MKTG 3130 Week 3

Please write 1 page.

Read the article in our Week 3 Folder “Making the Consensus Sale”. This article makes reference to the challenging group dynamics that have become prevalent in today’s complex selling environment. Identify at least three parallels between the Buying Influences framework of Strategic Selling and the challenges of making a consensus sale as detailed in the article. For example, is there a parallel between a Coach and a Mobilizer? Draw on the specifics of the Strategic Selling framework and the Consensus Sale article to justify your answers.

Karl Schmidt is the
practice manager of CEB
Marketing. Brent Adamson
is CEB’s managing director
of advisory services.
Anna Bird is a director
of strategic research for
CEB Marketing.

106 Harvard Business Review March 2015

Making
the
Consensus
Sale

You have to align all the decision makers.
by Karl Schmidt, Brent Adamson, and Anna Bird

G
ET

TY
IM

A
G

ES
/M

A
RT

IN
B

A
R

R
A

U
D

HBR.ORG

March 2015 Harvard Business Review 107

Sales reps have long been taught to seek out the executive who can single-handedly approve a deal at a company. But whether
they’re selling to a customer with 50 employees
or 50,000, reps today rarely find a unilateral
decision maker. More often, they discover that
the authority to make decisions rests with groups
of individuals—all of whom have different
roles, and all of whom have veto power. Reaching
consensus and closing deals has become an
increasingly painful and protracted process for
customers and suppliers alike.

To understand the impact of buying groups on
sales, CEB recently conducted four surveys of more
than 5,000 stakeholders involved in B2B purchases.
We found that, on average, 5.4 people now have to
formally sign off on each purchase. Complicating
matters, the variety of jobs, functions, and geogra-
phies that these individuals represent is much wider
than it used to be. Whereas an IT supplier might have
once sold directly to a CIO and his or her team, today
that same firm may also need buy-in from the chief
marketing officer, the chief operating officer, the
chief financial officer, legal counsel, procurement
executives, and others. The people on buying teams
have increasingly diverse priorities, and to win them
over, suppliers must bridge those differences. The

upshot is longer cycle times, smaller deals, lower
margins, and, in the ever more common worst case,
customer deadlock that scuttles the deal. (See the
exhibit “Group Size Matters.”)

Innovative suppliers, however, are finding ef-
fective ways to create consensus in these buying
groups. This article describes how those companies
prime groups with a common language and shared
perspectives, motivate internal champions to ad-
vocate for their firms’ solutions, and equip those
champions to help groups reach agreement. As we’ll
see, accomplishing all of this requires some novel ap-
proaches and a new level of collaboration between
sales and marketing.

Understanding Customer Consensus
CEB’s surveys spanned a wide range of industries,
geographies, and go-to-market models and an even
larger array of issues associated with group pur-
chases—everything from buying-group demographics
to purchase-process dynamics to individual behavior.
Three key conclusions emerged from the responses:

1. Personalization can backfire. Conventional
wisdom holds that the more personalized a message
is, the more effectively it will drive a sale. And in-
deed, CEB’s surveys found that individual customer
stakeholders who perceived supplier content to be
tailored to their specific needs were 40% more will-
ing to buy from that supplier than stakeholders who
didn’t. Marketers understand this: In another survey,

Consensus
often falls apart
before sales
reps even arrive
on the scene.
108 Harvard Business Review March 2015

MAKING THE CONSENSUS SALE

95% of nearly 200 B2B CMOs identified “better tai-
loring of content” as a top priority. But personaliza-
tion has a dark side. When individuals in a buying
group receive different messages, each one stress-
ing that an offering meets his or her narrow needs,
it can highlight the diverging goals and priorities in
the group, driving a wedge between members and
hindering consensus.

The implication for suppliers is clear: The best
way to build customer consensus isn’t to do a better
job of connecting individual customer stakehold-
ers to the supplier but to more effectively connect
customer stakeholders to one another.

2. Achieving consensus is hardest early in
the buying process. To help groups reach deci-
sions, it’s critical to understand where in the pur-
chase process they run into trouble. Our research
divided the typical process into three phases: prob-
lem definition, solution identification, and supplier
selection. We then asked customer stakeholders to
look at both group and individual decisions and say
which phases of them were most difficult.

