Qualifying a Prospect, Vol. 3: Demographics
The third in a three-part series on how to identify prospects worth your time.
The new SVP of Sales really pulled off those suede loafers, which seemed beyond my powers... Personally I thought the tailored shirt with the monogram on the cuff was a bit much, but then again, I was wearing Dr. Martens and jeans.
He had just come over from a big TelCom company to run sales for our 100-person MSP shop.
"I'm bringing in an enterprise sales team," he said. "Can you help onboard them?"
"Sure," I said.
So I made a new sales kit. I did my best to paste our biggest-sounding logos at the top and insert the word "Enterprise" into a bunch of sentences. Now we had an "Enterprise Security Solution" and "Mission-Critical 24/7 Support."
A couple of weeks later, four gentlemen arrived in suits. Collectively they'd sold $100 million in long distance minutes. And they, if no one else, seemed very impressed by that.
Surface tablets and lattes at the ready, they started laying down their battle plans.
"Targeting" was phase one. They printed out the Fortune 500 list and mapped all the companies geographically into regions. "Mapping" was phase two. One of them became "Director of Enterprise Sales, Northeast" and received a prospect list of every F500 company in his territory. Rinse and repeat across the country. "Territory Planning" was the final stage. Each rep prepared a business case for why these massive companies NEEDED our services. Like TODAY.
How many of those Fortune 500 enterprises do you think this crackerjack team closed in the next twelve months?
Zero.
We've covered Criticality and Transition. There's a third factor that won't win you a deal on its own, but will absolutely kill one if you ignore it.
Demographics.
Is this the right size company? Is this the right type of business? Does what you're selling fill a gap in their organization, or does it compete with something they already do themselves?
Each of these Fortune 500 companies had an IT department 100 times the size of our whole company. Their procurement process alone would have required a team of legal and compliance people that we didn't have. And that's not even getting into the audits and bona fides we'd be expected to produce.
But even more important than all that was the fact that no amount of territory planning and business cases will convince a global enterprise to take a serious bet on a vendor they've never heard of.
Big companies have big internal capabilities. If what you sell is something they already do, or something core to their business, you're not filling a gap. You're competing with their own team, and their own team has a budget and a head start.
And size is only part of it.
What you're selling can't sit inside the core competency of your customer.
If you're trying to sell software development to Salesforce, or IT infrastructure to Microsoft, you may as well be selling tires to Goodyear. Those are obvious examples. But you'd be surprised how many proposals get written to sell AI services to AI companies, or security consulting to firms with 200 security engineers on staff.
You need the company that is big enough to have real budget and sophisticated enough to understand what you're selling, but not so big and sophisticated that they can build it themselves for half the price. The sweet spot is a company that has a genuine gap, recognizes it, and has the resources to fill it.
The four suits with the Surface tablets had Criticality. Fortune 500 companies definitely need managed services. And let's give them credit their territory plans covered Transition too. They'd done their homework on news releases, M&A activity, new product launches. They knew why each company might need help right now.
But the Demographics were completely wrong. A 100-person shop chasing the Fortune 500 list is not a sales strategy. It's a wish list.
At Antimatter, we help sales teams qualify faster and stop wasting time on deals that were never going to close. If you see “qualified” deals fall through the cracks month after month, let's talk.