The Indirect Strategy
The Compass - Winning Deal Strategy Series; #2
The Indirect Strategy
What is it?
It is a strategy of avoiding direct engagement with the existing evaluation criteria or stronger competitors. Instead of pushing your deal to a close, you pull it in a direction that maximizes your strengths and minimizes your weaknesses or the strengths of your competition.
The objective is to maneuver yourself into a position of power to navigate your deal to a successful outcome.
Why use it?
Most salespeople instinctively push—pushing products, pushing for meetings, pushing to close. They are like baseball players with only 1 pitch, the fastball. Bring on the heat!
Most of your competition is going to use a direct or push strategy. If you are in a position of strength (see my essay on Direct Strategy) then push back and dominate your competition. But if you are weak in one or two areas in your deal, then pushing puts you in less-than-optimal position. So let the competition continue to push while you pull.
In today's B2B and Enterprise sales environments, most high-value deals are won through pull, not push. In my experience, I’ve used a Direct Strategy in about 20% of my deals and an Indirect Strategy about 50% of the time.
There is another benefit to an Indirect Strategy. It forces you to do additional discovery which has the potential to find additional value for your offering which can potentially increase the size of your deal. Think of that! Instead of discounting you increase your deal size. My example below shows how we increased our deal size 10x over our initial proposal.
This is the essence of the Indirect Strategy.
When to use it?
If you not in a clear position of strength in 1 or 2 of the following deal disciplines, consider using the Indirect Strategy:
1. Time – the timing of the close is not clearly defined or keeps shifting.
2. Velocity – if you are lacking enough velocity for control of the deal.
3. Position – if I am weak in one of the following 4 elements.
a. People – I am not bridged to power or am single threaded.
b. Value – my value prop is not clearly differentiated.
c. Profile – the Buyer does not meet my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
d. Process – the Buying process is not clearly defined or keeps shifting. Or the evaluation criteria do not play to my strengths or was set by my competition.
The other way to determine this is if your weighted forecast is between 60-80%, then you may want to consider the Indirect.
You are not losing the deal but do not have enough power to warrant a Direct Strategy.
Where to use it?
Use it only for strategic deals or those that have enough revenue to justify the added time and cost of sale. With the Indirect Strategy, you will win but you are taking the long way home
If you are working a smaller deal or one where you are not in a position of strength in more than 2 areas, there are other strategies that you can execute that may be less demanding than the Indirect.
The Indirect Strategy takes a lot of work and keen situational awareness. Using AI here is invaluable. Trained properly, your AI will make short work of the deep discovery requirements and help you know when to pivot. It can help you gain leverage and power.
The opportunity just needs to justify the effort.
Who to use it with?
The Indirect Strategy takes resources on your part. Build your deal team and deploy them strategically. In my example below of the Indirect, the client was a start-up with a small team. They hired me as an interim CRO to help them close that deal and 2 others to get them traction.
With your Buyer, you will also need create broad & deep access. You can’t be single threaded (single contact) and execute an Indirect Strategy with effect.
How to use it?
Start by probing on the 6 points of the Compass.
1. Time – look for ‘compelling events’. These are business events that you can attach your offering to and demonstrate how your offerings will support the successful execution of those objectives. It would be an M&A, an annual growth goal, new product offering, etc. The features and function evaluation become secondary to how you will support those business objectives.
2. Velocity – what are the activities you can execute or content to share that will increase the velocity of your offering. My favorite thing is to ‘tell them something they don’t know’. Some insight that you can share that separates you from the competition or the status quo. It could be a new product release or a new success story.
