What does your prospect think about? It depends on the customer’s role. Salespeople who target that position’s specific thoughts and concerns will be more successful. This is called role-based selling. For the purpose of this article I am skipping two crucial discussions. First, Assistants need to be marketed to as well. A salesperson must believe he or she deserves the executive’s time. After all, you are not wasting time, are you? Two, the approach to C-level and V-level roles needs to be personalized and stand out. More on those elsewhere as well as in future discussions. In the meantime, align your sales to the position’s objectives, while ensuring you are speaking correctly to the right ‘C’ (‘Chief’ title) or ‘V’ (‘Vice”-President title).
Peruse the below, but ultimately they need to tell you how to sell to them by telling you about their needs. This is why questions are important. This is why preparation in advance according to the below is important.
President or CEO
What? Grow and lead the company
Reports to: Board Of Directors/Shareholders
Pains and Concerns:
- Grow revenue
- More profitability/declining profitability
- Shareholder value
- Managing risk
- Happier and more productive employees
- Culture of organization
- Partnerships
- Company reputation and
- Determining strategy and direction
Financial Managers (VP Of Finance, CFO, Controller, Treasurer)
What? Financial management
Reports to: CEO and Finance Committee of the Board Of Directors
Pains and Concerns:
- Knowing and measuring financial drivers,
- Profitability, Quarterly goals
- Information and reports to manage events and conditions,
- Reducing costs,
- Predicting and eliminating risks
- Return on investments and return on assets
- Compliance and regulatory changes
- Accounts reconciliation and forecasting (treasurer)
- Business value (controller)
- Shortening transaction times,
- Line of business accountability
- Closing books faster or consistently having them ‘closed,’
- Ensuring consistency among territories, divisions and currencies,
- Drive operational efficiencies,
- Better, more consistent and more centralized reporting
- Make better decisions faster and
- Analyze and predict.
Human Resources Managers (VP Of Human Resources)
What? Manage the business’ people. A business’ most valuable asset is its people. Everything the company does or wishes to achieve is tied to its people’s skills and abilities.
Reports to: CEO or COO
Pains and Concerns:
- Business and society, and employees, constantly change.
- Doing more with the same or less,
- Improving productivity,
- Delivering and tracking education that is related to work,
- Budgeting for, finding, hiring and calculating the cost and return on employees,
- Complying with legal imperatives
- Enabling employee self-service for faster and more efficient control and removing bottlenecks and
- Local currency and regulations.
Manufacturing Management (VP Of Manufacturing, Chief Operating Officer)
What? Producing timely goods at the lowest cost
Reports to: CEO
Concerns:
- Manufacturing on demand with the shortest possible lead time,
- Manufacturing to order,
- Forecasting demand,
- Customizing and configuring to order,
- Collaborate and communicate with supply chain including suppliers, sub-contractors and distributors including view into demand and inventory via EDI or the web,
- Track costs,
- R&D
- Operational justification to understand where cutting cost won’t impact operations
- Analyze efficiencies,
- Predict inventory cycle and
- Eliminate waste.
Sales and Marketing (VP Of Sales, VP Of Marketing, CMO)
What? Increasing sales, improving top and bottom-line and tracking to forecast
Reports to: CEO
Concerns:
- Knowing the customers,
- Sales growth,
- Customer satisfaction/customer turnover
- Pricing
- Margin growth and maintenance,
- Forecast accuracy and visibility,
- Company profitability,
- Monitoring sales channels and trend analysis,
- New customer acquisition and cost of doing so
- Company image
- Productivity of sales and marketing staff,
- Effectiveness of marketing programs and motions,
- Positioning products, services or people
- Efficiency of different types of marketing (such as promotions, web, channels, viral, etc.),
- Campaign budgets and ROI (Return On Investment),
- Anticipating trends and consumption,
- Lead management and visibility into each representative’s achievements and pipeline.
- See http://www.alighaemi.com/wp/?p=846 for different types of marketing.
Information Technology (VP of IT, CTO, CIO)
What? Lead the company’s information technology
Reports to: CEO or COO
Pains and Concerns:
- Running the company’s information technology
- Which hardware, software and service
- Enabling productivity
- Interoperability among internal and external customers
- Flexible systems that can scale up or down with the business
- Saving the company money
- Eliminating disparate systems
