What struck me in each discussion

I was doing a series of deal reviews–not unlike most of the deal reviews I do. We were talking about the people involved in the buying process.  was how few people were being engaged at the customer — and that the right people weren’t being engaged, even by the customer buying group. Typically, the sales team focused their engagement strategy through one person–usually a friend or sponsor.


Sometimes, there were a small number of other people involved. In the Vietnam Email List reviews, the sales people confidently said, “We’ve identified all the people in the decision-making process.” These were all technical/IT project solutions, so the only people the sales people were engaging were in the IT organization. I kept asking, “Who owns the business problem? How are we engaging those people in the process,





after all, they have the most at stake, they have the greatest sense of urgency?” Most of the responses were, “No…” Too often, the sales people hadn’t even thought of the end users, the real customers. They sold IT Services/Technology to IT people, and that was who had engaged them. A few questioned, “Why should we do that, the IT people are our customers?”