Are you selling too high? Many technology companies automatically aim their sales effort right to the top of their prospect’s organizations. The C-level suite are the peak target and the rest of the organization are the footholds to get there. This is particularly true for companies selling enterprise-class and higher ticket offerings. Consider the compelling reasons to do so: bigger budgets, greater span of control, prestige, fear of the eleventh-hour veto. Yet, in their attempt to reach the venerable C-level summit, many firms find themselves gasping for air and woefully unprepared.

The reason? They wasted time trying to sell to someone who doesn’t care with a message they don’t understand. They may have forgotten to bring an economically compelling value proposition. Or, they don’t have a strong enough brand, market strength or reputation. Or, perhaps they never asked the question ‘Does the top really care enough to engage with me in the conversation?’

Years ago, I facilitated a focus group among Fortune 100 CIOs to preview a new offering for a client. Immediately I realized we weren’t speaking the same language. The industry jargon and alphabet soup used to describe our client’s new product sounded like a foreign language to these CIOs. Two of them even confessed to not knowing what ERP stood for. Our message didn’t resonate. We had run out of air for that kind of ascent.

When you’re tempted to sell high simply because the enterprise converges there, stop and apply the following litmus test to your approach: Given your current value proposition, who in their organization needs your solution badly enough that they would be willing to give you an hour of face-to-face time to discuss how you can help them? Better yet, would they be willing to rearrange their schedule to meet with you? You might find that it isn’t anyone in the C-level suite but someone a level or two down in the organization who understands the language you speak, who has the concerns your offering solves, and can get where you need to go.

They should be your starting point for selling to the enterprise. Perhaps not the ending point, but the right place to start. Of course, you may not like the answer you get to the one-hour litmus test. Perhaps meeting with those willing to would just be a waste of time; or they may not have the influence to sponsor you in the organization. In such cases you may need to sell higher. No problem. Just train harder and pack accordingly. Reframe your value proposition, enhance your offering or partner with another firm to complement your solution and increase your value.

Aim as high as necessary, but no higher. With every ascent you are better conditioned—and better prepared—for the next climb; however high that might take you.

Leary Gates is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lumina Consulting Group.

A prime illustration of this point from the not too distant past: the Storage and Data Hosting start-up boom back in the late 90′s. Sans the triumphant few like Rackspace (with great customer service and rock solid SLAs) and the moneyed up Telcos there wasn’t really enough data to drive businesses or consumers to host their precious bytes with outside firms. That is until the perfect storm hit both the business and consumer markets. First, the availability of reasonably priced digital cameras and iPods let the personal data floodgates open wide. Additionally, and more urgently, was the data deluge generated by Sarbanes-Oxley. Finally, all consumers began to trust their data to others for safekeeping.

Today its not infrastructure providers trying to win the hearts and minds of customers but the many companies creating whiz-bang widgets and tear-provokingly beautiful UIs that we find in Apple’s App Store. Why does a user choose an app and stick with it? Presently, a successful business app takes real-world behavior such as printing, signing PDFs, booking travel, reading publications, and so forth and transitions them to the new platform taking full advantage of the new feature functionalities such as the touch screen.

Business users, and consumers for that matter, will not seek out a tool they didn’t know existed. Getting attention and keeping it means more than just being beautiful and cool. Apple elegantly trained me to download portable digital media with my iPod and iTunes before the iPhone ever got in my hands. To their advantage, the form factor itself wasn’t so very different than my mobile business phone at the time – it too had a color screen and a QWERTY keyboard. Apple simultaneously trained me to use a new, yet familiar form factor and new way of using applications. Lo and behold, when I purchased my iPad, I was no virgin to touch screen technology or the App store. The hat trick for application development firms targeting the business market – understand your user’s behavior and improve their experience. If you can do that, their hearts and minds will follow.

Ilene Kaminsky is the Managing Director of Lumina’s Silicon Valley office and specializes in creating compelling customer experiences.

Getting back on the playing field after coaching and practice and most importantly knowing what we did wrong gave us the tools we needed to win the next game. When we don’t really understand why we lost, we cannot understand how to improve and how to achieve better results. Self esteem be damned in the business world as grown-ups.

Sales leaders generally believe they understand the reasons for a lost opportunity. Price, lack of product features or functionality, not enough executive support internally, and a lack of focus on the proposal comprise just some items on the “excuse laundry list.” We’ve heard them all and can rattle them off like a bad elevator pitch.

Further, the rate of market innovation as well as surmounting competitive threats can foster a company culture of the “fire drill.” Everyone runs around when the siren sounds and it’s nearly too late to put out the blaze before you lose the opportunity. Our egos are bruised and the smoldering cinders left over from the fire still burn your feet as you walk in the door to your office, head hung low. Who is to blame?

The best answer comes directly from your customer – and what I can say from experience is that it’s not about you. And that’s the point.

While doing some research not long ago I spoke to the CEO of a competing company to the one I worked for at the time. During our conversation he said his sales team found it easy to compete with us and win. I looked clearly stunned by his audacity – this small company was beating us and winning big contracts with our ideal customers. Why? We focused our pitch and our strategy on our capabilities and NOT on the customer’s requirements and how we’d make them successful.

I confirmed this with an actual customer. She told me that our folks didn’t give her the confidence she needed to know that we’d solve their challenge. We only talked about ourselves (and did this in too many slide presentations.) Our world view was inside out rather than an outside in. So, indeed it wasn’t about us.

