Every decision maker is looking for someone who can solve their biggest problems. To close a big deal, you need to demonstrate you can do just that.

For Tom Searcy’s full column in Inc.com click here

http://www.inc.com/tom-searcy/getting-to-the-real-dealmaker-on-big-deals.html

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A case in point that we discuss in our new book, “How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett” (www.closelikebuffett), happened in 2003.

For the full story visit our Forbes.com column

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dealmakers/2012/11/13/4-ways-buffett-overcomes-deal-bumps/

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What does Warren Buffett, consistently one of the top three wealthiest individuals in the world, recommend that you invest in? The answer is you.

When I attended the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting last year to see the world’s greatest investor in action and interview some of his executives, I walked through the Omaha airport and saw a photograph of Warren Buffett’s graduating class from the University of Nebraska with his quote, “Invest in yourself.” Investing in yourself is not an option in his eyes: it’s an imperative.

“Generally speaking, investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. Anything that improves your own talents; nobody can tax it or take it away from you,” says Buffett. “They can run up huge deficits and the dollar can become worth far less. You can have all kinds of things happen. But if you’ve got talent yourself, and you’ve maximized your talent, you’ve got a tremendous asset that can return ten-fold.”

For the past year I have had the privilege to study Buffett after McGraw-Hill publishing asked my buddy, Tom Searcy, and me to write a book on the lessons to be learned from the world’s greatest dealmaker.

Buffett did not amass his wealth by shrewd investments alone. Buffett is a master dealmaker. Amazingly, Buffett often wins deals by beating out higher-bidding competitors.

Career advice from the 82-year-old sage is also included in our book, How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett.

Here is a sampling of his career advice:

Every deal, including the job you take, must pencil out. Buffet said: “You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if you can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.”

Focus. Focus. Focus. Buffett recalls meeting Bill Gates in 1991: “Then at dinner, Bill Gates Sr. posed the question to the table: What factor did people feel was the most important in getting to where they’d gotten in life? And I said ‘Focus,’ and Bill [Bill Gates Jr.] said the same thing.”

Integrity matters. “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy,” said Buffett. “And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”

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 ”How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett”

 http://www.closelikebuffett.com/order/

“When you walk through the Omaha airport, there is a picture of Warren Buffett’s graduating class from the University of Nebraska and his quote, ‘Invest in yourself.’ Once you understand that there is an art and a science to making the deal, at once you’ll understand the value of Warren Buffett’s quote. Investing in yourself is not an option, it’s an imperative, and investing in this book is exactly the same. Getting the wisdom and thinking behind Warren Buffett’s deals will help you gain insight into the art and science of making your deals.”

―Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Red Book of Selling

By Tom Searcy and Henry DeVries

Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest dealmaker, has two rules when making big deals:

  “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.”

 Money is definitely an important part of the language of deal making. Do you speak in the terms of a big deal? Most sales people don’t often think of language as being an issue between them and their prospects. But to land a big deal with the C suite, it definitely is. 

 Why?  Two reasons:

1. You’ll sell one or more steps up on the organization chart of your prospect, at the senior executive level to win your bigger deals. This means that they see their problems in different language terms.
2. You get sent to whom you sound like. If you speak the language of feature/benefit or pain/solution, you will be directed down the organization chart and working with you will be delegated to a level at which your biggest deals do not get made.

 Executive prospects used to have budgets set in advance for those goods and service needed.  In those days you would go into their offices and say something to the effect of, “You’re buying X number of widgets from my competitor.  You should buy those widgets from me now because mine are better, they’re less expensive, I handle my inventory more efficiently, and I provide services they can’t match.” 

 Even more, you had the advantage of a “heads-up” against any existing competition out there. You probably sold your product or service using the following:

• Advantages your product or service brings to the prospects 
• Relieving prospects’ pain
• Your special features 
• Superiority of your methods.
• Prospects’ issues with former vendors.
• Words like Quality, Service, Capacity, Innovation, On Time Delivery, Guarantees, etc.

And these characteristics are important—to the department manager whose responsibility is to serve as the gatekeeper for the department.  Managers are expected to check and double-check all the characteristics you offer as evidence of your solution strength.  If they don’t, they lose their jobs.

 But now you’re going to sell to higher-level company deal makers, the kind that occupy the C level suites.  Since they delegated matters of service, quality, and price to the department manager, they have no interest in hearing about those matters. 

Talk About Money, Time and Risk

In our book How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett we talk about why big deal makers want to hear about Money, Time, and Risk.  This is the language of big deals.  Different deal.  Different prospects.  Therefore, different language.

That doesn’t mean you have to repeat those exact three words in every other sentence.  It means you translate your solution descriptions into terms that clearly relay what is of most interest to your prospect.  Here’s how it works…

When you mention the quality of your products and services, what do you really mean?  If you’re talking about all your certifications of quality, while they’re important, they aren’t what the executives want to hear.

