Decision Making Unit (DMU)
In this day and age, there is not one person who will make and sign off a decision especially with larger deals. It is important that we understand who these people are in the organisation and the role they are playing.
Economic
Role
To give final approval to buy
- Direct access to
- Veto
- Releases Money
- Discretionary use of funds
Focus
Bottom Line and impact on the organisation
Questions
What kind of return will we get on this investment?
Operational
Multiple Per Organisation
Role
To make judgement on impact on job performance
- People using/ supervising use of your product or service
- Personal, since user will live with your proposal
- Direct link between user’s success and success of your product/ service
Questions
How will it work for me?
Specifier
Multiple Per Organisation
Role
To screen out
- Judges measurable aspects of your proposal
- Gatekeeper
- Makes recommendations
- Can’t say yes (final say)
- Can say no (often does)
Focus
Bottom Line and impact on the organisation
Questions
What kind of return will we get on this investment?
Champion
Develop at least one!
(Can be found in Internally or externally!)
Role
To act as a guide for this sale & provides information about
- Situation
- Players and their CSF’s
Focus
Your success with this proposal
Questions
How can we pull this off?
Coach
Role
Your Pal
- The champion from your last deal
- Acts as your guide
- Identifies the 666s
- Points out minefields
- Wants to leverage the full ROI
Focus
Your ongoing success in this account
Questions
How do we keep this good thing going?
666 Anti Champion
Multiple Per Organisation
Role
- Can be anyone anywhere
- Ex employee of the competition
- May have money invested
- Dislikes your style
- In love with competition salesperson
- Had a bad past experience with you
Focus
Keeps you out at all costs!
Questions
How can I find fault with the proposal and direct to our preferred supplier
Qualification is such an important aspect of sales. It is well known that top 20% of sales people spend the majority of their time qualifying followed by closing against the other 80% of sales people that spend more time doing proposals.
A large proportion of sales are lost as they were not properly qualified. Perusing low probability opportunities is costly, time consuming and morale sapping.
Use this calculator to see how well qualified your opportunities are. This is not about probability but just whether this is a real opportunity and in the sales process.
80+ is qualified. If you are not getting above 80+ look at the information you don’t know and use this as an action list.
Further qualification
When we are speaking to clients below are a list of suggested questions to help support further qualification and to support us understanding the clients requirements better
Always good to get them talking as this often leads to us being able to respond with ideas rather than suggest something which may be inappropriate
- E.g. new team, CEO
- Problem with current supplier
- New markets / products
Who within their organisation will be using it, and what purpose does it serve?
- For example, is it to help marketing build a comms plan?
- Is it for the broad to have KPIs?
- It is for finance to justify launching a new product
- What do they need to know?
- What are the research objectives?
- What’s the ideal outcome in terms of insights / recommendations?
- What does success look like for this programme?
- For example, is this a programme that already exists and they are putting it out to tender? Dissatisfied with current supplier – why?
- Have they already learnt something, but have some gaps they need to fill?
- Is this to supplement internal data?
- If it’s a segmentation or brand tracker – have they done this before?
This is basically, what are the sample requirements?
Again, always useful to know if they deliberately sought us out or are calling loads of agencies on spec
Identify hard deadlines we will have to work to in terms of delivering output
- Detailed in-depth PPT or Word doc
- Top level costs and timings
- Email only
Opportunity qualification is considered best practice because:
- Promotes early engagement
- Provides the information you need to move forward or withdraw
- Encourages competitive analysis
- And if this is not enough, just consider the consequences of pursuing too many poorly qualified bids…
Where do you spend most of your time
Other useful bits and pieces for specific programmes:
- CX / Brand / Ad trackers – how frequently would they like to run their tracker?
- Segmentation – who will be using the segmentation. Is it for marketing vs. product teams?
- Ad / comms evaluation – what types of adverts do they have?
- TV / print / outdoor / digital
- Are different versions of the advert within the campaign
- Any idea of how the marketing spend will be spread across the campaign
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