Two results stood out: B2B buyers found group
decision making most difficult twice as often as indi-
vidual decision making. More important, the phase
they seemed to experience the most challenges with
was identifying a solution—agreeing on the best
course regardless of supplier. Most suppliers are
focusing on the wrong stage of the buying process,
falling all over themselves to persuade customers to
choose them, rather than helping customers settle on
a solution.

Our data shows that customers are, on average,
37% of the way through a purchase process by the
time they reach the solution-definition stage, and
57% of the way through the process before they en-
gage with supplier sales reps. So all too often cus-
tomer consensus has fallen apart before reps even

arrive on the scene. If suppliers aren’t anticipating and
proactively overcoming disconnections among stake-
holders before sales engagements, they’re probably
losing many deals—without even knowing it.

Achieving customer consensus presents not just
a problem for sales but also an opportunity for mar-
keting. Marketing departments are well positioned
to foster consensus for two reasons: They have tools
that can reach customers more effectively than sales
can during the critical consensus-building process,
and they can combine customer knowledge from
sales with their own market research to identify pat-
terns of customer behavior and broad customer in-
sights that they can translate into scalable marketing
approaches and materials.

3. Willingness to buy and willingness to
advocate are not the same. Because a supplier
has limited access to buying-group members during
the early stages of the process, it needs the active
help of an advocate inside the customer organiza-
tion. We call these people “mobilizers.” Mobilizers
come in many forms, but the best are motivated to
improve their organization; are passionate about
sharing their insights with colleagues; ask smart,
probing questions; and have the organizational clout
and connections to bring decision makers together.

But to effectively use mobilizers, suppliers must
address two challenges: the willingness of individu-
als to advocate on a supplier’s behalf, and their abil-
ity to do so. A CEB survey of nearly 600 B2B buyers
found that fully half the people who reported a will-
ingness to buy a product or service were not willing
to publicly advocate for it. This represents a huge ob-
stacle for suppliers seeking to leverage mobilizers to
create consensus.

Research shows that potential mobilizers are in-
hibited by the perceived risks inherent in fighting
for change and promoting consensus. Up to half fear

Idea in Brief
THE PROBLEM
Increasingly, decisions about
large company purchases are
made not by individual executives
but by a group of managers.
Because group members often
have different priorities, getting
them to reach agreement poses
a big challenge for suppliers.

THE SOLUTION
Salespeople must learn to build
consensus. They can do so by
helping buying-group members
discover shared language and
goals; motivating individual
members of the group to
become advocates for their firms’
solutions; and equipping those
advocates to teach and persuade.

THE BENEFITS
Consensus building taps
capabilities within both sales
and marketing. Companies that
encourage the two functions
to collaborate on consensus-
focused strategies are seeing
decisive improvements in sales
performance.

HBR.ORG

March 2015 Harvard Business Review 109

losing respect or credibility in their organization if
they push for an unpopular purchase or are unable to
attract support, or if the purchase they backed turns
out to be unwise. Twelve percent even report that
such advocacy could threaten their jobs. (The old
saying “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” speaks
to this point; potential advocates don’t want to be
the person who went out on a limb for the “wrong”
supplier.) Fear of these consequences increases
dramatically as the size of a buying team grows.

Ultimately, the decision to publicly advocate for
change is driven much more by the personal value
provided to the mobilizer than by the business value
provided to that individual’s organization. In study-
ing what inspires mobilizers, we found that factors
such as whether a solution could advance a person’s
career or help him be seen as a better leader were five

times as potent as the offering’s “business value”—
things like superior product features, likely impact
on business outcomes, or return on investment.

Overcoming potential mobilizers’ perceptions
of personal risk requires a personal appeal, not just
an organizational one. This is a deeply telling point,
because the most common tools in suppliers’ tool
kits—for example, ROI calculators, lifetime-value
assessments, and total-cost-of-ownership score-
cards—address organizational risks and rewards
but say very little about individual ones. Once again,
suppliers are emphasizing the wrong things with
their sales and marketing investments.

But even when someone sees the personal value
to be gained and is motivated to become a mobilizer,
he or she will need support. Marketing has a key
role to play in both encouraging mobilizers and
equipping them to build consensus.

