Here are five sales benefits of calling at the top when you prospect:

1. You will have the attention of the ultimate decision maker of the sale
2. You will shorten your sales cycle as a result of being with the decision maker
3. When you run into problems with people that manage or administer your program, service or product you have a relationship with someone that can fix the problem.
4. If the problems you uncover are real problems you will be in front of the person that will find the money to fix the problem and complete the sale
5. When you call at the top you will know if a current relationship will derail you from getting the sale.

Your decision when you are prospecting is to decide:  How important is it for you to have these 5 sales benefits.  If these benefits won't help you sell more business, more quickly at higher margins then keep calling on those that can only tell you know, limit your budget, and limit your abililty to effectively implement a plan, program or service the exceeds the prospects expectations.

In our world of sales training and sales development much is made of sales techniques:  Opening statements, value proposition, closing techniques, open ended questions etc.  And I'm sure that if you've attended training you had all you can handle concerning the 10 best ways to close more deals more easily.  Or the 5 best ways to see the unseeable prospect.  And yet after all of that training little has changed in your results.  Oh sure you've made some incremental changes but is that what you are really after. Aren't you trying to get to a point where you can describe your sales practice as extra-ordinary?  Certainly anyone that has been in selling long enough wants more that average and wants more than incremental improvement when investing time and money in 'training' or development'. To quote one of our sales development experts, Mark Trinkle, "To what extent do you think that maybe the training you've gone to is the problem?"

How much time have the training programs spent on the root causes of an ineffective selling system?  How much time have they spent on discussing the importance of understanding the impact of 'need for approval' or a 'non-supportive buy cycle"?  You see until you get to the root cause of a problem all you can do is treat the symptom.  All you can do is run faster to get more results.

 Try finding out what the root problem is and treat that as an infection. Get rid of the problem - get better sales results.