1/17/2024-KDMs vs. Influencers

Don’t take no from someone who can’t say yes – probe to uncover how much power each of your buyers possess.

Buyers come in many flavors, right?

While it might be convenient to bucket buyers as KDMs or influencers, labeling them is a waste of time.

Your number one job in appraising decision-makers is uncovering the strength of their power. How much of an influencer or decision-maker are they?

Just like "hope" is a terrible business strategy, so is assuming who has decision power and who doesn’t. There’s only one way to handle this: ask direct questions of each buyer until you are 100% sure of their power strength.

Today, write down the following questions verbatim because it may be difficult to ask them in a pitch meeting unless you read them from your notebook:

"How much decision power do you have on this <contract/deal/campaign>?"

Or…

"What’s the extent of your weight on the upcoming decision for our business?"

Or…

"So if you had to define how much decision you have for this deal, what percentage would it be?"

Asking prospects to define their decision power is not easy, but you’ll just be guessing about their weight unless you ask.

A crusty old sales mantra suggests you should treat all buyers as queens and kings. And hey, sometimes old, crusty sales mantras carry a lot of weight and stand up over time…as this one does.

It’s smart to treat everyone on the buy side like royalty…but that doesn’t alleviate the burden of finding out how much decision power each buyer wields. Until you know who on the buy side can say "yes" and who can’t, you risk spending time with those who won’t ultimately matter in the decision process.

Stop assuming everyone you work with on the buy side has equal decision power. They don’t. And stop assuming that titles infer decision power…often they don’t.

Don’t take no from someone who can’t say yes.

The easier route is to find out where the decision power is on each account and spend your time appropriately.

You’ll start cracking up the second you watch this silly 2-minute parody on ordering pizza for lunch.

As you chuckle, think how awful it would be if your KDMs made their decisions about vendors like you this way.

So…imagine you were the pizza rep charged with making them decide…how would you do that?