2.145 Winning Hidden Stakeholders with Michael Field

In this conversation, Karen Kirton sits down with marketer Michael Field to unpack the hidden force behind so many B2B wins and losses. We explore the invisible buying committee, the stakeholders you rarely meet yet who quietly shape every major decision. You will learn how to identify them, speak to what they value, and create simple assets that help them champion your solution inside the room you cannot enter. 

In today’s episode, you will learn about: 

• Why the person you talk to the most is not always the decision maker 
• How to map the real influencers in a deal across finance, risk, safety, procurement, and operations 
• Interview techniques that reveal what actually drives choices, not just what people say 
• The emotional side of decisions and how to de risk choices for project managers 
• A 30 day action plan to start influencing the whole committee in your market 

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Transcript

Karen Kirton   

welcome Michael.  

Michael Field  Thank you. Thanks for having me.  

Karen Kirton   

It's great to have you here today. And I think what I'd like to start with is perhaps what is the biggest misconception that owners have when it comes to who makes the buying decision?   

Michael Field   

Yeah, it's a great question. Often businesses and the sales people or representatives of that business think that the person that they've got the closest contact with is their buyer. So they've got a relationship with somebody. They've built that relationship. They're relying on that person to act in their best interests inside the organisation, and quite often, there's a cohort of people inside that business. They might not make the buying decision, but they certainly influence the buying decision, and they're very often invisible to the vendor, and particularly invisible to the salesperson. Yeah, and I don't know if this is related, but I know from business friends of mine that work more with corporates. There's a lot of people in the chain, and that sales person will build a relationship for a long time with the one contact. Then they leave, yeah, and so then they're like, Oh, now I've got to try and find out who the next person is and who I build the relationship with. So is it that ongoing kind of sales process as well as the initial how do we work out who to talk to? Yeah, it's a great question, because you can benefit from that. If a client who really values you moves to another organisation, they often will re engage with you, which is great, but it's also a torpedo that it can kill your your business. So you know the 101, of sales is that once you've got that contact as you go up across and down in terms of relationships, but that's probably not the issue. It's more important to understand who is on that executive or influence team, who's got an active role or a waiting on that buying decision that you might never get to meet. So for example, a client manufacturing, food packaging, they talk to procurement. They might talk to a site manager or a manufacturing or process manager, but in the, you know, third floor of the building there's a safety officer, there's a risk manager, there's a whole bunch of people who don't take sales people calls. So I think my argument on this is that you actually need to find other ways to get your messaging to them. It's unfair to put that responsibility on to the sales person to say, well, go and find all those people. It's more an overall marketing communication strategy to say, let's, let's track who these people are, identify them and find the messaging that's going to resonate with them. And that's where you would do things like this a podcast, or, you know, speaking at events, and you cover a much wider palette of buying decisions,  

Karen Kirton   

because a lot of the time, the people that are in that a lot, they call it the invisible buying committee that they don't want you to know who they are. 

Michael Field   

They've structured their corporate life. They've actually galvanised themselves against inbound. So they've actually built defences against that in terms of Job Title, Location, email address, availability, contact number availability. They're quite often instructed at a reception level to say, look, I don't want to take any outbound calls because I'm doing this. So these are the three people I'm prepared to talk to. So a safety person would do that, a risk person would do that. They'd have their cohort of people and a sales person trying to get in there and argue a risk message or something like that is not going to work. So it's more an organisational question to say we know that these people influence the buying decision. We know that it can weigh heavily on our success or failure. How do we identify who they are? How do we identify what they need to know, and how do we make sure that we're creating that message in a consistent way so we can influence them? 

Karen Kirton   

So what would be the signs that you're only speaking to the visible stakeholder, like there any sort of early warning signs people can be aware of. 

Michael Field   

I think that size does matter in the context of businesses, that if you're talking to a smaller business and you're talking to the owner of that business, they still have invisible buying committee. They've got partners, and their team will have a view, and those sorts of things. I think it's wise to take a view that there is always an invisible buying committee. And I'll use a sort of an old example. If you think about car sales from 2030, years ago, a salesperson would often just talk to the mail. And what a foolish decision to make when there's, you know, their partner and children and other people who are going to have a view on that decision. So I think that it's wise to always have a view that there is an invisible buying committee and try and map it. But as you rightly said, the larger the corporate the more complicated it gets, and the harder they are to reach.  

