The New Power Base Selling: Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

CHAPTER 6

Fox Hunting and Power Base Mapping

Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically.

—Marcus Aurelius

We find that although most sellers intellectually understand the significance of working with Foxes and Power Bases, they fail to develop the daily habits that allow them to quickly and naturally identify them. This gap between recognition and implementation tends to prevent sellers from gaining the coveted Political Advantage that fuels Value Creation and competitive strategy in their accounts. This chapter helps close this gap by showing you how to uncover certain Political Revelations to determine who is a Fox and who is inside or outside the Power Base. Over time, the activities that drive these Revelations will become a lot more natural and automatic for you to complete, and soon, they will become second nature.

We refer to this process as Fox Hunting because the focus should be on finding the Fox. Aiming for the Fox makes it easier to identify Power Base members along the way, which you often do even before you identify the Fox. That’s okay; you will eventually need both, and members of the Power Base can help you recognize and align with the Fox.

We present Fox Hunting in two parts. We first provide a brief explanation of useful tools for the hunt, and then we show exactly how to apply these tools in order to make hypotheses and draw conclusions about a given individual’s degree of influence.