Creating Customer Consensus
In research with hundreds of organizations and
thousands of sales and marketing executives, we
have identified three strategies that are key in
building consensus. Below, we’ll describe each of
them in detail, illustrating them with selected ex-
amples of approaches that have proved effective at
the companies that belong to CEB Marketing.

1. Priming customer buying groups for
agreement by creating a common language
and shared perspectives around a problem
and a solution. The starting point in any program
to build consensus is to identify common ground
among stakeholders. If you’re selling enterprise
marketing-management solutions, you’ll most likely
be dealing with at least the CMO, the CIO, the CFO,
and procurement, who all have overlapping but dis-
tinct and sometimes conflicting interests. Helping
those stakeholders see their shared interests will set

Help
stakeholders
see their
shared
interests and
find common
ground.

MAKING THE CONSENSUS SALE

the stage for consensus and make it easier—and less
risky—for mobilizers to advocate on your behalf.

Two approaches can help purchase decision
makers focus on what unites rather than what
separates them:

Language mapping. Like many companies, the
network and security solutions provider Cisco mines
social media and online publications to track trend-
ing terms and themes in its space. By analyzing the
phrases surrounding terms of interest, Cisco cap-
tures the context of online conversations and can
identify the priorities of various stakeholders as well
as topics that might appeal to them. For example,
in discussions of smart devices, it found that both
CMOs and CIOs focused on “connectivity,” though
the CMOs might refer a lot to “product development”
and “innovation,” and CIOs to “systems upgrades”
and “network architecture.”

The area of overlap—“connectivity”—gave
Cisco’s marketers the raw materials to develop
messaging. They crafted a range of experimental
messages (such as “connectivity isn’t as high as
you think” and “Only 1% of devices are connected
so far”), embedded them in social media, and then
tracked adoption of the language in online conver-
sations among both stakeholder groups. The mar-
keting team then integrated resonating concepts
and tested messages into collateral, such as tweets,
blogs, and white papers, to help create a common
language and shared perspectives among stakehold-
ers. Cisco’s sales reps report that this approach has
raised interest in connectivity—which Cisco’s prod-
ucts enable—among both CIOs and CMOs, increasing
alignment between two often disconnected parties.

Shared learning. In some cases stakeholders be-
lieve that no common ground exists and that their in-
terests are mutually exclusive. A production manager,
for example, may feel that her goals for efficiency are
deeply different from a safety officer’s goals—though
in fact they aren’t. In such cases, shared learning
experiences can expose common priorities.

Kimberly-Clark Professional (KCP) sells health
and safety products and services to businesses
worldwide. To make enterprise sales such as air-
frame maintenance solutions, KCP may have to
align the seemingly diverse interests of production
managers, safety officers, sustainability heads, pur-
chasing managers, and others who need to agree on
a purchase. One way KCP achieves this is through
facilities assessments, or site surveys, that provide

shared learning. Marketing promotes the surveys on
its website and sends potential customers invitations
explaining the benefits of “learning tours” in which
KCP experts visit facilities, offer advice on improve-
ments, and answer questions. Typically, the accompa-
nying materials promise guidance on how to control
costs, increase productivity, reduce workers’ exposure
to hazardous materials, and increase environmental
performance—highlighting the stakeholders’ shared
needs. After the walk-through, KCP provides a report
summarizing its findings and recommendations.

Greif, a global industrial packaging manufac-
turer, takes another approach to shared learning.
Companies in its industry generally struggle with
commoditization, as most purchasing decisions are

GROUP SIZE MATTERS
THE LIKELIHOOD OF A PURCHASE DROPS SHARPLY
AS THE NUMBER OF DECISION MAKERS INCREASES.

NUMBER OF GROUP MEMBERS

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX
0

100

81% 31%

SOURCE CEB/MOTISTA 2013 B2B BRAND SURVEY

AVERAGE
BUYING-
GROUP
SIZE IS
5.4

C
H

A
N

C
E

O
F

PU
R

C
H

A
SE

HBR.ORG

March 2015 Harvard Business Review 111

1 Make content supplier neutral.
Mobilizers will
reject anything that
makes them look like
shills. To be credible,
information on both
the problem and the
solution should not
promote any one
supplier or offering,
though it’s OK to
clarify elements of
the problem or the
solution that your
company is uniquely
able to address.

