Andy Paul, author of Zero Time Selling, argues that sellers waste time chasing executives when they should target lower-level decision-makers instead. His "sell low, sell small" approach uses pilot purchases to reduce customer risk and help smaller companies compete against larger ones.
Hi, Peter Winick here, and today I'm here with Andy Paul, who is the author and founder of Zero Time Selling, one of the top 3 sales and marketing books for 2011. Andy, totally counterintuitive, everything you read today, everything that's kind of pop sales culture, if you will, He's going to show me how to get into the C-suite. He's going to show me how to sell to the CEO. He's going to show me how to get in his office and engage him. And you're saying, no, sell low. Like, walk by his office, there's a bunch of sales guys dying to get in that have read all these other books, and you're saying sell low? That sounds like my portfolio. What's up with that?
Yeah, I've done that with real estate before. So, well, I think there's this unhealthy infatuation with selling to the C-suite that exists in selling And the fact is that 99% plus of the products that are sold to a corporation don't require C-suite approval. I mean, if you take a typical company, maybe a $100 million a year company, they probably have thousands upon thousands of purchase transactions every year buying thousands of products or building, assembling their products or just normal operations of their business. And probably less than 1% of those rise to the level of either being a capital item or something that needs to be approved.
So, so why is everyone so infatuated with it? Is it, it sounds good to tell my friends I met with the CEO today versus the assistant to the assistant purchasing agent? Like, what's— where did this come from?
Well, I think everybody likes to believe that their products are strategic, and the fact is their products aren't strategic. Most of the products are tactical, right? And there are products that are strategic, and in the book I give an example of a little tool that you can use to help gauge really where within the organization you should sell. It's really based on a combination sort of the strategic nature of the product and the complexity of the product. And there's an intersection there and there's a quadrant. And depending on which quadrant you're in, where the product is strategic to the company, it's complex, it's pricey, then yeah, you're going to be selling up the scale. But as I said, 99% of the products that exist that you sell these days are outside that quadrant. And so a good example of this that's sort of interesting is that you see this whole explosion of software as a service applications out there and services.
Mm-hmm.
Well, I mean, the genius of that, right, and I was talking to a VP of sales at a company that provides one of those just last week, was that, hey, we can get a marketing guy to approve this. This is a couple thousand dollars a month. That's nothing, right? That doesn't have to go to the VP of marketing. It doesn't have to go to the CEO to get approved. And it is something that actually in some cases can turn into being strategic to the company. But it's a vital tool.
So selling low is— what I'm hearing is 2 things. One is Low in terms of someone's role or title.
Right.
That's number one. And then number two is don't go in there trying to hit the home run and sell $5 million worth of whatever. Go in and sell a smaller, smaller amount to get in the door.
Right. So that's, that's another part. So just to finish on CLO, in the book I talk about identifying the actual decision maker. And there's somebody who's functionally responsible for using your product and functionally responsible for deciding which product is going to be chosen. That's the person you need to have the bulk of your selling to. Now, it doesn't mean there isn't somebody maybe above them that might approve the purchase. Well, that's different than deciding who the vendor is and who the seller is. And the problem with selling too high— I just remembered this from a company I used to work for— the CEO was saying, look, why are you bringing this decision to me? I don't need to decide this. But now that you've brought it to me, I have an opinion, right?
Right.
And so you really invite trouble if you think, gosh, I've won this sale. My boss is pushing me to go talk to the CEO to make sure it's okay. You could lose the sale just as easily at that point. To your other point about selling small is, yeah, I think you want to start with the smallest possible relationship with the customer, especially if you're a small to mid-sized business selling into a relatively large company. They're going to be concerned about the risk of doing business with you. They're going to be concerned about the risk of your being able to fulfill the contract. That's why they tend to want to buy from larger companies.
Right.
So if you can identify a small piece of business to start with and reduce the risk that the customer has, then chances are you're going to get that business if you have the better solution. I give an example in the book of a company that was a client of mine that was selling to a larger company that needed $10,000, $100,000 systems over the space of a year that they wanted to install. And their RFP that came out was for 10 systems. And we worked with the client and got them to convince the customer the best thing to do is buy one, try it out, make sure it worked, from no matter who they bought from. Well, the big guys they're competing against lost interest because they need to chew on bigger bites, right?
Right, right, right.
So suddenly they had the field to themselves. And what they did is they were able to execute that order 10 times, right? They couldn't have executed the whole thing at one time, but they could execute that order 10 times.
And they eliminated this bigger, larger competitor because they made it a smaller nugget.
They made it a smaller nugget, yes.
So sell low, sell small.
Start small, yes.
Andy Paul, Zero Time Selling. Thank you very much.
