Blog of Sales Intelligence Tactics

I’m under the rain in Tunisia in what is now expected to be nightmare holidays. As a I have no special talent in suicide, I think this is an opportunity to step back from daily tasks and think about sales tricks.

Let’s address the topic of influencers.

I posted something last week on the subject but I would like to go deeper in the concept of influencers, and the way sales superheroes leverage influence in their sales process. The concept of influence is large but simple : Being influential means you have some sort of a power on someone in its decisions making.

I distinguish 2 types of influencers with very different strengths in different situations : the market opinion leaders and the corporate insiders.

In these days, “social CRM” has become a buzzword and primarily focuses on social marketing and the highly challenging e-reputation. Given this context in perspective, the term “influencer” mostly stands for people recognized as opinion leaders in their areas.
Highly-followed twitterers are the modern icons of influencers. Twenty years back, these sorts of opinion leaders were bar tenders, doctors or celebrities. Political spin-doctors elaborated strategies to bring them on the same page : their audience and credibility were proven to be effective in gathering votes.

“Market opinion leaders” influencers have become a key target for corporate marketing departments : if the company is able to catch their interest, they spread the (good) word to their audience, bringing credibility and notoriety for your offer. They can even generate leads i.e. interest in potential next-to-be clients.

To my opinion, these sorts of influencers concern marketing, not sales. Sales have a mission : find new prospects, convert potential leads (raised by marketing), dry the ink on new contracts, secure their presence in client accounts, expand the revenues in existing client accounts.
One taskforce, one mission.

That leads us to a second category of influencers : the corporate influencers, or insiders.
Corporate influencers are sales targets in a (more) pragmatic approach : to dry the ink on a contract or to secure a client.
The definition of the influencer in this way would be : an opinion leader in corporate decisions, someone on the sideway of the obvious chain of command. On the sideway, yes, but with a real power on the decision makers.

Corporate Influencers can either be a powerful project manager (lower on the chain of command) or someone who has the power to block a sales process (a purchase manager or a leading operational manager hardly concerned by the product you push up).
Influencers are usually difficult to identify and difficult to manage (as they can have a good impact as well as an annoyance power).

Finally, I would say that influencers are not key for any situation. It depends on the business criticality of your offering, on the transversal business impact of your product, on the overall cost of your solution, or on the number of supporters in the direct chain of command you already know. Corporate influencers are great in competitive RFP (obscure decision processes with no ability to talk to the right decision makers), to sign a new prospect (first-time act is sometimes painful) or when you are challenged by a competitor.

From the brilliant sales people I met during the last years, I would say that most of them already use corporate influencers without digesting any theory on the subject. Salesmen usually look for influencers in despair when the storm comes by : when their client becomes unhappy with the service, considers calling for competitors or when a big new project involves a complex chain of decision makers with no real supporter for the salesman.
But there is no miracle in desperate situations. When you identify that signing requires the approval of more than 2 persons, invest in corporate influencers.

If you have zero intelligence to find them out, walk around, ask questions, show interest in corporate people on the sideway. If you meet the 3 or 4 people closest to the “official” decision maker, you’ll probably meet one good influencer. At this point, you can’t pitch your product, no. Remember, he’s not on the direct chain of command and has probably lots of other suppliers to meet. Be smarter, create confidence and empathy. Once he witnesses interest in your person, he will try to help you achieve your objectives.

I didn’t find any influencer for the Tunisian weather. So that just doesn’t always work.