Is Your Sales Team Making Your Complex Sales Process Too Complex?

By Paul DiModica

Often, sales teams and the executive management staff struggle with their approach to what they call complex selling. The term "complex" is defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:

Complex: composed of two or more parts and is hard to separate, analyze, or solve.

So what is a complex selling environment? A complex sale happens when there are multiple participants, sometimes located in different geographies all directly or indirectly actively involved in the decision process to buy a product or service.

4 Mistakes Most Salespeople Make
In Complex Sales

Today, most companies incorrectly define complex sales and this affects their ability close business and increase corporate revenue.

1. Salespeople assume that if they are interacting with lower level managers who like or approve of their offering, then the prospect is qualified and in an active buying mode.
   
   This mistake complicates a sale because lower level contacts are professional lookers who will meet with vendors just to look busy. To be qualified, prospects must have management buy-in with funding approved and the prospect must take action steps during the sales cycle to prove they are qualified buyers.
   
    
2. The best way to sell companies is through lower level managers because they are more accessible than senior management.
   
   This is a mistake because your first entry point into a company dictates how the prospect sees you. If your first contact is a lower level manager below the title of Vice President (in the U.S), you are perceived to be a commodity before your sales cycle starts.
   
    
3. Salespeople give equal weight to working with lower level managers as they do with senior management and hope lower level contacts will induce senior management to buy.
   
   This is a mistake because lower level associates may suggest, recommend or approve . . . but they normally don’t buy.  Giving equal time and sales cycle support to lower level prospects implies that you do not know how to get to senior management. The result is that you lose control of your sales cycle. Often, without a proven sales process, sales teams in complex sales just take the least path of resistance to show their management team they are doing something by talking to anybody who will listen.
   
    
4. Salespeople believe that lower level management can communicate their business value for them to senior management.
   
   This is a major mistake. Selling professionally is complicated. Assuming that lower level management contacts who have operations, engineering or professional service backgrounds will succinctly communicate your business value and manage all of your sales objections correctly when they go to a steering committee, decision team or short-list committee is totally wrong. They are not you. If they were you, they would be in professional sales.

5 Reasons Why Management Teams Make These Complex Selling Mistakes

1. When a company's revenue is down, the senior management team incorrectly thinks that meeting with lower level contacts is better than having no prospects at all in their sales pipeline.
2. When a senior management team's emotions and ego are driving the company leadership rather than logical and strategic analysis of the company's business revenue capture problems, the management team believes it knows everything and its sales team needs to follow their direction. (This is common in privately held companies and is called the King in the Kingdom syndrome.)
3. When the company does not align marketing, sales process and corporate strategy into one defined revenue capture approach, they just attempt to contact any level of entry and hope someone buys.
4. Senior management prospects buy based on the value your product or service brings to their department or company. Lower level contacts buy based on the features, functions or price of your product or service. Often, companies focus on the wrong value, which ends of pushing away senior management buyers and enticing lower level contacts.
5. Salespeople often hold onto lower level contacts hoping that if they hold on long enough, they may ultimately sell someone. That is not a sales process -- it is a waiting process and most salespeople today don’t have two year sales quotas.

How Should You Manage a
Complex Selling Environment?

• In large complicated sales that involves multiple contacts with different titles who are located in different locations, learn how to penetrate the "no talk zone" of senior management and start in the "value selling zone" at the VP level and above. Contacting lower level prospects as your first entry point is a reflection of your inability to correctly communicate value to senior management.
• Use prospect engagement outlines to manage lower level prospects.
• When working with senior management prospects, understand why they buy and why they will not buy from you and then make them take actions steps with you during your sales process so they will prove to you that they are qualified buyers.
• When selling in a complex selling environment, create marketing material and business proposals that communicate value based on how senior management sees your value . . . not how you see it and use it as "invisible salespeople" when you are not there.
• Often complex sales are not really complex because of what the customer expects you to do -- but because of the way your firm sells. Complex sales became complex because companies allow prospects to manage their sales cycle for them -- so don't allow prospects to manage your sales cycle.  If your marketing, proposals or sales methodologies communicate commodity -- you force your sale into a defensible position and are passed to lower level managers.

They key to complex selling is to sell senior management by proving you have a right to sell at their level . . . and then manage lower level prospects through the authority that senior executive gives you. If you can’t do this, then you have created a complex sale that should not be considered complex.