B2B Decision Makers: Three Steps to Tailoring Sales Strategies to Specific Prospects

Every business-to-business customer has a main decision maker, one who decides whether or not your company wins their business and one that defines the criteria for a successful supplier. In some accounts it’s the purchasing manager. In some accounts it’s the project or product manager. In others it’s engineering, and yet in others it’s the business owner.

Ultimately, it’s your job to understand what motivates these individuals in order to make sure you are focusing on the right strategies at the right time. However, you must continually improve your approaches. 

Defining Your Prospect

Your success in sales comes down to identifying the specific decision maker in each account and tailoring your strategy to their main concerns and needs. If you apply one strategy for all, you’ll surely lose. This is ultimately why it’s so important that you take the time to define these individuals and their main concerns as customers in your specific market.

It’s that last aforementioned sentence that often confuses companies. You must focus on your specific market and the types of prospects your company sells to. Not all purchasing professionals are the same. Not all engineers are the same. Not all project managers, product managers and business owners are the same.

None of these prospects have the same concerns from one industry to the next, and from one account to the next. Focus on those characteristics that make your market unique. So, how is this done?

 

To learn more about a customer's fears in a business-to-business marketplace, please go to: Five Customer Concerns That Cost You Sales and Market Share 

1. Build a Character Profile: It’s far too easy to say that all procurement professionals are only concerned about price. The reality is that price is only one portion of the equation. Granted, in some markets, price is the overriding factor. However, don’t limit your character profiles to the obvious. Instead, delve further into the main concerns each decision maker has.

Focus on identifying what the main concerns are for purchasing, engineering, product and project management and finally, business owners and high-level executives. Again, identify their most pressing issues in relation to your specific market. Nobody knows your customers better than you do. 

2. Match Strategies to Profiles: The first step was to define your market’s specific decision makers. Identify what motives them to move forward with a purchase, what their main concerns are and how your product or service addresses those concerns. The second step involves developing specific strategies when selling to these individuals.

For instance, business owners have concerns pertaining to their market position, their customer base, their business’s costs, their performance as a company and their bottom line.

Engineers, technicians and project managers have cost concerns, but these concerns are weighted against value, quality, service, consistency and performance. Budget constraints play a role as well.

Finally, purchasing is predominantly concerned with supply chain management costs – and that doesn’t always mean pricing. It also includes financing, obsolescence, damage, pilferage and inventory stock outs.

3. Role Playing Exercises: The ultimate goal is to use role playing exercises in order to train your sales and business development team on how to identify, manage and sell to these aforementioned decision makers. Now, a number of companies assume that the exercise itself must be elaborate, or that it requires the input of sales training professionals. However, this simply isn’t the case.

First, nobody knows your business, your market and your customers better than you do. Second, you know exactly how to set up the exercises – you just have to sit down and put something together. Third, running your own role playing scenarios allows you to tweak the exercise, tailor it to different circumstances and then alternate the scenarios. You don’t need a sales training consultant for that.

  

To learn more about role playing in B2B negotiation, please go to: Improve Sales Training & Negotiation Skills with Role Playing

Again, no account ever has the same decision makers. In some accounts it’s purchasing, others it’s engineering and yet sometimes success comes from dealing with the business owner. In the end, your ability to succeed comes down to identifying who the decision makers are, how best to approach them and how to move the sales process forward.

Please note: It’s important to remember that sales can only sell. In the end, your marketing strategies play a vital role in appealing to these decision makers. It's your marketing that helps to identify qualified leads and appeal to their needs.

To learn more about the role of marketing in this scenario, please go to: B2B Marketing Essentials: Decision Maker Focused Marketing Materials