It is hard for anyone to feel deterioration or appreciate prevention. You can only really feel relief or crisis. If you sell qualities such as reliability, your buyer can only truly understand it if they have experienced failure.
This is why inexperienced buyers are so dangerous in the buying process and why financially motivated buyers are risky for their companies. They do not have the context for evaluating the pitfalls of poor choices. Presenting the true benefits of the right partner to an inexperienced buyer often means little to them. They do not have relevant experience to evaluate the difference between an acceptable choice and the right choice.
What to do:
- Be relevant and specific in your examples. Your case studies must not be about market risks or disasters in general. It is too easy for the decision-maker to say, “We’re not like that.” Your examples must be business and industry relevant to create a true sense of risk.
- Define “good” versus “great.” Inexperienced buyers still have a general understanding of good versus bad when considering vendors. Their purchasing rubric has been defined to aid in that. What is missing is the rubric of good versus great. That comes with experience. Scare the buyers with the risks of bad choices, but also present what great choices offer.
- Bring a positional voice. I equate taking sales people to meet with finance people like taking a knife to a gunfight. Finance oriented decision-makers value someone who speaks his or her language. Take someone from your finance or purchasing department to the presentation or have him or her on a call to help financially oriented buyers to sort into their language the buying criteria
