Make it safe to say yes
The idea
A big company rarely buys the best product. It buys the one nobody will be blamed for choosing, so your job is to take the risk out of saying yes.
Where it comes from
Harry Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible (1997), a line I highlighted when I read it last year. It is backed by Gary Williams and Robert Miller’s Harvard Business Review study of how executives decide, “Change the Way You Persuade” (2002), and by a recent Andreessen Horowitz article on selling AI to large companies.
The story
Beckwith ran an advertising agency in Minneapolis, and his book is about selling things a buyer cannot see or test before paying for them, like advice or software. His observation is that this buyer does not shop the way we imagine. They are not ranking the options to find the winner. They are worried, and they are looking for the option least likely to go wrong. In his words: “People do not look to make the superior choice; they want to avoid making a bad choice.”
His advice follows from that. Stop trying to look superior, and remove whatever could make you look like a bad choice. The best thing you can do for a prospect, he says, is get rid of their fear, and he suggests a trial period or a small test project as one way to do it.
In a large company that worry has a name attached to it. The person who signs for your product owns the decision in front of their boss and their peers. If it works, the company benefits. If it fails, they carry it. That is the logic behind the old saying in technology sales that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
The research agrees. Williams and Miller studied 1,684 executives over two years and grouped them by how they make decisions. The largest group, 36%, were what they called followers: people who decide based on how they, or other executives they trust, have made similar decisions before. Followers are rarely early adopters. What moves them is proof that the thing has already worked somewhere else. Only a quarter were the type who get excited by a bold new idea.
So a founder walks in with a pitch about being new and different, and the biggest group in the room hears untested.
In July this year Joe Schmidt and Julian Marx at Andreessen Horowitz gave founders two questions to ask before choosing how to sell. How exposed is the buyer who signs? And does proof travel in this market? Where the exposure is high, as it is in law or finance, they argue for what they call a lighthouse strategy: win a few marquee customers and let their names reassure everyone who comes after. Their example is Harvey, the legal AI company. Lawyers are trained to avoid risk, and no firm wanted to go first. Once Allen & Overy had signed, others could follow. One sign that you are in this kind of sale is a buyer who asks whether it is safe before asking what it costs.
A question to sit with
In the deal you most want to close, what is the person signing afraid of, and what have you done to take that fear away?