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At a few talks recently, I’ve found myself using the term “grid” or “matrix” selling more and more. As organisations become flatter and more democratic rather than autocratic, it isn’t always easy to identify the key decision maker anymore (used to be known as “the man”). Selling business to business, this means that you have to work harder to cover the bases or influence people who may be involved in the decision making process.
I use the term “matrix” selling to describe the process I feel you need to go through to win business. That is to always consider colleagues one up, one below and on either side of the person you are trying to influence. The workplace can be so political, it’s very important that you understand if their is a disturbance in your matrix (nicked that from the very excellent 1999 film of the same title), so to speak. Of course, this can differ culture by culture, however for a UK audience, this is becoming more and more of a feature of business life.
When you identify people within the matrix, it’s then critical that you ask the right questions of them, I recently wrote a blogpost on a similar issue here. The main point is that you are trying to gather as much intelligence about the potential purchase to ensure that you can overcome all potential objections. This also means you retain the integrity of your matrix and it should hold firm, even if there is one person within it that may not agree with your potential route (although this should have been overcome in the objection handling phase, but not everyone is always won over).
Selling is about people, solutions and business cases. By covering your bases properly, you should be able to satisfy any buyer that you’ve done your due diligence on their business to make you the only choice for them.