Karen Kirton   

So.What is the  first step in trying to map that? 

Michael Field   

the first step is surrendering the view that you know who the customer is. The first The first step is actually accepting that you might not know who might not know your customer as well as you think you do, and acknowledging that no matter how long you've been in your industry, you might have been in your industry for 10 or 20 years, or something like that, and say, Well, we know our customer, and there's a lot of con of confidence, often in businesses and business owners, that they really know their customer, but their deal win rate tells me that they don't know them that well, because the win rate is the evidence that they don't. So I think that's the first step. The next step is to either with your team really just do what I call an autopsy on Lost deals. So just grab the last 12 months worth of sales opportunities, particularly tenders and those sorts of things, and say, Let's really unpack why we lost that. And our company, of IT field, did some research with this is manufacturing businesses, speaking to procurement and our clients view was that they lost deals because of price, and when we did long form qual interviews with procurement, 80% of their decisions had nothing to do with price. So I think that there's just insights that are available that would refresh people's thinking and challenge them. 

Karen Kirton   

And I think over that from many years ago. I think when I was studying marketing, and they often talked about, people will give you price as the answer, but it's actually nothing to do with price, because they will pay the right amount of money if they think that it fits them. 

Michael Field   

It's the easiest way to get the rep off the phone. That's the reality. It's simple currency that the rep can take back to the business and say, the competitors beat us on price. So then everyone goes and they think it's a price issue. Whereas, if you're prepared to dig deeper with that customer and say, help me understand other parts of that proposal where we could have improved our position, can I talk to some other people in your business to understand that in more detail, or we formalised that as a customer interview set with that invisible buying committee, you come back with really deep data saying there were totally different drivers. A salesperson is not incentivized to go and find those things out because they're hard and they take a long time, and they've got a resistant client, so they just move on to the next sale. So you have to, it has to kind of sit within the remit of the CEO general management or a motivated marketer, to say, let's get to the bottom of this. 

Karen Kirton   

And it can be very hard, because sometimes the potential client doesn't actually want to tell you the real answer, either, or sometimes they don't even know, because emotionally they've made the decision, they don't even recognise what that is. Yeah, so it's pretty tricky. So going to, you know, to that point, and then also what you're talking about with, you know, people in the business not actually wanting to be found. So how do you get that invisible person or that information without being perceived as pushy or, you know, overly political for example. 

Michael Field   

Yeah, it's, I think that this is where the responsibility splits between sales and marketing. So I'll use a live example. So a client who sells vehicles to the mining industry, the client that we're working with, their sales people are talking to procurement, they're talking to the fleet manager, and they're talking to the mine manager, but the CFO has got a huge influence on that decision. So the way we did that is we conducted long form interviews with everybody in the invisible buying committee, and we found out that the key driver for the CFO was lifetime cost of ownership. So the marketing asset that we created was a lifetime cost of ownership calculator, and then we micro marketed that on LinkedIn to job title by industry, so a free lifetime cost of ownership calculator for service trucks in the mining industry. And that was only targeted to the CFOs. The important thing here is that they found it, engaged with it, downloaded it, and they believed that they found that themselves. They believed that it was their research. So then when they come to the senior leadership team meeting where that vendor opportunity is being discussed, that CFO comes in with the opinion that this is the right vendor for the following reasons, and I'm saying it in the right way, they don't know that that was part of the marketing strategy. And the sales person doesn't really have to be involved in that, 

Karen Kirton   

yeah, because it's not like you're kind of like pushing it, no, it's them actually going and say, Oh, that's interesting. And because you're speaking their language, 

Michael Field   

it's an education process. And I think that, you know, sales is about speed and trans, yes, transaction, speed and volume, I guess, and size of prize, and that's how they're rewarded. But long term, sustainable client relationships come from the whole business, understanding your value as a vendor. So I think that that's it shouldn't be seen as a short term ploy to win that customer over. It should be seen as a. Consistent part of your strategy to say they're an important audience in our marketing mix. 

Karen Kirton   

So are there themes that you generally say? So when you select the CFOs interest in lifetime value like that kind of makes sense, right? Because a finance person is going to care about that. So there are other themes that you see that people find more important from a safety person or a finance person or procurement, etc. 

