Setup guide: high-ticket and long-cycle sales

Who you are reaching

A short list of senior people whose trust takes months to earn. Volume is the wrong setting here. Presence is the right one.

Prospects settings

• Their Job Titles: senior and specific. CEO, Owner, Managing Partner, CFO, Chief Operating Officer, General Counsel, depending on what you sell. Add the deputy title too: the VP who runs the evaluation.
• Words to Watch For: the strategic topics your buyers post about, not your product. Growth, succession, risk, expansion, exit, board, capital, margin.
• People to Skip: Consultant, Advisor, Broker, Sales, and your competitors.
• Target Country: set it.

Train Allen

Bio: who you serve, what the engagements look like, how you talk. Rules: "never reference a service or offer", "never ask for time", "no exclamation points", "write like a peer who has done this before". Goal: add insight. Length: medium. Under How Allen responds, weight insight and respectful pushback; senior people respect a view.

Sample comments

On a CEO posting about weighing an acquisition:

• Add insight: "The acquisitions that went wrong in my experience were not priced wrong; they were integrated too slowly. Eighteen months of 'let them run independently' is where the value leaks. Worth deciding the integration plan before the price."
• Respectful pushback: "I would separate two questions that usually get merged: is this a good business, and is this a good business for us to run. Plenty of deals pass the first and fail the second, and the second is the one the board rarely asks."
• Ask a question: "What does the seller want after close, beyond the money? That answer has predicted more of the outcomes I have seen than the multiple did."

Autopilot

Three a day, weekdays, watchlist only. Untick the audiences and leave My watchlist ticked. You are not looking for new people; you are staying in front of the right ones. Add a broad audience later if the watchlist runs quiet.

Watchlist

Your Dream 100, literally. Every decision-maker and deputy at every target account, every past client, every referral source. Find them with Find leads on the Connections page, or add from profiles with the extension. Review monthly.

The first DM

Never a meeting request. "Thanks for the reply on the acquisition post. The integration-plan-before-price idea came from watching two deals go sideways. If a short write-up of what those two got wrong would be useful, I am glad to send it." The call comes when they ask what you do, which happens sooner than you expect.