3. Position – I expand my discovery in these 4 areas:
a. People – go wide and deep. Engage with Executives, with Management, with Operations and other potential users. You’re looking for new perspectives on the problem your opportunity is trying to solve. I can’t tell you how many times I found people on the Buyer’s team that found the existing evaluation criteria to be incomplete offering me the opportunity to ‘reframe’ the deal.
b. Value – this is where the most value is. Go up the value chain. 90% of salespeople sell the efficiency value prop - their offering is going to help the Users do their job faster, better & cheaper. Great. But this is also the weakest of values. Prob on effectiveness, risk mitigation, strategic growth, customer experience or intrinsic value.
c. Profile – Constantly look for changes in the Buyer and Competitor profiles. Is there something changing that provides an opportunity to exploit. An example is if the Buyer was just acquired by a PE firm which has been rather common lately.
d. Process – Suggest changes to the Buyer’s ‘buying’ process. Point to industry best practice for evaluating offerings like yours. Show how other firms in the Buyer’s industry successfully purchased your offering and what their process was. Proactively introduce references who may disrupt the existing buying process.
Example of the Indirect Strategy.
This may be a bit long, but it is a true story of the Indirect in action.
A start-up tech company developed an innovative product for managing documents in regulated industries like Banking, Pharma, etc. They were invited to compete in a project at one of the largest global banks. I was hired by the Seller as the interim CRO to help them with this opportunity.
The bank’s objective was to reduce their document expenses by $250K per year. The competition was 3 other firms each larger than $1B in annual revenue. We had zero. The Bank’s Operations VP had point on their selection process.
We had a superior product but were getting out-muscled by the larger competitors. Our profile was weak compared to the competition and they had access at the executive level. Relying on our superior product capability alone and competing directly was too risky. We had to execute an Indirect Strategy.
We asked the project sponsor what other areas of the bank outside of Operations may see some benefit from this project and started meeting with these various groups. One, the Private Wealth Management group, shared that they didn’t do a lot of document management but what they did do was critical. They had a six-step process for documenting and managing their wealthy client’s money. Here is the dialog. “What happens if you miss one of the document management steps? We get fined. How often does that happen. 3-4x / year when the SEC does their audit. How much do you get fined? Last year over $50M. What?”
We found 2 other groups with similar situations. We then executed a ‘lock and flank’ strategy. We made the appearance of competing directly on the main Operations criteria. We enhanced our claims on our product capability a bit and challenged the competitions product claims. The competitors obviously pushed back hard keeping themselves ‘locked’ on a features and functions battle. Then, we flanked. We developed a prototype for the smaller groups so they could see their specific requirements in action which gave us the support of these ancillary but powerful teams.
These actions got us meetings with senior Executives at the bank further strengthening our competitive power and credibility. We won that deal. And, due to the expanded scope, the deal size increased from $450k to $4.5M.
We had moved our value proposition from efficiency only, where the competition stayed focused, to efficiency and risk mitigation. As is the nature of banks, the senior executives there cared way more about mitigating risk than gaining efficiency.
Leveraging AI
The first thing to do is train your AI to search and build the business profiles of your customer and competition. I have 16 profile variables I evaluate. The profiles provide insight into how they buy and compete. Have it re-assess those profiles daily during the sales process highlighting opportunities that may give you leverage.
This used to take me hours and even days to do. AI now does it in under a minute.
Train your AI to track your deal velocity. Then do a deal workout with your team to plan your next moves and have your AI measure the impact of these actions on your deal velocity. You should only execute activities that impact the speed and direction of your deal. This is all about creating the power to drive momentum.
On my strategic, must-win deals I would spend hours with my team working through different deal strategies. Now, with a trained AI, you can get 3-4 options with their velocity impact back immediately. You keep refining it and in under 30 min you have a battle-ready plan.
Note: Most sales teams are using AI tactically and retro-actively. “Tell me what happened”. You gain a competitive advantage by leveraging your AI strategically. “Tell me what should happen”. You will need to train your AI to do this.
Navigation:
This Indirect Strategy essay is the 2nd of the 8 Compass Sales Strategies in this Deal Strategy Series.
Each strategy serves a specific purpose in different competitive deal scenarios. The next essay: The Divisional or Split Strategy.
I train sales professionals, business leaders, and their AI agents on Sales and Deal strategies using the Compass AI Sales Strategy system. This training acts as a force multiplier, empowering you and your AI agents to work in alignment to win business and exceed your number in competitive environments.
This was written while listening to ‘Where I Find God’ by Larry Fleet
Artwork: #3 by Amy Donaldson
