Find Your "Jimmy"

Have you ever encountered a situation where you have sold to all of the right people including executive sponsors, decision makers, stakeholders, procurement, and economic buyers - and yet somehow the sale isn’t going through?  Or the project is stalled?  My boss told me about a situation that he encountered several years ago where he had seemingly gained agreement with everyone necessary to implement his solution and yet week after week nothing happened.  He finally did some additional digging and found that a guy named Jimmy was in charge of scheduling projects, and Jimmy didn’t like our company, so he continued to put our project at the bottom of his list.

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Even though my boss thought that he had every base covered, there was a critical player in the process that he had not encountered.  Further digging surfaced that Jimmy loved baseball. After a few tense meetings with Jimmy - and a couple of baseball games later -  the project found its way to the top of his project list. Jimmy had not realized the importance of the projects, and he had an incorrect impression about the company.  Jimmy, though not a decision maker in the traditional sense, was nonetheless critical to the sales process.

I once encountered a “Jimmy” of my own.  An account was ready to move forward with our solution, yet we were being blocked by the contracts group.  No matter what we put in front of them, they kicked it back with non-trivial changes to the terms that caused our legal team to nearly start from scratch. It was very frustrating for both companies.  In this case our customer’s business user was able to wield her influence in the organization to make our projects a priority and someone told the contracts team to take it easy on us. We eventually got our agreements completed but not until we had missed a few important go-live dates.  All of this because “Jimmy” was holding things up unnecessarily.  We eventually spent some time with him, and like my boss’ Jimmy, he is now on our side.

Selling to all the right people and getting the appropriate sign-offs is hard enough - uncovering the “Jimmy” in your account can be just as important.  Find him and neutralize him or you will find your projects on eternal hold.