The five sided deal

In one way business is simple. You work out who has the money to pay for your service and then you go sell to them.  This is 100% true – however, I can guarantee that most of you are only looking at part of the picture.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine in the financial advisory business was looking at potential business in a government asset privatisation. Working with him we soon realised that he had 5 potential customers for his services in the transaction.

• First was the government agency responsible for organising the sale.
• Second was the private sector party (investment bank, etc) acting as advisor on the sale
• Third was the advisors to the advisors (e.g. accounting firms, etc.).
• Fourth was the potential bidders for the business.
• Fifth was the service providers to the bidders .

I had another experience helping a friend sell consulting services into mining companies. We got absolutely nowhere for the first few months. I was demoralised and my friend was probably annoyed at the lack of sales but remained polite with me.

We were talking about the problem one day and we realised that while we had been trying to help the mining companies get a better deal out of major suppliers they weren’t interested – basically they didn’t know any better and didn’t understand how we could add value. So my friend suggested that we help some of the under-resourced suppliers sell their services to the miners. We started work with a client the very next day.

So next time you are thinking about who your clients are – try thinking how many sides to the deal there are.