I just finished three days of sales training using Miller Heiman’s Strategic Selling and Conceptual Selling training classes. My company brought them in and the entire leadership team went through the courses. I learned many new things about complex sales processes and how to best position yourself to achieve a Single Sales Objective for each opportunity.

One of the more interesting concepts I learned was that of the Buyer Influences that are involved in all complex purchasing decisions. Buyer Influences are roles that are always present on every complex purchasing decision (such as when a consultant sells services to organizations). Your job, as someone selling into an organization, is to figure out who is playing each role and to ensure you’re paying attention to all of them.

But the roles aren’t equal. The User Buyer Influence includes the hands-on users of the new system and their bosses. The Technical Buyer Influence includes IT, systems, architecture, security, etc. Each of these has a certain degree of influence and can screen out or derail your sale...essentially they can all say no and stop you from closing the deal.

But they can’t say yes! Only the Economic Buyer can do this. Economic Buyer’s have the approval to release funds and sign the contract. The lesson to the class was that during the sales process pay attention to everyone who can say no, but above all else, pay special attention to what the Economic Buyer considers important, because only they can say yes.

So let’s recap here. One of the most widely used sales training programs for the last 30 years says you should always pay the most attention to the needs of the Economic Buyer, because they control the funds. Common sense, right?

By now you’re probably asking yourself what this has to do with Evo? I’d say everything.

Here’s the connection:

1. 1.In every deal, the Economic Buyer Influence is looking for improved results in some fashion after the promised solution is implemented. That’s what they pay money for (in part...as I learned...personal reasons are also part of the decision). These business results are usually expressed as impacts to the bottom line and should always be quantifiable (according to both Miller Heiman and Evo).
   

2. 2.Since the Economic Buyer is the #1 person with respect to selling the deal, their objectives should be the implementation team’s #1 focus when delivering a solution. I mean, they put up the money for the project, right? Seems kinda fair that the most important person gets attention for their requirements.
   

3. 3.But in practice this rarely happens (our trainer corroborated my experiences)! As soon as the deal is closed, the User and Technical Buyer Influences take over the project. Sales tosses it to Delivery. And the race is on. The swarming begins (picture ants). Write User stories, create project plans, set up development environments, draw up architectures and all sorts of things. Busy, busy, busy, busy.
   

4. 4.Yet sadly, the Economic Buyer’s measurable results that were promised in the sale, are somehow either lost in the shuffle, never specified clearly by management or taken seriously by the team.
   

How can this be?

This is where Evo can help. Evo’s concept of the Top 10 Business Objectives aligns with the Economic Buyer’s Requirements. They’re the same thing. When written in Planguage, a planning language, the Economic Buyer’s Requirements can be specified succinctly with precision.

So how would this work in practice? Let’s imagine an Economic Buyer who is looking to increase revenue for a product line. He’s determined that improving current customer satisfaction is part of his strategy for increasing revenues (too many customers are not renewing due to poor issue resolution). One of the biggest historical customer complaints has been the time it takes to submit an issue and get a resolution implemented. For critical issues, while the system is down, customers lose tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. They tend to get pissed off when things like this happen and don’t want to sign new license agreements. Thus lower revenues.

So our Economic Buyer is looking for a solution to help fix this and some other issues. Using Planguage, we could express this one Economic Buyer requirement as:

Name: Improve Issue Resolution Time

Scale: Elapsed time in hours from when [Defined Issue] is detected by customer until tested fix is applied in the production environment.

Meter: Issue Tracking System monthly report of all reported issues

Benchmark [Current Release; 186 customers; Issue = Critical; 90th]: 32 hours   <-- May 2008 report

Target [Next Release; 90th; Issue = Critical]: < 8 hours   <-- Top 3 Customers are asking for this level

Failure [Next Release; 90th; Issue = Critical]: > 24 hours    <--Tightest current customer SLA

The syntax is a bit odd, but hopefully you can see how clearly we created a name and scale of measure for the requirement that was simple and makes sense. We also parameterized our scale and specified precisely how we’re going to measure progress (a monthly report). Finally, the current Benchmark was provided, followed by Failure and Target levels of performance for the next release and the sources where the numbers originated.

With these 6 lines we can express over a 15 pieces of important information about this one requirement alone. For an Executive Buyer’s “Top 10 Objectives”, that would be 150 pieces of critical information on one page. How’s that for Agile AND Rigorous?

With each of the top objectives specified at this level and then prioritized for implementation, we could use Evo or Scrum to deliver results iteratively. By leveraging Planguage, we’re now able to actively measure our progress towards objectives in terms the Economic Buyer specified when they released funds for the project! And they can even...gasp...“re-focus their funds” on new opportunities if the project isn’t delivering the promised results.

What a novel concept!

So next time you see the sales consultant in the hallway, walk up to them and ask, “Have you figured out who’s the Economic Buyer?” If they don’t think you’re nuts and actually say “yes”, then ask them to share their Win-Results for the Economic Buyer Influence and make sure you focus on their needs first. They’ll know what you mean :-)