You’ve got your product offering in good shape. You’ve exposed the offering to enough prospects to know there’s interest. You’ve secured enough funding to carry you for a while. You clearly know which level / title in the company will benefit most from your product. You’re set to launch.
There’s more good news. Through your contacts in the industry and your investors’ contacts, you can get to the CFO, CMO, CTO or even the CEO. Great, clear sailing. Well, maybe there are winds you haven’t figured on.
I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have had a superior product offering, great upper level contacts and failed to hit sales targets and, in some cases, folded. Why? Because they failed to identify, or underestimated, who the offering threatened. Referrals from top management are great but be careful. The presumption is that a referral from a member of senior management is a slam dunk at the lower levels. Many times it’s not, for less than obvious reasons. The product or service might have high CMO appeal, but she / he generally kicks it down to the operating level for evaluation. That’s where it sits in purgatory because it’s seen as a threat to their job. I worked with a company that had developed a highly superior customer intelligence program. The CMO loved it and referred it to the head of social media analysis. The head of social media knew it could quantify what he could only observe. He never killed it; he just let it die slowly. I have seen it happen too many times. It’s the silent adoption killer. I call it being killed by the “dumb middle.”
So what do you do? 1) When you are presenting to the dumb middle don’t reference any conversation with the senior officer. Treat the person you are talking to as king of the hill. 2) Show how your product or service improves his / her value in the company. 3)Talk about the collaborative nature of your product that draws on his / her expertise.
Too many times you represent your product as a “game changer.” Too many department heads like the game the way it is now.
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