CHAPTER 14

The Indirect Strategy

Changing the Ground Rules

Appear where you are not expected.

—Sun Tzu

Stage IV Customer Advisors know that it is uncommon for sellers to marshal all the traditional and nontraditional sources of relative superiority necessary at a specific and early point in the sales cycle. For this reason, Customer Advisors focus on the Indirect strategy as the intellectual sword of their sales campaign; it produces the highest win rates of any class of strategy. It accomplishes this by leveraging politics, unexpected customer value, and strategy to shape the customer’s buying criteria.

With an Indirect strategy, you work to change the ground rules by which your customer will make a decision. You identify unexpected customer value in your Attack box and work with the customer Power Base to make this the primary buying criteria for the decision.

The element of timing is critically important with the Indirect approach, in terms of:

• Upfront Speed: It requires that you quickly identify unexpected customer value and align it with the Situational Power Base early in the sales cycle. This will help you establish an informal agreement in principle with the Power Base in terms of what unexpected customer value you’ll provide—and when during the sales cycle.
• Back-end Surprise: It requires that the seller hold back on proposing Unexpected Value to a customer until a specific point late in the sales cycle. This enables you to pull the rug out from under your competitors at a point when they have little chance to catch up.

Now, let’s take a moment to take a look at different types of competitive ways the Indirect strategy has been implemented.