Find Three Doors into Each Account
This is a “Bonus Chapterette” of my book Mindshare to Marketshare.
It is free, thus bonus. It is short, not a full Chapter, thus “Chapterette”. This is my way to add those things that I learn/observe after the book was published.
To get context, the following Chapters (available here on Amazon) are useful;
Reduce Customer Acquisition Cost
- How to get the balance of Inbound and Outbound right in order to reduce your Customer Acquisition Cost, by creating a Customer Hypothesis.
Do The 4-Step Social Media Dance
- How to test your Customer Hypothesis by doing the Social Media Dance to connect efficiently to the right people.
By a “door into the account” I mean the person who will give you an initial feedback that will validate or invalidate your Customer Hypothesis:
- Validate means, move this one forward.
- Invalidate means drop this target from your list. In other words, you “qualify this one out”.
There are four reasons why you need to find multiple contacts into each account:
- Window of opportunity. Time is of the essence in sales and if your one route into that accounts is not motivated to help in a timely way, you may have lost your window of opportunity.
- In case your contact is a time-waster. Your contact may not have the clout to move a deal forward or may not have the motivation to do so. If you only have one contact you may not be able to see this clearly.
- So that you can triangulate. You want to be having conversations at multiple levels and in multiple areas, so that you can compare what you are being told and arrive at some approximation of the truth.
- In case one jumps or is pushed. You maybe talking to exactly the right person when she decides to leave the firm or her business unit gets the axe and she has to leave.
It may take you a bit longer to find three routes into an account, but it will save you a lot of time down the road. Always remember that enterprise sales is a marathon not a sprint.
