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There are many “buying influences” in today’s solution sales situations. There are a lot of people who can say yes. There’s only one can say no. He (or she) is the benevolent dictator. Every company has one. But in today’s pressure cooker of moving products and services, companies often forget that this person is pivotal to their success. Sure, we have to promote the benefits of our stuff to the entire organization.  We have to reach what management loves to call the decision-making team. But all too often, we’re playing to the stands and ignoring the person in the box seat.

The result? Everyone is “amazed” when the sale goes South. You know.  It went to the folks who didn’t have engineering, manufacturing, operations, IT, administration, purchasing, finance “sewed up.”

Dictator At Work
It’s fascinating to watch benevolent dictators at work. They have people do the basic research, make the internal proposals/recommendations, make the preliminary judgments. But the final say is hers or his!

Companies become increasingly sophisticated and often overly analytical in their marketing and sales approaches. Advertising, public relations and sales promotion efforts have to expand to do more than just sell the concept of advanced technology.  They must promote, sell the product’s and services’ proprietary benefits, decision security blankets to the benevolent dictators.

Companies and individuals don’t buy products, services simply because they meet certain specifications.  They commit to the total company.  That includes the company’s technical expertise, business philosophy, marketing acumen, support reputation. The buying decisions made by new and old customers go far beyond simple technical persuasions. Success is no longer assured by offering technically superior products.   The road to financial success is strewn with the bones of superior products. Markets are so competitive that comparable products are always available. 

Computers for example – in all shapes, sizes, prices, colors — can be found on almost every street corner.   Low-, medium- and high-end printers abound.  Memory of every shape and size can be bought from hundreds of suppliers.  Cameras, smarphones and business/personal apps are everywhere. That’s why it’s vital that a firm’s promotional activities communicate technical/application features as well as the business and emotional benefits. 

Highly Placed Advocates
One of the key goals of your communications efforts should be to build advocacy within the prospect’s organization or the family. An advocate is someone who really wants to buy from you. If your advocate is too low in the organization (as it is for us in our family), his or her suggestion simply runs up through channels as a recommendation. If you have a highly placed advocate, the same idea comes down the organizational chart, as a directive. Today’s marketing and sales resources are finite.  We have to use them carefully to reach the key benevolent dictators and make them our advocates. They don’t make all of the decisions … Just the ones that count!

In their book Winners: How America’s High-Growth, Mid-Sized Companies Succeed, Richard Cavanaugh and Donald Clifford, Jr. discussed a two-year study on what’s right with American business.  The book went the next step beyond that of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, Jr.’s, book In Search of Excellence. Cavanaugh and Clifford studied how mid-sized growth companies have outpaced the rest of the nation’s businesses in almost every sector. They found that the management of these companies focuses on the value of their company, their products and their services, and often get premium prices.

Market Niche
These companies find market niches with new products, new ideas, new ways of doing business.  They create new paths, while conventional firms elbow each other on the same timeworn roads. They are creative entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats or professional managers. These are the people who push, pull and force their organizations to grow.  They represent a tremendous opportunity (and risk) for those who are able to keep pace with and be attuned to their growth paths. In his book High Output Management, Andy Grove spoke of leveraging as it relates to management. 

Simply stated, leveraging means contacting those who are most influential in a given situation and allowing them to pass the work to others who are responsible for decisions and actions. By reaching the right contact, you affect communications throughout the organization with minimal time and effort. That means that successful and austere marketing, communications campaigns have a high degree of leverage to address and reach the benevolent dictators.  Since reaching the benevolent dictator is important marketing goal, you have to question the traditional methods of measuring communications’ effectiveness.

Quantity can no longer be substituted for quality. Management, marketing and communications teams should not … no, cannot … use piles of inquiries as proof of promotional value.  Bingo cards, click thrus may bring you a few hot prospects, but big sales don’t result from someone following up on a bingo request or mouse click.

Communications’ Mission
Most managers still don’t believe the true mission of advertising and public relations. Many don’t comprehend — or simply don’t believe — that product specifications alone won’t sell the product. But true company leaders are learning. They’re learning that the company and people behind the product carry as much—if not more—weight than its specifications.  They’re realizing that the intangibles of image and peer acceptance carry more weight than the product’s feature set.

Marketing expertise — a commodity in dramatically short supply — is being grafted into top management teams. There are lessons to be learned from consumer marketing, but there are just as many unique aspects of business-to-business marketing.  Aspects that only business marketing people bring to the table.  Niche marketing is dramatically different from mass marketing. Benevolent dictator marketing is dramatically different from mass marketing.

Until firms really learn, understand and believe the importance of marketing, management will want communications efforts based on the wrong marketing premises, targeted for the wrong people. The results will only reinforce — in their minds — that communications (advertising and PR) are really a waste of money. Only the creative entrepreneurs who understand the benevolent dictators and know how to make these individuals their advocates will survive, thrive, grow.