When talking to sales “experts,” you’ll often hear some form of, “Avoid selling to managers at all costs. Instead, find decision-makers, and sell directly to them.”

While I agree that it’s important to sell big-ticket services directly to decision-makers, I couldn’t disagree more with the idea that you should avoid managers. In fact, it can be much easier to sell to managers than to decision-makers, provided you sell the right things the right way to the right people for the right reasons. And, we all know it’s easier to sell to current clients than to find new clients, so once you make your first sale to the manager, the sky is the limit on future business.

The trick is to realize that many managers have “signature authority” for small-ticket items, and can often purchase up to $5,000 in services without approval from higher up. So, to find new clients quickly, you must create a packaged service that solves one of their major headaches, and then price it under their signature limits.

By “packaged service” I mean a fixed process with a fixed result for a fixed fee. For instance, one of our clients is a national staffing firm that can handle just about any staffing issue for any size company. One of the ways the employees at this firm help their clients find qualified candidates is to use some sophisticated Internet search tools that they created. From a list of job-specific criteria, they identify about 1,500 potential candidates, and then, after a multistep screening process, they identify 10 to 20 highly qualified candidates for the specified position.

While this three-day process is part of almost every large staffing project they do, it’s also perfect for packaging and selling to a recruiting manager who is under the gun to fill a position. In fact, we were hired to locate these recruiting managers through our “Right-Now Prospecting” program.

The offer we are using on behalf of our client goes like this: “We provide our clients with a set of prescreened resumes for any position they need to fill. We do this for a fixed cost of two thousand dollars, and can deliver the resumes in three business days. Is this something you want?”

Approximately one out of every 40 people who hears that offer says, “Yes,” and sets an appointment to discuss the service. And, because the service is under his or her signature-authority limit, our client’s salespeople can easily close two out of three of the appointments we set.

By creating a packaged service that is easy to understand, that solves a major headache faced by managers at your prospects’ companies, and that is priced within the managers’ signature-authority limits, you can quickly secure first-time clients at the manager level. This not only generates short-term income, it places you in a position to more easily acquire larger projects down the line, by implementing your cross-selling strategies.

Have a great week!

Gill