CHAPTER 3

Influence and Authority

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

—Salvador Dali

When coaching the competitive deal reviews, we often heard sellers claim that they would “never get involved in customer politics.” But whether they knew it or not—and whether they liked it or not—they already were involved in customer politics from the moment they called on the account; they never had a choice. To help improve a customer’s business and to win a sale, you have to not only sell people on your ideas but sell the right people. So how do you determine who the right people are? The answer lies in understanding customer politics. More specifically, you must gain insight into how the relationship between influence and authority shapes the customer organization’s decision-making process.

The crucial nature of this realization for sellers lies in the fact that:

Political Advantage is the most important of the nontraditional sources of relative superiority because it fuels the other two: Value Creation and Competitive Differentiation.

In that way, mastering politics is not a choice; it is a requirement. So let’s begin by understanding it.