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Machiavelli II has been devised to help a sales team strategise how they will win a large sale. A large sale is defined as a sale when there is a team from the supplying company selling to a team from the buying company over a significant number of sales meetings, and where an understanding of the politics of the situation is all important.

It is critical to think through the politics of these big sales and to organise the appropriate lobbying. But it is also incredibly difficult to think clearly through the mixture of needs, criteria, influences, likes, dislikes, availability, power, skills, resources and events.

Most sales teams find it so difficult to unravel all these conflicting issues in a big sale that they do not address the challenge of a planned campaign, but react from one meeting to the next.

This is a dangerous approach. They usually misunderstand the politics and omit very important lobbying issues from the agenda of the meetings they hold. Big sales are often like a game of chess and it is essential to think the game all the way through.

Machiavelli can help them to unravel all the issues, leaving time to examine and explore the really critical problems concerning the sale.

Over the years, Advance has developed a process for achieving these plans. To the teams, some of the ideas appear very creative but, in fact, a lot of the work is (or should be) routine.

For this reason, it has been possible to develop a “knowledge based system” to assist with the planning.

During the preparation of a plan, the sales team will be prompted to give a full description of the sale in which they are working. This description will include details on key players in the prospect team, the power relationships between them, their needs, the criteria they are looking for and the resources they control.

The output from Machiavelli II will be a suggestion of all the sales meetings that will be necessary for the team to get the politics right and win the sale.

The plan will be a list of events giving details of who should be there from the supplier side, who should be there from the prospect side, a detailed agenda for each meeting and a list of all the commitments and lobbying that should be achieved at the end of the meeting.

Commitments come in several flavours but, for the moment, suffice it to say that we want individuals to commit themselves to release specific resources, insist on specific benefits or criteria and tell other people about their requirements.

The plan cannot be a definitive answer as to how to win the sale but it can be a major step along the way and give the sales team something quite comprehensive to critique. The planning process exposes the holes in the understanding of the situation. It then suggests how to implement the sales campaign. In the end, the final test of the quality of Machiavelli’s output is the account team. Until Machiavelli II produces a plan that makes sense to the team, the plan is wrong, not the team.

Machiavelli II is flexible enough to accommodate most needs and is of value whenever there is a sale with a large number of people to convince and a large number of meetings to hold.

 

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