We’re all losers. But good losers slouch home and try harder next time – not by repeating our mistakes and expecting different results – but by arming ourselves with the right information rather than a set of well-rehearsed excuses. Score one for the home team.

Ilene Kaminsky is the Managing Director of Lumina’s Silicon Valley office. If you want to really find out why your ideal customer didn’t buy, contact us about our Opportunity Loss Review service.

Every company, no matter its size or industry, has an ecosystem — a web of companies and people whose success depends, at least to some degree, on your success. Think suppliers, customers, strategic partners, manufacturers, employees, stockholders — all stakeholders in your success. They want you to win. It makes sense — if your company is failing, your customers can’t get the support or product updates they need; your vendors’ revenues fall and their accounts payable could be in jeopardy; your employees’ jobs are at greater risk, and so on. Everyone in your ecosystem is pulling for your success. The question, then, is ‘What is your organization doing to encourage and harvest the capabilities of these critical elements of your ecosystem?’.

What we’ve discovered is that too often our clients miss an opportunity to involve their ecosystem in solving difficult problems. In the backdrop of today’s environment, we’ve found that our clients are working harder than ever to increase sales while doing all they can to reduce, or at least contain, costs. How can your organization use its ecosystem for the benefit of all? In short, think boldly and creatively. Lumina is encouraging its clients to use the current environment to creatively address their business issues hand-in-hand with the members of their ecosystem. Perhaps now more than any other time in history, the companies and individuals in your ecosystem are thinking more deeply about how they can help you — acting not out of charity, but out of their clear understanding that if they want to be successful, they need to help make you successful.

The first steps in moving into a meaningful dialog with your ecosystem partner is understanding their motivation. Sure, all of your suppliers want you to buy more stuff — but it goes way beyond that. What is it that’s driving their business forward — not just short-term revenue, but strategically moving them forward. Perhaps they have a critical product or technology transition; perhaps they have excess inventory because of cancelled orders; maybe they’ve promised Wall Street they would enter a new market or geography. As with most meaningful relationships, you must first seek to understand the needs of your partner. From there, you can devise a strategy to help them help you.

For example, we were working with a small software company that was struggling with sales, despite a superior product and competitive price point. The company needed capital to build its infrastructure in order to increase sales — but outside funding was not an option. This is where their ecosystem became a critical part of the solution. In this case there was a major potential distribution channel partner whose future offerings were going to depend on this software company. There was also a prospective customer pipeline that would benefit greatly from their new software. However, these prospective customers didn’t have the internal resources to migrate their software, and didn’t have the budget to hire outside resources. The solution: use the marketing budget and name-recognition of the large channel partner to promote the new software; and use the customer’s existing software maintenance budget to offset license and deployment costs of the new software platform. In the end, the software company’s sales took off, the channel partner was able to launch a new product line with a large pipeline of business, and the customers could use their existing budget to get the new software that they needed for their organization. A little creativity and cooperation helped everyone address their short-term goals and move forward with their long-term strategy.

How can you use your ecosystem to help solve your business’ key challenges? Here are ten things to keep in mind as you strive to put your ecosystem to work for the benefit of all

1. Be sensitive. You must clearly understand the short-term challenges and mid-term strategies of those in your ecosystem — what’s keeping them up at night and what promises and vision are they communicating to their stakeholders? Don’t do anything until you clearly understand this.
2. Be meaningful. You must create a tactical a strategic win for those that participate — short-term sales for your suppliers are great, but not if it derails them from their core business strategy. Sure you need wins upfront, but those wins need to be taking you on a trajectory that’s meaningful to the company in the long-run.
3. Be a connector. You need to find creative ways of connecting your ecosystem — the only thing all of these people and companies have in common is you. How are you going to connecting them together in a meaningful way?
4. Be up high. You need to capture the imagination of high-level decision-makers. Your not going to ‘plugging into some program’ — you are the program. This kind of thinking needs the authority and imagination of the executives in your ecosystem. Don’t side-step your day-to-day contact, but don’t stop there or you’ll never move your idea from a thought to an action.
5. Be creative. This is not a time to just do more of the same. Brainstorm. Meditate. Pretend that you don’t know the ‘rules’ and think big. Today, no idea is too wacky to consider.
6. Be courageous. This is not a time to be timid. Boldly engage the key decision-makers in your ecosystem with your ideas.
7. Be a leader. Be flexible, but have a plan. The single biggest thing that you can do to improve your odds of success is to have a concrete plan. It may not be the final plan or the plan that gets implemented, but you need to show that you’ve thought things through. In business, a blank piece of paper is a terrible conversation starter.
8. Be ready to act on your plan. The last thing you want to do when you get the head nod is to say ‘uh, well, can I get back to you?’.
9. Be resourceful. If someone in your ecosystem, such as one of your suppliers or customers, says ‘no’, look further down your list. Who else could benefit from a deeper relationship and commitment from your company?
10. Be thinking about other resources that can help — not just money. Hard cash is great, but it isn’t the only thing. Suppliers can offer marketing assistance, better payment terms, better demo programs, joint sales calls, pre-sales support — keep thinking. Customers can be great spokespeople at your conferences, offer to make introductions to other prospects, host executive round tables — keep thinking.

Partner funded development is a great way to involve your entire ecosystem in your success and the success of those involved. The process of creating a winning web of relationships will last beyond the original initiatives and create relationships that can never be duplicated by any competitor. Your ecosystem is waiting – now is the time to move boldly forward.

Dan McCormick is the Managing Partner of Lumina’s Denver office.