Michael Field   

The one that I find most interesting is with project managers that they are managing business risk and personal slash career risk. So project managers end up making a lot more decisions on what product goes into, say, construction sites, for example, and they're putting a lot on the line, because if the project is delayed, their reputation is impacted also. So they're managing as much of their own emotional turmoil around risk as they are of the project. And there's no amount of, you know, traditional sort of, you know, blokey mateship conversations that's going to overcome that you need to be able to de risk that decision for people, and you need to de risk it for them in relation to the project in and in relation to themselves. And again, I rely on the fact that, to me, that's an education piece to say, well, first of all, does our product stack up? Does it actually de risk it, or is there some product development requirement here? Or if it is a really great product, and we're really proud of it and we're confident, meets the brief, how do we educate the customer on that so they can see those benefits and then act in our interests when the decision is made? 

Karen Kirton   

Yeah, I love that. As you're talking I'm just thinking about whenever I speak to business owners, and you talk about pain points, obviously people comes up, which is great for us in our business. But marketing is always like one of those just big it feels like this black box voodoo kind of area that I don't know what we're doing. And so I love that you've put this together, because it's really breaking that down into here are the practical things that you can do that are actually going to market your business properly. 

Michael Field   

Yeah, 100% and you're right for us. Like marketing has always been, you know, considered as sort of a dark art where businesses are kind of hoodwinked by the marketing folk, and it's can be really disappointing and frustrating. And our view on it is that, as like in your industry, there are real, measurable metrics that can be set. What is this have to achieve and measured and reviewed, and unless you know how they were achieved, unless you know what the lever was to achieve that, then it was just luck. So our view is that if you're going to go down the pathway of mapping the invisible buying committee and codifying that and then creating content to meet the needs of each of those groups, there should be a measurable impact on lead volume, lead quality, closure rate, deal size and also repeat purchase you should have, it should have, and it does have a direct impact on your market share, revenue, margin and market share. And if it doesn't do that, then it's then it's just fanciful thinking, 

Karen Kirton   

Yeah, and you mentioned how you did those qualitative interviews, yes. And I know that people would think, Oh, you know, could I do that? But I would say there's benefit for an external party. What are your thoughts? How do people react to an external party coming in? Would they tell a vendor the same things that they're telling an external 

Michael Field   

Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. We have found that repeatedly, and we've done this for hundreds of projects, and hundreds of projects means 10 to 15 interviews per project. So there's just a huge data set there that that we have that experience with, and in every single instance, we have just found astonishing insights from the customer that they would never tell a vendor, and the way we explain that to our customers is to say, look, there's two issues here. One is that your customer doesn't want to reveal their cards because they don't want to make it easier for you to win their business. They need to protect their buying behaviour. The second thing is that most businesses don't have the self discipline to not defend themselves when a customer raises a complaint. So our view is that we there's a mental game that we play, that everything we say to that customer should have a question mark on the end of it in the interview. So tell me more about that. Help me understand that. When did that happen? What was the impact? So we act more like marriage counsellors than interviewers. There's no scaling questions on a scale of one to 10. We really just show deep interest in understanding their world. There is a psychological or emotional shift that happens in the interview where you hear the big are you sure you want to hear this? And absolutely, let's. Let's hear it. And we typically ask for like, 15 or 20 minutes, and they usually give us an hour, hour and a half, and the longest interview has been three and a half hours. They had a lot to say. The last rule is, we never hang up. We won't terminate the call. So if they've got something to say, we just say, Okay, is there anything else? So yeah, you're absolutely right. We get given pure gold, gold nuggets from the customer that they would never tell the vendor. 