2 Minimize mobilizers’
efforts. Mobilizers
will act only if
they feel that the
personal value of
promoting a product
or service outweighs
the effort of doing
so. Ensure that the
recommendations in
materials are as clear
and simple to execute
as possible. Remove
technical language,
streamline processes,
and clarify how much
time and information
will be required to
tailor materials
to the mobilizers’
organizations.

3 Address knowledge or
skill gaps. Mobilizers
don’t have the
benefit of your sales
reps’ experience.
Leverage any
existing materials
that document your
reps’ expertise,
such as purchase-
process knowledge,
cross-functional
perspectives, or
persuasive tactics.
Where necessary,
create new tools
by partnering with
sales to understand
common obstacles
and easy ways
around them.

based solely on cost. Realizing that connecting of-
ferings with customers’ sustainability goals could
elevate packaging decisions to a more strategic level,
Greif developed a diagnostic tool that potential
customers can use to evaluate the environmental
benefits of various operational changes, including
switching to lightweight shipping containers. The
calculator (called the Green Tool) requires the par-
ticipation of multiple stakeholders and, like the
KCP learning tours, helps decision makers with
different goals discover their areas of alignment. A
sustainability head, for example, understanding that
a packaging switch could reduce the firm’s CO2 emis-
sions, might reach out to purchasing and plant man-
agers for data the tool requires—such as container
weights and volume, transport distances, and trip-
page rates (a measure of a reusable container’s life
span)—to calculate the emissions impact of various
containers over their life cycles. The Green Tool

reveals cost and sustainability benefits that resonate
for each stakeholder—not just the sustainability
head—moving the group toward a shared decision
to purchase. In the three years following the intro-
duction of the tool, sales of Greif’s sustainable prod-
ucts and services have increased significantly. For
example, sales of lightweight plastic drums grew by
about 15% from 2011 to 2013.

2. Motivating mobilizers. As discussed, your
potential mobilizers may fear they’ll hurt their cred-
ibility and job security by lobbying for a specific solu-
tion. They must believe the rewards of advocacy will
outweigh the risk and effort. There are two impor-
tant levers marketers can use to shift the risk/reward
balance in the right direction.

Decrease individuals’ perceived risk. Potential
mobilizers often hesitate to recommend a purchase
because they’re unsure that others in the organiza-
tion will support their position. The results of one
of our surveys—of 3,000 employees across a range
of organizations—hammered home that point:
Willingness to advocate for a purchase more than
doubled as perceived organizational support for
a supplier increased. The challenge for suppliers,
then, is to reveal this support. The shared learning
events described earlier can help, but more-focused
approaches that target individual advocates and
encourage them to speak up are critical to getting
the customer group to participate in such events or
engage with diagnostic tools in the first place.

Holcim, a global supplier of cement and related
products and services for the construction industry,
uses a simple and effective tactic to do this. As a com-
ponent of its sales operations, Holcim regularly sur-
veys people throughout its customers’ organizations
to collect Net Promoter Scores (which gauge willing-
ness to recommend a product or a company). If an
account manager encounters a potential advocate
for a new offering at an existing customer, a Holcim
rep can present that person with NPS data from
other functions that demonstrates broad support for
Holcim’s offerings. Reps report that advocates are of-
ten unaware of allies within their organization until
they see the NPS numbers and say that the data gives
those allies confidence to promote a purchase.

Increase perceived rewards. Connecting with
customers’ emotions has long been central to
consumer marketing. It’s less common in the B2B
world, where sales and marketing typically focus
on conveying the business value of products and

CONVERTING SALES TOOLS INTO MOBILIZER TOOLS
SUPPLIERS OFTEN HAVE SALES COLLATERAL THAT COULD BE REPURPOSED TO
HELP INTERNAL CHAMPIONS, OR “MOBILIZERS,” BUILD CONSENSUS AROUND
PURCHASES WITHIN CUSTOMERS’ ORGANIZATIONS. WHEN ADAPTING THOSE
MATERIALS, MARKETERS SHOULD FOLLOW THESE THREE PRINCIPLES:

112 Harvard Business Review March 2015

MAKING THE CONSENSUS SALE

services. But combining perceived value with
an emotional tie can make all the difference in
motivating a mobilizer.

