Don't Talk to the Monkey When You should be Talking to the Organ Grinder

Welcome to episode number six entitled:

Don't Talk to the Monkey When You Should be Talking to the Organ Grinder.

Very popular phrase. And even Winston Churchill commented, you should never talk to the monkey when the decision maker is in the room.

What it really means is you remember the old fairground, you would actually see the monkey dancing and there would be an organ grinder in the background, winding up the organ, playing the music.

Well, the monkey is just dancing to the music. The real music maker is the organ grinder.

And so in any sales situation, somebody is calling the tune. The decision maker.

Particularly in construction bids and competitive bids, a senior executive in the general contractor who's probably making that decision, and he hands off a lot of the detail of attending to that decision, collecting the information, getting the bid, getting the estimates, getting the take offs done, reviewing those bids, delegates it to juniors in the organization.

But at the end of the day, it's the decision maker who says, yes, we're going to go with your bid or somebody else's.

I go back 30 years now in my own sales career. And I remember I was very early on in a consulting company and I discovered that the business had done a lot of work in the food sector, food manufacturers, food distributors.

So I thought, well, I should go and target some food companies. And I happened to have a friend who said, well, I know an owner of a food company and they affected an introduction.

And I met with that owner. His name was Roy Moed, very successful businessman, did many, many deals. And we had a good conversation and he said, look, you need to be working with my Managing Director. His name was Nick.  We probably do need some help, you know, work with him.

So I worked with Nick for a few weeks. I did a site tour. I started to understand their challenges and clearly there was an opportunity to improve the profitability of this food business. They were a company called Pourshons, and they had a little factory on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport.

They would make those little crackers and orange juice packs that would go onto the airlines that when you flew from one place to another, they'd come down the aisle with that in a big cart and then they'd hand out these portions of food. Hence the name Pourshins. Clever name, very successful business. And I knew that we could help.

And at the same time I had a boss, a sales boss, his name was Gerry Burke. I mentioned him to you before and he would always be asking me what's going on? “So, Mick, where are we with Pourshins?” And I said, “Well, Gerry, the Managing Director, Nick, he stopped taking my calls” I

He said, “well, you need to go and see him”. I said, “well, but how? He's not taking my calls.”

 So he said, “well, what I want you to do is I want you to go to that factory at 06:00 in the morning. You were still dark and wait for him to arrive. And when he arrives, get out of your car and talk to him.”

 Well, this was completely abhorrent to me. I felt like I was stalking, but Gerry would beat me with a stick if I didn't go and do what he said. So off I went. Very early in the morning, I'm sitting outside this factory and the Managing Director shows up in his vehicle. He gets out and starts walking towards the building. So I leap out of my car because I want to get to him before he gets to the security door.

Well, he thought he was being mugged. He was absolutely scared out of his wits.

“What are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I've got to talk to you, I've got to talk to you”. I said,

“well, come on in!”.

So we went and had a conversation and he said, look, it's not down to me. Roy, the owner, hasn't given me the permission to use you and he's the decision maker. I said, well, can you get me in to see him? I said, Well, I don't think so. You need to approach him directly.

One takeaway for you guys when you're in your sales campaigns. I learnt a very big lesson here in that I'd run what I felt was a fairly stellar campaign. I'd gotten Nick and his subordinates online and yet the sale wasn't going ahead. Why not? Because he couldn't say yes to the deal .

And he couldn't sell. It to Roy He's not my proxy, he's not the salesperson,.

You're the salesperson, so you can't expect somebody to do your selling for you. So when I assume you were sitting in the meeting with Roy and Roy saying, I don't know why we should pay somebody to come in here when it's your job, Nick, to fix it. What's Nick going to say? He's not going to say, oh, no, I really, really need help. I mean, his ego would step in the way and say, no, you're right, I can probably fix this.

And so you come to a bit of an impasse.

Lesson number one, don't let somebody else do your selling for you. They're not going to be able to handle all of the objections and they have their own self-interest at heart and they're not going to say that they don't know what the answer is usually.

Now I'm faced with this situation where I know that Roy is the decision maker, but I'm not getting any audience with him. So I decided I would write to him. And in those days I'm, I'm going back 30, 32 years now it wasn't about emailing somebody!

You know, you would actually type up a letter printed off and put it in the, in the post and it would be delivered.

