What Is a Decision-Making Catalyst?

The role of a salesperson is simple or complex in direct proportion to the complexity of the buyer’s decision-making process. In transactional sales, the salesperson might simply be an order taker. Or they might be responsible for helping a customer choose from a basic menu of options.

But in a complex sales environment, a salesperson cannot be a simple order taker or product pusher. To succeed, the salesperson must become a decision-making catalyst. Here’s what that means and why it matters.

Change Is Hard

Even for individuals, change is hard. Continuing to do what we’ve always done, the way we’ve always done it, in the environments we’ve always been in is easy. Changing any of those things is hard and can feel risky. Most people won’t initiate a significant change in their life unless strongly motivated to do so.

Inside a large organization, change is even harder. There are multiple stakeholders, each of which is an individual with the usual individual resistances to change. Then, there are all the interdependent systems, established processes and operating procedures, and all the people who are used to doing things the way they’ve always done them.

To succeed in complex sales, one must become a decision-making catalyst.

Without a clear case and a clear path for change, most organizations will choose the status quo. For this reason, the salesperson in a complex sales environment’s biggest enemy is not another company with a similar offering. It’s the buying organization’s inertia.

In order to overcome this inertia, the savvy salesperson will take on the role of decision-making catalyst in order to help the organization to move forward and make the change.

How To Be a Decision-Making Catalyst

The salesperson’s first job if they want to help the buyer make a decision, is to identify all of the relevant stakeholders and the systems in which they operate. In a large organization, no single person makes a big decision that impacts multiple aspects of the company. Instead, multiple people across the organization will champion, promote, ignore, or object to the project, with varying levels of influence. If even one of the key players is not on board with the change, change is unlikely to happen.

Next, the salesperson must uncover each stakeholder’s unique perspectives, priorities, goals, and challenges. What problems they are trying to solve, what opportunities they want to take advantage of, risks they perceive, and what they need to know that they don’t already know.

With a clear picture of each stakeholder’s perspective the salesperson’s next job is to help the full team of stakeholders develop a shared mental model of the problem, the desired solution, its timeline, and the process for implementation. Only when the primary stakeholders are in agreement on this will the organization be move forward.

Becoming a Decision-Making Catalyst Requires a Specific Skillset

In order to become a decision-making catalyst, salespeople need more than just to understand their own product. Product knowledge is table stakes. They also need to know how to build trust, ask good questions, conduct effective conversations across organizational layers, exhibit business savvy, and employ effective systems thinking tools.

In complex B2B sales, every system inside the customer organization interacts with multiple other systems. It’s easy to get lost in this complexity and either ignore it or make the solution more complex than it needs to be.

Good systems thinking skills help salespeople stay focused and effectively navigate this complexity. The DSRP framework developed by Derek & Laura Cabrera provides useful tools for this.

Distinctions (D) tools help salespeople understand what systems and people are relevant to the problem the customer is trying to solve. This helps reduce overwhelm and identify the stakeholders who actually matter.

Systems (S) tools enable the salesperson to zoom in and zoom out on problems to understand what a company’s priorities are, how they impact various aspects of the organization, and how the proposed solution will affect it at different levels.

Relationships (R) tools help salespeople understand the interconnected relationships among stakeholders, as well as find the hidden gems that live inside those relationships.

Perspectives (P) tools remind salespeople not to assume that their own perspective is shared by the others, and instead provides them with a method toward developing the shared mental model that will result in a positive outcome.

Conclusion

Complex sales are complex, but they don’t have to be complicated. Salespeople can navigate complexity by understanding the physics of change, and creating the conditions under which organizations choose to make change. Only then can they hope to be effective in their roles. Sales leaders who understand this, understand that their core job is to support their salespeople in becoming decision-making catalysts.