Selling to multiple decision-makers means equipping one person to sell for you, because you will never be in most of the rooms. Find out whose approval and whose opinion are in play, then give your contact the language and the material that survive being forwarded without you attached.
Ask whose opinion and approval are in play, then hand your contact something that works without you in the room.
Most of the selling happens where you are not, so your contact is the one presenting your work.
Write a half-page your contact could forward to their boss without editing it.
You are selling into a system.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
Find out who the decision-makers are by asking directly on the first call, before anybody is invested in an answer. Three questions surface almost the whole map:
I teach a wider version of this as your client has a client. Beyond the people who literally sign, ask whose opinion, influence, approval or beliefs are in play on your contact right now. A peer whose project competes for the same money is a decision-maker even though nobody will ever call them one.
Asking early is what makes this comfortable. Six weeks in, "who else is involved?" sounds like you are going around your contact. On a first call it is simply a good question, and the answer shapes everything you do next.
More decision-makers make a yes harder because every additional person adds another way for the answer to become no change. Each one has their own priorities, their own quarter, and their own reason the current arrangement is fine.
The research puts a sharper point on it than most consultants expect. Samuelson and Zeckhauser, testing status quo bias across a series of decision experiments, found that "the more options that were included in the choice set, the stronger was the relative bias for the status quo."
A decision with many participants is a decision with many options on the table, and the option that always survives is the one where nobody has to do anything. That is also why these processes run so long.
Your job stops being persuasion and becomes reduction. Fewer open questions, fewer things for a group to disagree about, a clearer smallest next step. Every ambiguity you leave in the room is somewhere the decision can settle back into doing nothing.
A long, impressive document sent to a group with no shared context tends to produce silence, because nobody in the group is confident enough about it to spend political capital.
Reach the people you have never met through your contact rather than around them, and ask plainly. Going around a contact costs you the one person who was willing to advocate for you.
What to ask for, in ascending order of what most consultants are willing to request:
Most consultants stop at the first and assume the third would be an imposition. Flynn and Lake found people underestimated by as much as 50% the likelihood that others would agree to a direct request for help, because askers focus on the burden and discount the social cost of refusing. Your contact wants this to move too. Asking them to bring you into the room is often a relief rather than a favor.
Give your contact something short enough to forward and specific enough to defend. I call the underlying principle you are the expert in helping your clients buy: they may have bought this kind of work once or twice, and you have sold it many more times than that.
What travels well:
I teach a lightweight version of this as a Proposal in an Email, a named piece of the Academy curriculum built for exactly this handoff, and the single-approver case has its own shape. The shape is the point here: a document that only works with you narrating it will be presented by somebody who cannot narrate it.
The thing that changed how I sell was realizing I am almost never in the room where this gets decided. Neither are you. Your contact is, and they are doing it in a fifteen-minute slot between two other meetings, describing work they only half understand, to somebody with four competing priorities.
Once you see that, the job reorganises itself. You stop trying to be impressive and start trying to be easy to repeat.
I ask people to think about it as selling is socializing. Not networking, and not schmoozing. It means the sale travels through conversations between people who know each other, and none of those conversations include you. Everything you hand your contact is going into one of them.
And be generous about your contact's position. They are navigating their own knot, under pressure you cannot see, sometimes caught between people who disagree. A consultant who makes that easier is truly on their side, which is a rarer thing than it should be. Clients can use an ally, and the ally usually wins the work.
One call with everybody sounds efficient and usually is not, because a group with different priorities tends to defer rather than decide. Separate conversations let each person raise the objection they would not say in front of their boss. Use a group call to confirm alignment that already exists, not to create it.
A contact who will not introduce you is telling you something useful, and it is worth asking about directly. Sometimes the relationship is not strong enough yet, sometimes the boss is simply inaccessible, and sometimes your contact does not want to spend the capital. Ask what would make the introduction easier, then give them exactly that.
One proposal with sections that answer different concerns beats several versions you have to keep straight. Finance wants the number and the scope, the person with the problem wants the outcome, and the approver wants to know why now. Cover all three in one document, and let your contact point each reader at the part that matters to them.
A champion does things when you are not watching: they forward your summary, they book the internal meeting, they come back with questions their boss asked. A contact who only responds when you write is interested rather than advocating. Test it with a small request, and see whether anything happens.