And I wrote to every one of his executive officers, one to the operations director, one to the sales director, one to the chief financial officer, one to Roy himself and one to the managing director.

I wrote about three letters, you know, each to these people over a couple of week period. And eventually I get this call from Roy over at Portions. He says,

“Mick, get your team in here in 1 hour” A

And so I call up one of the directors of my business. His job was to go in and do an analysis of the capability and where the improvements might be. And he had a rather dim view of salespeople. But at the end of the day, you Sizzlers know nothing happens, right, until the salesman does something. The world turns on the basis of what the salesman brings to the table.

So we're all sitting around Roy Moed’s boardroom table and I'm low man on the totem pole and seen as being kind of like dirt on the bottom of my analyst director's shoe.

Roy turns to the director and says,

“ Okay, he said the reason you're here is him!  (pointing at me.) He's been writing to us every day for two weeks. He obviously believes that you can do something for us. So here's your chance. Tell me what you can do.”

And so we presented our case, won that business and got a very successful project. T

he key thing here is when you're in sales you need to be able to identify that decision maker and get in front of them.

So what exactly is a decision maker? What's the difference? Well, in this example I just gave you, Nick the Managing Director, very important person. But he's an influencer. He can influence the decision.

And the distinction between an influencer and a decision maker is an influencer can say no to your bid, right? He can say no to your sales offer, but he can't say yes. He can make a recommendation, but he can't say yes.

Whereas a decision maker can actually say yes to your bid, your sales offer. And equally he can say no, but is the only person you can say yes.

So as a salesperson you need to get to the person who can say yes.

Now I know that can be quite challenging, so I have actually written a book that will help you with some of that. The book is called The Ultimate Formula for Winning Work with General Contractors. If you want to win more bids, then this is the book for you. Get your copy and some bonuses, or go to Amazon and it will be available there, back to the show.

So let's think about that competitive bid process. You're trying to bid to a general contractor. There are at least three, four, five other players in the mix, and you're dealing usually with some kind of junior or intern or project manager.

There's a project executive somehow lurking in the background who will ultimately be the person who will say, yes, this is the bid we're going to go with. This is the recommendation we're going to be taking to our owner.

And how do you get to that person? Because it's quite challenging. You don't want to offend.

I see this in sales is we build these very close, intimate relationships with people. We get on really, really well with them. And it almost seems a little rude, a little improper to say, hey, can I go and meet Joe, the project executive? And they say, well, no, don't worry. Don't worry, Mick. No, I've got it all covered. I'm putting your case forward. I really like your bid. I've been advocating some of the things that you've been talking to me about

You fear that by saying, no, I absolutely need to speak to him, you're going to offend him and ultimately lose the bid. Or here's the deal, and I go back to my mentor, Gerry. Gerry the dog ate my homework Burke-  because he was always crazy and did things that were completely he had an excuse for everything. That's why Gerry the dog ate my homework.

He was a great student of sales and the sales psyche. And he said to me,

“Mick, look, if you don't have the ear of the decision maker, I guarantee you somebody else does”

And if you don't use every fiber of your being to get in front of the decisionmaker, you're playing roulette, and likely you will lose.

So here's another important point from this podcast. You will win many, many more deals by asserting your right to talk to the decision maker than you will lose for offending somebody during the sales process.

As a salesperson, it is your job to deliver the decision maker to the sales process.

Otherwise you're not selling anything right? You've got to be able to get in front of that decision maker, and I use the word right there.

You're making a very significant investment in that prospect company. You've invested time in discovery. You've invested time in building estimates. You've worked with your vendors to source material. You've got costs. You've looked at schedules. You've looked at all of those supply chain irregularities in order to determine what you can promise and what you can risk.

You may have even taken some product early and put it in your warehouse to assure that you can actually start that job on time.

Not only that, but you have a team of people who have worked up that estimate internally. You've got people from the accounting department that have entered all that detail into the system. You have tracking. You have internal meetings. You have risk management. Somebody needed to look at the contract language. You have a massive investment, so you have made an investment.

One of the things that I say to people in the process is that “we've decided to make a significant investment in your company in order to make you successful, in order for us to show that investment and to demonstrate, we really need to speak to Joe. And I really would like your help in engineering a conversation, a meeting with Joe so we can present our case, talk about the investment, talk about how we're going to mitigate risk.”

