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

Fox Hunting Intelligence Gathering

The best sellers rely on three primary Fox-Hunting activities to develop visibility into who may be the Fox and in the Power Base. These include:

1. Conducting customer research

2. Making astute observations

3. Asking good questions

These three tools are meant to be used together to help form hypotheses and draw conclusions about an individual’s degree of influence. In other words, it’s not enough to draw a conclusion based on one research item, observation, or question. All three tools are needed to connect the dots over time. Customer research provides sellers with information, while astute observations apply judgment or inference to that information. For example, let’s say that a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) presents several company initiatives to industry analysts but spends more time and goes into more detail on one specific initiative. A seller therefore might infer that the initiative that gets most of the attention is his highest priority.

Asking good questions results in two outcomes:

1. Additional information in targeted areas, perhaps providing background on the CEO’s initiatives, particularly the one that you feel is the highest priority

2. The ability to move from inference to conclusion, such as in confirming the high-priority initiative through questions addressed to other key customer individuals

We refer to this process, which is shown in Figure 6.1, as intelligence gathering or, simply, intel, and you will use it in ...