It isn’t that they don’t care about quality.  Of course they do. But for higher-level executives, their concern about quality takes a different form. 

What does high quality mean to high-level executives?  From their perspective, if they do a deal with you and you have high quality products, what do they get? The answer is as simple as A, B, C:

A. Money

• More repeat purchases from their customers
• Reduced waste in production
• Ability to price their products or services above those of their competition

B. Time

• Trust that you will meet deadlines
• Fewer hours spent in dealing with customer complaints
• Quicker installation guaranteed to their customers

C. Risk

• Less risk they can’t meet their deadlines
• Less risk their products or services won’t work correctly
• Greater customer confidence

Sales people need to emphasize, and even quantify, the above kinds of pluses to your solution for C suite executive problems.  Saying you have high quality products or services doesn’t do you any good.  Showing how those can be translated into money, time, and risk for the senior executives will give you a much better push toward landing your next big deal.

# # #

Former CEOs Tom Searcy and Henry DeVries, co-authors of the McGraw-Hill book How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett, are experts on key account sales strategy. With his sales strategy company Hunt Big Sales, Tom has helped clients land more than $5 billion in deals. The ex-head of an Ad Age 500 agency, Henry is on the marketing faculty and is the assistant dean of continuing education at the Univ. of Calif. San Diego. When you order How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett today, you’ll gain instant access to hundreds of dollars worth of business-building tools and advice from leading experts. Details here.

 Click here to buy the book

 ”How to Close a Deal Like Warren Buffett”

 http://www.closelikebuffett.com/order/

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1. Know the other guy’s money. He always seems to know how they make it, how they count it, and how they spend it. This is obviously much easier to do for publicly traded companies. For privately held companies, the numbers are fairly easy to estimate, at least the cost of goods sold and probably the cost of sale. These numbers are critical to discussing the possibilities of working together. Too often the discussion stops at budget. When you don’t know, ask. Not the trade secrets, but at least the industry averages. This provides a basic framework for the discussion.
2. Know the other guy’s wallet. How does this sale impact any of these critical numbers? The terms of the deal should be looked at from their side of the table first, then yours.
3. Start discussing the money early. You know you are going to discuss the money later. Early in the conversation, you do not have enough information for precision. Instead, you have an understanding of the economics of the prospect’s industry, so you have enough to determine if a deal makes any sense at all. Use that economic information and industry knowledge to frame a shared understanding of the reality of the money for this opportunity.
4. Use ranges to qualify and disqualify. Understand early (and throughout the discussion) whether you and your prospect are in the same arena. By using ranges of prices, cost structures, yields, and performance you can both be sure that you are dealing in a shared reality rather than getting to the end and finding yourselves so far apart that there is permanent damage done to the relationship.
5. Speak the language of investment and outcomes. Every large sale is an investment on both parts in an outcome. When you move the conversation from price to investment and cost to outcomes you are focusing on the business impact rather than budget impact. This is the language of large sales.
6. Don’t discount early. Listen carefully and you will regularly hear fearful “deal makers” use language like, “Let’s not let money get in the way of working together.” There’s a word for this that is not used in polite company. This is the language of discounting before the scope has been clearly defined. The sales person believes that he is being clever by taking money off the table. What he has really done is to take margin off the table, his and his company’s margin. If qualifying investment and impact has been made up front, then this point does not need to be made again.
7. Don’t negotiate until it’s time. Work on the deal points one at a time. Work through the investment and outcome ideas clearly, then negotiate. True, all of these points require negotiation. However, too often the conversation turns to negotiations too early before real scope and deliverables have been defined. That means that the whole is reduced to the little parts before the shared picture of the whole has been established.

In the book you will read many tales of deals that illustrate important lessons about how to make a deal like Warren Buffett. With each lesson you will also get some specific thoughts on how to put the lesson into practice. No book about Warren would be complete without a generous amount of the wit and wisdom of the world’s greatest dealmaker, which we include in our Warren Ways. And Warren has so much to teach from a lifetime of deal making we end each lesson with a Buffett Bonus.

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1. The 22.6 million self-employed professionals, consultants and business owners make deals to land clients and contracts.

2. The 15.4 million sales professionals and related occupations (advertising sales, business development, insurance agents, real estate brokers and agents, sales reps, securities and financial services) who make deals to land accounts.

3. The 5.8 million corporate CEOs, the chief deal makers of their organizations.

4. The 1 million business transaction attorneys who close deals on behalf of clients and for themselves.

The millions of business leaders equally interested in money flow and deal-making opportunities, including executives involved in corporate strategic planning.

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“Risk,” says Warren, “comes from not knowing what you are doing.” For the most part Warren did his homework so he knew what he was doing.

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