The Problem With Selling to Multiple Decision Makers

Selling a complex B2B product to multiple decision-makers can be chaotic.

Most of the time, you won’t get all decision-makers all on the same call.

Maybe because you’re not aware of all the decision-makers, and maybe because some of them are just busy.

But even IF you manage to get let’s say 3 out of 4 of them on the same call, the deal still won’t go through if that 4th person isn’t convinced. And you don’t even get a chance to explain yourself to them.

One way to mitigate that a little bit is to record your demo and discovery calls and send them to your prospects afterwards.

That’s what we do will all of our sales calls. If I know that not all decision makers are on the call, I’ll tell the people present that they can forward that recording to their co-founder or their CFO.

But you can never be sure that they’ll forward it or that the other person actually watches the recording.

But even IF they did, and all of the decision-makers who weren’t on the call, spend an hour watching it, it will still ONLY work if the questions they have exactly match those questions that were asked on the call.

Usually that’s not the case. The technical person will have different questions than the user who will use the tool than the CFO who signs off on the deal.

So they’ll often be questions that don't get answered.

Here’s what we do to mitigate that a little bit: An FAQ page. A subpage on your website where we answer all the recurring questions we usually get from prospects on sales calls.

You can even break it down by personas and create product, finance, and technical FAQs separately.

On our website FAQ page (which we call “Our Process”) we have separate videos for each of the frequently questions. And I use this page actively.

For example, if I’m talking to a Co-Founder and I know their technical Co-founder is not on the call, I tell them, “By the way, your Co-Founder will probably have some questions that I didn’t answer on this call, so we have this FAQ page that they can check out, here’s the link.“

It’s not perfect because not everyone will read your FAQ page, sometimes they’ll want to hear it directly from you. And that’s fine. Even if only 10-20% of prospects check it out, over time it adds up.

How to implement this?

Ask your salespeople or whoever is on the calls with prospects about the recurring questions they usually get asked and make a list of them. Most of the time, it’s the same questions over and over again.

Then create a video for each of them, and put them all into a subpage of your website. Call it your “FAQ” page or “Our process” or “Our product” or “How we work”.

Takes a couple hours to implement and setup, once.

And now you have a tool that you and your salespeople can actively use to answer questions they get in follow-up emails and get decision-makers who weren’t on the sales call more aligned.