Ask Yourself: Who Cares?

You can’t force urgency. But someone in your prospect’s organization stands to gain—or lose—the most if your solution isn’t implemented. Here's how to find that person, turn their priorities into action, and get your stalled deal off the bench.

Don't forget to check out last week's top tip: Why You Can't Let Go of a Lost Cause!

For more strategies like this, check out my sales tip video library on YouTube...

If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

I was leading a pipeline review yesterday with a small team in technology, and one of the sellers was telling me that her deal couldn't move forward because she couldn't get the IT department, who was responsible and had the budget for her solution, to move quickly. And this happens sometimes, right? The person who has the budget and is responsible for making the decision to move forward doesn't have any urgency. And IT departments are notorious for this because they're busy, they've got lots going on and it just goes in the queue. Right. They might even set priorities based on resourcing from last year.

So I asked a simple question: Who's driving for this solution? Who stands to benefit? Who's the financial beneficiary of this solution?

She looked at me kind of funny and I said, look, IT departments don't just decide on a whim. Hey, you know, let's look for something else to do. They're busy. They've got stuff going on.

Somebody marched into their office and said, we have a problem. We need this fix to go find a solution. We need to find that person. Somebody in the organization is facing a compliance issue, a revenue issue, a fraud issue, a productivity issue, a customer issue, a legal issue, a productivity issue, an HR issue, an injury issue. Someone is facing that and has driven the decision down to the department who has the budget and the decision making capacity to make the decision.

When you can find that person, you can create urgency. What we need to do is get to those people who stand to gain the most or lose the most from a delay, and talk to them as business associates.

Have them drive the priorities, have them change the priorities. Have them talk. Peer to peer with our buyer. This is not about going around or going above. We're going to do this in concert with our decision makers.

But I tell you this, you cannot manufacture your urgency inside a delivery department. You have to create urgency from the person who is the financial beneficiary or the value beneficiary of the solution that you are implementing, and the person who made it their initiative to put this in the priority queue to begin with.