So you are positioning yourself as a business peer to Joe, because in the sales process, you can be one of two things. You can be a supplier or you can be an equal peer to Joe.

So when you talk about risk mitigation, ideas change. Then you're speaking more like a business person than a supplier. And it's more natural for you to be able to get an audience with Joe

In some circumstances, it may not be obvious who the decision maker is. Right? As part of your job as sales, you got to identify the decision maker.

Very early on in the process, you want to be talking to your contact, hey, who else is going to help you make the decision, make the choices? What are the criteria upon which you are going to make the selection? What is that process and who's going to be in those meetings? And that should give you some illumination on who those people are.

If you know that organization well, you probably know the executive that's going to make the decision.

You might even ask, how involved is Joe in the decision? When does he typically get involved? Because I know it's a significant investment, not just by our company, but on your company as well, and they should be able to do that.

Now, the earlier that you have that conversation, the less alarming it is. If you say that's part of your process early on, you're setting the expectation that is the field upon which you are going to compete as opposed to waiting a few months.

You built the bid, and it's gone a little quiet. Now you want to talk to the decision maker and your pal will say, oh, no, you don't need to do that. No, I've got it all covered. Well, they don't have it all covered. They're not your sales proxy, right? And you need to be in there.

Getting access to them, what the Rainmakers do is they set their stall out early. You remember, you have the most leverage very, very early on in the sales process. You have to educate them how they're going to make the decision, because maybe it's a junior. They don't know. And you can say, look, we've done this many, many times. There's a lot of risk that needs to be involved, a lot of moving parts. So what we like to do before we submit the bid is sit with the team. And I'd like to joe, I think, is going to have a big say in this. I'd like to sit with him and get his perspective on this and how we can manage this whole project together.

So very early on, when they're asking you to make an investment, they're more willing to be able to give you the right kind of access.

When I've been involved in competitive bid situations, particularly if I'm a little late to the game, right, the bid has already been formed. The requirement has already been shaped a little bit. If they won't let me have access to the decision-making body, I won't bid.

I'll say I can't bid. And they'll say, why not? Because I need to talk to the decision maker.

Because at the end of the day, when you're looking at a bid document, it's just a distillation of what somebody else has said. So the building owner has said, this is what I want.

The construction exec has then translated that into what they think it looks like.

They hand that down to a couple of juniors, they write it down on a piece of paper.

Annd you're looking at something that's three or four degrees separated from the actual true need.

So the closer you can get to the initial definition of need, the more information you've got to be right on target. So be upfront with them.

What do the Rainmakers do? Right?

We know number one, what have we learned –

Number one, if you're not talking to the decision maker, somebody else is.

Number two, your pal can't be your sales proxy. You have to sell to the decision maker. It is your responsibility to deliver the decision maker to the sales process.

Number three, you need to get in and build that relationship with the decision maker early.

What the Rainmakers do is when they're deciding which companies they're going to bid for, they know who the key players are going to be, and they start to form relationships even before a bid has been put together.  

I would advise you to have ten companies that you're going after and identify those key executives, start thinking about how you can build a relationship. Look at their social postings on LinkedIn or Facebook, comment on their folks on their posts.

What associations are they members of? Go join those associations and make presentations so that you can connect with them.

It doesn't preclude you from sending them ideas, thoughts about other projects. So keep yourself top of mind. That's what the rainmakers do.

The rainmakers identify decision makers early, build relationships, even pre-bid.

Once the bid has been gestated, it's formed, it might not be fully written down again. The rainmakers getting to the decision makers saying, hey, I've got some ideas. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? So it's very natural to be engaged with the decision maker throughout the process.

Remember, don't just talk to the monkey, you must speak to the organ grinder.

The organ grinder is the one who's calling the tune. And if you want to win, you're going to have to be on the dance floor with the decision maker.

Hope you enjoyed this week's episode and we'll see you next time. Well, we've come to the end of another great episode. Hope you enjoyed that.

If you enjoyed the show, go to Apple podcasts and leave us a review. Five stars would be perfect. Let us know. Put some comments in there, that would be fantastic. And if you want

Lastly, I've distilled the essence of the rainmakers, the lift off people, and I put it into a book called The Ultimate Formula to Winning Work with General Contractors.

A lot of the things I've talked about today and more are in this book. Go get it on Amazon or at sellthessizzle.net.

See you next week.