W.W. Grainger, a global provider of maintenance,
repair, and operations (MRO) solutions, traditionally
sold to facility managers who had wide latitude in se-
lecting MRO suppliers. But with pressure to contain
costs growing, facility managers were increasingly re-
quired to defend their choices. Grainger started find-
ing that many weren’t motivated to make a case for
using Grainger, despite its premium offerings, as other
suppliers were often perceived as “good enough.”

Through its market research, Grainger dis-
covered that facility managers see themselves as
behind-the-scenes problem solvers who face daily
obstacles to keeping their plants running safely and
efficiently. Out of this finding came “Get It. Got It.
Good,” a campaign designed to demonstrate a direct
connection between Grainger’s unique capabilities
and managers’ desire to run facilities at peak perfor-
mance. The campaign reflected the gritty reality of
the job and conveyed that Grainger understood the
challenges facility managers face and their fear of
missteps that would cause downtime.

The result of the campaign? Reps report that fa-
cility managers feel that Grainger “gets them” bet-
ter than competitors do and are more motivated to
advocate for Grainger products. The campaign has
dramatically outperformed expectations, delivering
175% of expected returns.

3. Equipping mobilizers to be effective.
Mobilizers typically aren’t salespeople. They usually
aren’t experienced with change processes, may lack a
cross-functional perspective, and may not be skilled
at persuasion. Suppliers can help them in all these ar-
eas. Indeed, 80% of the mobilizers we surveyed told
us they wanted support from suppliers in communi-
cating the value of solutions they championed.

In an earlier time, providing that support would
have principally been a sales task. But because the
challenges to achieving consensus often emerge
before sales has a foot in the door, this task increas-
ingly falls to marketing. Progressive marketing
teams, we’ve found, are adeptly converting sales-
enablement materials to support mobilizers, making
those materials freely available early in the consen-
sus process, and distributing them in lead-nurturing
e-mails, through blogs, and in myriad other ways.

Consider one approach used by Marketo, a
provider of marketing automation software. Marketo

created a 100-page mobilizer tool kit, “The Definitive
Guide to Marketing Automation,” which it e-mails to
leads and posts on its website. The tool kit covers ev-
erything from what marketing automation is to the
future of the technology. But its central chapters zero
in on the specifics mobilizers need to make their busi-
ness case internally. It provides detailed guidance on
how to communicate the value of marketing auto-
mation to diverse stakeholders, including the CEO,
the CMO, the CFO, the CIO, and the head of sales,
walking readers through the chief concerns of each
executive and how to address them. It also offers
tips on the art of persuasion, including the need to
understand management’s objectives and to create
a financial case, and the importance of “discussing,
not presenting.” The arguments given are supported
with case studies. Finally, the guide takes mobiliz-
ers through the purchase process, with a primer on
aligning internal stakeholders and selecting a vendor.
While the guide carries the Marketo brand, it is con-
spicuously supplier agnostic, devoting only a single
page, tucked at the end, to Marketo’s solution.

CEB has presented the Marketo case to hundreds
of marketing executives in dozens of sessions. In
every session at least one CMO says he or she has al-
ready used Marketo’s tool kit in purchasing market-
ing automation software. Pam Boiros, vice president
of corporate marketing at Skillsoft, found the concept
so compelling that she decided to create a similar tool
for Skillsoft. Says Boiros, “Many of our sales team
members tell us they are using this guide—in whole
or in part—to set expectations with customers, help
guide the purchase decision, and influence RFPs.”

THE BIGGEST change in sales and marketing today is
how customers buy. The new need to create consen-
sus is turning decades of conventional sales wisdom
on its head—replacing the requirement that sales
focus first on connecting the customer with the sup-
plier with a requirement to connect decision makers
within a customer’s organization with one another.
The other major requirement, more implicit than ex-
plicit in this article, is that the relationship between
sales and marketing finally change. Companies
have long paid lip service to the need for sales and
marketing to play together nicely. But given today’s
pressure to drive consensus, suppliers that don’t
align sales and marketing as a single team with a
common goal will be trounced by suppliers that do.

HBR Reprint R1503H