Any business developer who has successfully navigated through the maze of corporate decision making and purchasing processes can tell you that a deal cannot be closed until it is approved by the person who has the power to say yes.
What is also true, but often forgotten, is that an opportunity should not be considered dead until it is rejected by that same person and nobody else along the way. Yet, it is very common to see sales deals fade away at middle levels of large organizations, rejected by managers who don’t have the power to approve them.
This is somewhat expected. Mid-level managers usually operate within very well defined boundaries of approval power. For anything that is outside these boundaries, they act as gateways to the higher levels of the organization, tasked with filtering out whatever does not have enough value to move up the chain. In most cases, they have to be sold first on any idea, before further selling it internally or allowing any outsider to do so. So it is not surprising that they end up saying many NOs.
But this makes no sense. Let’s say that you have to ask for an exception to an established rule. Would you accept a negative response to your request from somebody who is just following rules that he/she does not have the power to change or circumvent? Probably not. Just to mention a few examples from day-to-day dealings, you don’t let that happen when talking to customer service representatives; you ask for the supervisor. Same is true when dealing with banks, government agencies and so on.
There is no reason why it should be any different when doing business development. Finding the right person to say the ultimate NO is the only way to be sure that a deal will not happen. Until you get to that person, a rejection by somebody else along the way may be for all the wrong reasons: he has his own agenda, he doesn’t understand the value of what you are selling, he doesn’t want to bother, etc. It is certainly not easy to do, but the bottom line is that you should not accept a NO from somebody who does not have the power to say YES.
