Follow the Money

A generation before Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character, pro football player Rod Tidwell shouted, “Show me the money!” in the film, Jerry Maguire, similar words were whispered by a very different character in a very different film.

Hal Holbrook played the character and he only had a code name. His code name was “Deep Throat” and his advice to Woodward and Bernstein in a dark parking garage as they were trying to piece together the Watergate story was, “Follow the money”.

Follow the money is good advice when working a complex sale too, especially a highly technical one.

Let’s say an IT manager is bidding out a project and calls us in. He has lots of questions for us and he’s able to answer ours. It’s easy to spend most, if not all our time with that main contact.

Especially when your attempts to contact others in the organization are stymied by that main contact. Or even if you do get through to them, those other execs point straight back to the main contact. And, when he tells us he has decision-making authority.

But if you follow the money, you might wonder where the money is coming from. Is it in the IT manager’s budget? Or is it in a business manager’s budget and the business manager has told IT what she wants because she’ll be paying it for it?

Next question: As long as someone is paying for your solution, why should you care?

Here’s why: If you’re only talking with IT and the business manager has the money, you’re depending on a go-between for information. But that go-between has their own vested interests, their own needs & wants. One of their interests might be to protect their turf – not only from you but also from the business manager. Even if that isn’t the case, information will be filtered.

And let’s say your solution will solve the problem but at a cost higher than the business manager’s budget. Would be easier for that IT manager to press the business manager for more money? Or, would it be easier for the IT manager to play “good cop” and make the business manager the “bad cop”, not willing to budge on the original budget?

That is why, after you determine there’s a need worth solving, a very smart step is to ask the IT manager a series of questions starting with, “Once you make your solution provider decision, what happens next?” No matter what he says, you follow up with, “And then what?” You keep asking until he tells you every step in the process (at least the ones he knows about). Eventually you get to the step where the person with the money signs off.

Want to understand the decision process? Think “Follow the money.”

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