people with negative power.
• Having identified the gaps, which of your current partners are best positioned to help you plug the gaps? Or do you need to consider identifying other companies that you could partner with?
• Before approaching any partner with your idea, make sure you have defined and obtained management support for what you will do for the partner. As always, develop the "win-win" scenario and understand your own and the partner's business case for co-operating in this way.
• Remember that your primary reason for embarking on this strategy is to defend your own customer base and to attack one or more of your competitors' customer bases. This is probably not something that you want to advertise widely, so the usual rules about announcing partnerships and gaining a high market profile may not apply. Make sure that the relevant people within your own organisation appreciate this. Perhaps more importantly, make sure that the equivalent people in your partner's organisation also understand!
• Finally, all the usual sound business practices surrounding managing the partnership, setting joint objectives, monitoring progress, keeping the partnership on track etc. still apply. If anything, such partnerships will have more "nebulous" and less easily quantifiable targets, and so should be managed in both organisations by experienced partner managers.

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