People don’t care how much you know because they know how soon you’ll go

Years ago in my professional career, I was introduced to one of the oldest and most well-known axioms in the business – and certainly when it comes to sales: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
 
The idea behind this was very simple: relationship trumps transactions. A prospective buyer is going to give the business to someone he or she knows, trusts, respects and can count on when the chips are down. This becomes so much more valuable than the lowest CPM or negotiated price per widget.
 
…but what happens when you’ve spent all that time cultivating a meaningful and enduring relationship, only to find that your contact is no longer there? 
 
When trying to break into a new company or establish a new account, it’s actually a lot more challenging. Why? Because Nepotism rules Bro-K. New hires tend to bring in their cronies and inner circle and while you might argue this is exactly the solution, namely the power of relationships prevail and will allow for seamless transitions from one organizational swamp to another, it sucks for those new to the game. 
 
The marketing world is fraught with a declining CMO tenure and it’s not just the length of the job at hand, but also the quality of the time spent…or perhaps I should say, the lack thereof. So little time is spent cultivating relationships because the real focus and energy is being spent on developing political alliances, building fiefdoms and inevitably looking for the next “opportunity” and timing to jump ship.
 
So if you’re salesperson (and aren’t we all salespeople at the end of the day?), startup founder looking to get funding etc, what can you do about it?
 
Here are 6 tips:

1. Invite more people to join the meeting. I know that’s counter-intuitive because we’re all actively trying to reduce the number of attendees
2. Send a follow-up in writing and cc others in the department
3. Ask to be apprised of any HR changes. Ask and ye shall receive. Watch the trades and after a round of layoffs or the umpteenth reorg, try and understand which changes impact your business. 
4. Ask for intros to replacement personnel. Seems simple enough.
5. Need to know contact details of attendees? Just look at the calendar invite ahead of a meeting and voila. And if that isn’t disclosed, take the time to write down names, titles and something interesting about everyone when they do introductions. Pay attention!
6. Finally, match up everyone to their LinkedIn profile. Do this before the meeting as part of your homework and afterwards in advance of any follow up

 
At the end of the day, the nature of the beast is that this game of musical chairs is not going to stop any time soon, but you can improve your odds of moving forward even when everyone else is taking a step back.