hello this is dr. adam jae bok in this short audio presentation we're going to talk a little bit more about the decision-making unit we'll try to cover a few things associated with attributes of the decision-making unit and some specific approaches to help went over the influencers who are so critical in the decision-making units process you may remember that we've talked about a customer including both an end user and more broadly the decision-making unit that actually generates the purchasing process if this isn't familiar please go back and take a look at the value proposition topic we have covered some of this already we're going to be focusing in more specifically on the influencers and the aspect of veto power so there are more roles in the decision-making unit than simply the economic buyer and the key champion there can be primary and secondary influencers people with veto power and at organizations when you're selling to companies purchasing departments we sometimes specifically talk about two types of influencers Belle cows and lighthouses Belle cows are leaders who bring other people within the organization along a lighthouse influencer we usually describe as being either an individual or an organizational purchaser that lots of other similar kinds of people look to and so that when they see that the lighthouse is lit they're likely to say oh that's being used we probably could do something very similar so how do you target influencers a lot of that has to do with the process in which you get those key influencers the information that they need in order to come hopefully to a conclusion about your product that you feel is warranted so a really nice example of this one I'll be at a relatively old example was the bose model 901 speaker now probably all of you are familiar with bose because of their noise cancelling headphones but obviously bose is a company that's been around with speaker technology for a long time and they had we're in the process of launching this very specific speaker system that had some really interesting technologies in it that Bose felt made them really attractive and more high-quality but as they because these are higher-end speakers and because this is quite a while ago Bose realized that there were very specific people who influenced the kinds of customers that they were trying to target and those included for example experts at stereo stores back at a time when this kind of equipment tended to be sold in specialty stores and malls media experts and other people who provided key information about these kinds of products such as magazines stereo magazines and so Bose made a very specific effort to provide the technical information as well as sample products to these kinds of individuals and when the speaker actually launched all of those influencers already had had direct experience with the product and wrote favorable reviews and magazines the people in the stores were big fans of the product and promoted them on their own and so this was a very successful campaign this was a product of a speaker system that was quite well received for a very long time so a more recent example although even now it's getting a little bit old was the Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies and you might ponder for a moment who are the primary influencers for these movies as they came out well obviously some of them would be movie critics merchandisers there was an expectation that that was going to be linked merchandise and then more often than not we were talking about friends and peers right and I think that if you began thinking about this even though certain amount of this would be stereotypical you can recognize who the target the beachhead market was clearly people who had read the series long before perhaps we could stereotype it to MIT primarily males people who enjoy fantasy literature and fantasy movies and so on and so forth and you might have thought this would be very straightforward but in fact there was an interesting little kink associated with this which you may not know of but in fact this was not the first time that the Lord of the Rings had been turned into a movies in fact many years ago an effort had been made to create an animated version of The Lord of the Rings movies I am NOT going to subject you to watching these I know in some of the other videos I've actually clipped in key pieces of information and videos that I thought you should see I'm not going to subject you to this because there really is no other way to describe these other than just awful if you go to the actual slide decks you can link to these and play them directly or you can pull them out into another window these are on YouTube I encourage you to do so for just like 10 or 15 seconds and trust me you will immediately see the problem these these movies that were generated were just terrible and in fact they were so bad that the final movie The Return of the King wasn't actually finished the movie itself stopped before the story was completed but even just looking at these images here I'm sure you can see just how awful these were allowed to be and the concern was that when Peter Jackson's versions of the movies were launched they wanted to make sure that nobody was referring back to these because these had been such a commercial disaster and so the studio's did a fantastic job of releasing small snippets of the movies teasers key information and they did all of this and they completely pretended that these prior movies had never happened and these were never mentioned anywhere every effort was made to simply bury them under the rug as if no one had any knowledge of them anymore and I don't have to tell you but obviously this process was incredibly effective and the influencers who were so critical turned out to be very enthusiastic so what where did they go after they went specifically after fansites they learned very quickly to completely avoid mentioning anything from those and yes one of them in fact was a musical they worked with key fans and bloggers and co-opted them into the process by giving them early access to screen shot to still shots and some of the music and so on and so forth and obviously this process was incredibly successful and here was a quote from Common Sense Media in which they said this was a once in a generation not since Star Wars transcendent reminder of why we tell stories and obviously these were incredibly successful movies and a obviously the movies on their own stand quite well and I'm a fan as well but a significant amount of that success can be attributed to the mechanisms that they use to win over influencers early in the process so how do you win referrals from influencers you build those relationships pull together a group of VIPs target professional reviews wherever you can get the online referrals and then wherever possible give influencers selling tools that is create the mechanisms such that as customers are getting exposed to those influencers they have then direct access to purchase the product in the case of the Lord of the Rings links to local movie theaters or even discounts or things like that so this is a purposeful process sometimes we want to pretend that influencing just happens by accident but the really good companies and really good entrepreneurs put together a very clear process in order to make this work there are of course other roles in the dmu there's often a person with veto power very commonly in business-to-business environments the IT department more often than not has some veto power especially for apps and software where they orb or specific technology products where they can simply say we're not going to buy that because it's not compatible with what we have or we're not trained in it or something like that the US government often has veto power over certain things a great example of that is the FDA which has veto power over marketing or selling health care products anytime that there's a standard someone likely has veto power somewhere and so it's really really important if you're bringing a novel product to market that you recognize if there are standards in place or there are any specific organizational bodies that have the ability to simply say no you can't we're not going to allow customers to purchase this and then of course there's usually a purchasing department which at businesses can have significant influence over what kinds of products can be purchased when they can be purchased and how much can be spent on them so it's really important to think about the motivations associated with this purchasing process in purchasing departments very often the key motivation is number one that the new product has either a lower cost or can be reimbursed or that and that they don't want to get fired for taking a risk very often entrepreneurs run into this as they're trying to sell a new product to business customers where they know that the product works well and the customers even agrees that in theory the product the new product could work well but the purchasing department doesn't want to get fired for taking a risk that doesn't play out imagine for example that you're trying to sell something to a company and normally they buy that product from a different organization maybe it's something like IBM or maybe it's a product another type of product from an existing large organization that's very very reliable the challenge here is that if you try to convince them that your product is better they might agree that it is but they might be unwilling to work with you simply because you're a startup company unfortunately this problem of getting purchasing departments to take a can be a significant impediment to startup companies getting their products sold purchasing departments usually are looking to do less work or have an easier job and so if your product is going to make their job more complicated because they've got to do more work or there's more paperwork associated with it that could be a problem and finally a big motivation is they want to justify the job they do and look good in front of their boss if your product doesn't do that if it makes them look bad or it makes it look like they're not doing work very well you are probably going to have a lot of difficulty in selling so try to keep all of these things in mind as you think about these the process of getting through the generating sales this should be coupled with the overall customer acquisition process which is talked about in one of the other audio presentations so this can be applied to the t-shirt project it's obviously not as that's obviously much simpler but if you're going to get involved in entrepreneurial activity you'll need to think about these more complex situations where the decision making units have more elements that all and all their needs have to be satisfied