Karen Kirton   

Yeah, and that was something I hadn't thought about, actually, is that defensiveness, and we see that in our business with engagement surveys. We do engagement surveys, and I get it. I'm an owner of a business as well as an owner. It's really hard, really hard, when you see that 900% of everyone is very happy. Everyone is very happy with everything. Yeah, that's just the way it is. But the immediate response is obviously that, well, that's because of or, that must be or, and, yeah, we get a lot more information from the employees directly than ever comes to the managers. And I think that's probably part of it, is that active listening and being genuinely curious and wanting to show the information without having that personal aspect to 

Michael Field   

it, the owner, the owner has to, the owner of the business has to surrender all of their defences, and they have to just have an open mind and curiosity to engage with someone like yourself to say, we really want to understand what's happening with culture in the business. There's going to be dark episodes in there that they need to hear about. And I think that you're right, we need to prepare the business owner to say, look, this isn't going to be all, you know, roses and sunshine. There's going to be some information that's going to come out of that that will surprise both of us. We don't know what's happening either. So we go in with an open mind, and then when we review it, we have to look at that in a really practical and pragmatic way. To say, yep, what can we do about that now? 

Karen Kirton   

So if I take your idea of this invisible buying committee and take it out of a sales lens, it into a workplace lens, if I'm a leader and I'm trying to push change through the organisation, is there any principles that I could use from your concept that would help me in terms of, well, how do I implement This change, like, how do I find those invisible, right? 

Michael Field   

So you're talking inside the business. So you're looking at generating change inside the business. I think that the models the same in as much as there will be hidden pockets of influence that are often invisible, that the speed of the speed of commerce means that quite often, those people can skate below the radar and not get observed, and they prefer it. So there's, there's a, I think, that there's a psychological, a mental shift that needs to occur across the leadership. And you know, you and I would be in heated agreement that it has to come from the top. If the CEO and the board, or whoever it is, not 100% behind it, it will fail. That's my view. So there's a there's a level of humility that the leadership has to, has to adopt, to say, we just here to learn. We just want to understand. And if there's a history in the business that it's been sort of punitive when things are found out that requires some management where people like yourself are expert in managing that. That's not my world, but assuming that you've got a willing group of people to participate in that you've got a really skilled leader, and you've got great external help to do that. I think the first part is just getting the leadership on board, and then the next part is kind of, I think that, I think that the leadership team have to really observe the business and understand where are the pain points. I found that you can look for tells. You can say, Okay, we've got a really high number of credit notes. Let's understand that. So if you go and talk to a credit officer, they're not in a leadership role, they're not in an influence role, they're just managing credit notes. So my feeling is that you need to be able to take a calm view of the business. Look for I call it follow the heat. Look for markers in the business that could show up issues, and then follow those until you're satisfied in a non judgmental way. So I don't think that the business can often do that themselves. I genuinely believe that this is where you know businesses like yours and people with your skill set come in, because it needs somebody with a calm, level headed capability, but a framework and the experience to deliver that. 

Karen Kirton   

Now we're almost at time, and I've really been fascinated by this. Thank you. But my last question is, is there anything that you wish that you knew earlier about running a business or being a leader? 

Michael Field   

Yes, I. Um, I heard a quote from and I'm paraphrasing so it might not be exactly accurate. I heard a quote from a business person I really trust and admire, and they said that when a leader speaks, even if they speak with the volume of a mouse to the team. It's like a lion's roar, like wow. So the level of responsibility that we have to hold ourselves to our highest standards all of the time and not fall into our old habits or just let things go and those sorts of things. So without being anxious and wound up about it, I think just knowing that everything you do is seen and has an impact, both positive and negative. So that would be somebody should have told me that earlier. 

Karen Kirton   

I think so often we don't want to be that person, right, like we don't want to think of ourselves as the boss or what have you. But the reality is, is that your hierarchy and organisation automatically amplifies whatever you're saying so 

Michael Field   

good, the bad and the ugly. And you know, we're all imperfect beings. We're all a work in progress. So I have my dark side. 

Karen Kirton   

Thank you so much for joining today. How can people get in touch with you? What's the best way through LinkedIn or the website? 

Michael  

Thank you. They're very welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on there. If you visit our website, which is evettfield.com, you'll find all the information for our socials on there. Excellent. 

Karen Kirton   

Thank you so much, and we'll put the links to your LinkedIn and the website as well into the show notes. So thanks so much for joining me. I've really enjoyed it, and for those listening, if you've received value from this episode, I'd love it if you can leave a rating or a review over Apple podcasts or Spotify, so someone else can also find the episodes to help with their business. Episodes are released on Mondays, so click subscribe, and you'll be notified of when it's available. If you have any feedback, questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to amplify hr.com.au, or connect with me on LinkedIn, and we can start a conversation.