The HQ Visit Strategy

This edition is about how to engage the most senior customer executives who matter to your deal.

It's a strategy few reps know about and even fewer use it.

When I've used it, it has completely differentiated me/my company by offering a unique buying experience at the executive level.

More importantly, it has helped me close eight figure deals.

It's the HQ Visit Strategy.

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Executives are unique stakeholders

The never-ending drum beat of true enterprise sales is about how to engage senior executives in a serious business conversation.

Executives have all of the decision-making power, control (or outsized influence over budget) and a big mandate to make big things happen to improve the business.

They are most often inaccessible, protected behind gatekeepers, accosted by so many sellers that their inboxes are full of prospecting emails which lay ignored or are deleted en masse.

As sellers, we feel elated to actually get an executive on the phone, we turn ecstatic when we get them into a meeting.

Yet, more often than not, once the executive's cameo appearance is done, we never see them again. Most often they delegate the entire conversation to someone else, or what they heard in that meeting did not resonate with them and they moved on, dropping you like a hot potato.

Then there are the cases where an executive is really interested in what your company does. They know they have a problem they can’t fix internally, they know they need to procure an external solution, they may even be watching a short list of suppliers - you and your biggest competitors.

It is at this point that you are simultaneously met with the biggest, most serious opportunity of your fiscal year AND you are at the greatest risk of losing it. The hunt is afoot, the hounds have been released and it is ON.

I often say that selling to large enterprises is a race to the top. The seller who gets the highest in the org wins (within reason, you can go too high and spin your wheels).

But how do you keep your most senior customer stakeholder(s) engaged throughout the sales cycle? How do you maintain access to them along the journey?

The first step is to set up some kind of governance structure in your engagement. “Governance” is essentially a series of pre-agreed meetings scheduled in advance to reserve time with relevant stakeholders to progress a project or engagement. They are more typical with existing customers but they can absolutely be put in place with net new opportunities. I wrote at length about governance structures here.

But the crowning event, which can completely change the game for you and your big deal, is an HQ visit.

An HQ visit is where you host a small delegation (2-6 people) from your account to visit your corporate headquarters. The visits have 3 goals:

1. Get senior customer stakeholders away from their day to day craziness and onto your territory where they can be immersed in a creative, collaborative experience with you and your team.
2. Give your customer VIP’s concentrated access to your most senior executives and brightest minds to share deep thought leadership, product and implementation knowledge.
3. To quickly establish and deepen relationships between your leadership teams.

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Who Should Attend

HQ visits are a strategic tool designed to help you accelerate senior stakeholder engagement. The guest list should start at the top of the food chain in terms of the executives(s) who own the problem you are trying to solve or the project that has been slated and funded to remedy the issue. If that person or group isn’t willing to travel, you know one of two things - either the deal will never be big because it’s not important enough for the senior player(s) to invest personal time, or you are not in first place in the beauty pageant vs. other suppliers.

When you DO have executive buy-in at the highest appropriate level, make sure they have the right customer stakeholders come along, and then go all in to deliver a top-notch experience.

The "others" I typically invite are the buying committee - heads of the functional areas who will be part of the vendor selection. It is important they come because they need to get to know your organization as well and they should feel the sense of specialness you are heaping upon them with such a unique experience.

In terms of time commitment, I recommend no less than 5 hours, no more than 2 days, 1 night.

Content You Will Need

The key content pillars are

1. The Customer Perspective (they present) - their business, the problem, why they need to fix it
2. Your perspective - what the customer will need to do to get to an optimal future state
3. The recommended approach
4. The journey they need to traverse
5. Multiple customer stories
6. Collaborative experience proving a point, creating a new perspective
7. Social space

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What Should the Agenda Look Like

Here is my ideal agenda for an executive HQ visit:

Agenda

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Key Experiences

There are five things the customer should experience over the course of the visit.

1. You think of their reality before you think of your products.
2. You have really smart, credible people.
3. You have done this before and you will be a safe pair of hands.
4. They will not screw up this project by choosing you.
5. You will be easy to work with.
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The HQ visit is an incredibly powerful and underutilized strategy to bring a quantum leap in the progress of important sales cycles in a very short time frame.

Which of your accounts is a candidate for an HQ visit?

I encourage you to go for it with your best account in the next quarter. Let me know how it goes!

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