TABLE OF CONTENTS The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
Understand strategies for building relationships with technical decision makers.
Know how to find and develop a coach.
Consider what credibility means in your business and identify ways you can build your credibility.
Think back to when you were new to sales, whether that was yesterday or 20 years ago. When you attended a customer meeting, you would probably go expecting to hear what that customer wanted and have a discussion about how you might be able to solve that problem. As your sales career advanced, you learned that it was not enough to offer the right solution. In this chapter, we discuss the meta-rules of strategic customer engagement. The manipulation of politics and relationship building may seem cynical, even Machiavellian, but it is par for the course in today's world of high-value sales.
Do not assume that the business decision makers are the only ones with whom you need to develop relationships. Although conventional account strategy dictates selling high, you will need to cover key members of the IT team to prevent your competitors from flanking you. Some of the concepts in this chapter touch on overall account strategy. You should be using the same guiding principles to approach the technical organization that the account exec uses with the business decision maker.
You helped qualify the lead, responded to the request for proposal (RFP), and made the short...
