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

Penetrating Competitively Held Accounts

Now let’s examine how you might apply this process to a competitively held account. Going back to our banking example from earlier in the chapter, assume that the competition is working in all three business units that we identified. In fact, the SVPs of wholesale banking, community banking, and wealth management are potentially all aligned with the competition, who has an installed base in each business unit. So, how do you penetrate the account?

You’ll probably have a difficult time getting a meeting with an SVP, so where do you start? You can launch your effort by gathering intel and progressing along the seven steps that we outlined earlier—but in a much more indirect manner. You still need to identify which business unit to focus on; we’ll assume it’s community banking. And as before, this will require that you make midlevel contacts to gain intel and some degree of support. But you also need to produce inroads into IT and Finance. In a quick but quiet way, you get to someone in the Power Base of IT, ideally an Emerging Fox who may not be covered by the competition. You then connect your community banking contact with your IT contact to develop the concept of a technology-enabled solution that will reduce or redirect labor content through check imaging.

As you progress to the point of producing a draft Value Proposition, you make contact with a member of the Finance Department or perhaps Marketing if your focus is going to be on the ...