How to Sell to Buying Committees

[MUSIC] So I wanna talk a little bit about you know, what we're seeing buyers today, how they're using multiple there's multiple sort of deicision makers, influencers and recommenders in every buying cycle. It's known as the buying committee. It's it's been a really, I'm not sure when this phenomenon started, but, you know, if you, just to give you perspective, we did a study with a company focused on really small businesses, I mean I'm talking one to ten employees, and they had two or three people involved in their buying cycle. But, you know, as importantly on the enterprise side when you're dealing with big companies, you know, you're talking about 20 plus people. And that can make things really difficult from a sales and marketing perspective. The most important thing, you know, I believe is that, you know, you should one, this just cries for the collaboration between marketing and sales. Because you, just as a sales person, you could as a sales manager go to a sales person and say, well you got to make sure you get to all of them. It's just not realistic. It's really and you know basically, frankly, it's not efficient at all, right? You're just, you know, if a salesperson needs 30 deals in their pipeline to hit their number and having them track down the entire buying committees for all of them is really gonna be difficult. So marketing needs to play a role in a couple ways. One is, you know, what type of content, it all comes, it's, it's, it seemingly always comes back to content. So what kinda content is marketing providing both on the website and across the internet in order to educate right you know, all these other buyers who are on the way but as important is. What type of materials are they providing sales people as they enter a sales cycle? So an example of that, we worked with one company that had, some really, the buying committee was brutal, and they couldn't get to them. They always got to this champion, and it was a cloud company, so you're thinking, kind of, not not a revolution but you know, they're definitely being really disruptive inside of their companies. These guys are saying, I wanna go do it, and then these guys were losing in the back. And so with, you know, what we did with the company was, we created what's known as champion content. It was content for the champion and it was built for all of the different stakeholders in the, in the company. So if it was the finance guy was really worried about risk, right? [UNKNOWN] obviously, so we put together a deck that they could do it, put it in their own information so they can hand that and sell that to the CFO or to the finance contacts. IT was really worried about security, right, and frankly losing control. So they had to write some really important pieces there, you know, why IT people care about this particular solution, you know, how to control security etc. Really it was an incredible map of the whole, of the entire list of stakeholders involved in the decision. And they created materials for each one that they could give to their champion so that they could go in there and help them internally sell. And then, you know, what you heard back from sales, is wow it goes faster and then occasionally we could identify the one or two hiccups which is way more manageable. So that's just one example on how to handle the, the buying committee as a, a, you know, as, as we call it today, and I think you know, I've seen more and more people using content to go handle it, and I certainly recommend it.