As every effective salesperson knows, you must determine early in the sales process whether the customer or prospect you're working with has the authority to make decisions and purchase your product or service. That is, do they have economic power? If they don't, they're merely a gatekeeper (sometimes willing, sometimes reluctant) who is blocking your way to the person with the real purchasing authority.

There are no two ways about it: Without access to the purchasing authority, you face a more significant pathway to the sale. Even if your principal contact/gatekeeper wholeheartedly buys into your value proposition, it doesn't matter; until the person with economic power has the same appreciation of how your proposition will create value for them and their organisation. Until then your work is for naught.

In a perfect world, salespeople will always try to communicate directly with whoever has the purchasing authority. If your initial contact within your target business isn't the authority, you get with whoever has it. But as we know, it's not usually that simple. In fact, it's not unusual for the authority to go out of their way to shield themselves behind gatekeepers.

Whilst selling to a customer who doesn't possess purchasing authority is not ideal, it’s often the norm and there are certainly ways that you can help your prospect/contact sell internally... and thus help you make the sale.

Central to this goal is that you want to make your contact, presumably already a champion for your product or service, a de facto salesperson for you inside their own company. And you can help them become such a salesperson by guiding them through the same process that you undergo every time you work your way through a client relationship to make a sale – that is, you need to help them be able to transfer their belief in your products and services to the organisation by creating and communicating value.

If you want to effectively help your champion create value in the mind of the purchasing authority, it isn't going to happen overnight. However, when you understand it, it's actually quite a tactical process that with enough practice and application is very doable for anyone to achieve.

Through the next four blogs, we will follow up with a series that will expand on the four steps that we recommend salespeople follow to help prospects sell internally:

1. Understand the purchasing cycle – Businesses of every size go through a similar process, and if you're to understand the people you're dealing with, you must understand how they purchase, what procedure they follow and where they are at anytime in that cycle.
2. Understand the buying team – When you can't gain direct access to the purchasing authority, you're probably dealing with a buying team. Every one of these teams includes three types of people (or roles that they fulfill), and it's essential that you identify each member and determine what role they play.
3. Define objectives – All sales calls or presentations must begin in the mind of the salesperson with a clear statement of purpose. And when it comes to more complex sales, especially when you don’t have direct access to the purchasing authority, it's essential to work with your contact to define a concrete series of objectives.
4. Form a sales strategy – With your objectives defined, you will need to develop a sales strategy with your principal contact based on three factors: the size and complexity of your value proposition to the target organisation, the organisation's tolerance for change and the nature of existing relationships within the organisation.

Insights into each of these steps will be covered in our next four blogs. If you don't already subscribe to our blog, enter your email address into the field at the upper right corner of this page and you'll receive an email notification each time we post a new blog.

As the year draws to a close, it's a great opportunity to take a step back and think about our year of blogging. What an interesting, enlightening and fulfilling experience it's been to bring our programs to life with stories from clients, personal anecdotes or recent news and research. We hope you've gotten as much out of our blogs as we have!

The feedback you've shared directly with comments, in emails or in person has been invaluable in shaping the direction of our content, and we encourage you to continue to provide it.

Next year promises plenty of challenges and opportunities. There will be more sales insights to help guide you through the sales process and create value. Likewise we'll continue to write on leadership topics in the anticipation of helping you improve your leadership effectiveness and increase employee engagement.

Until then, everyone at Fortune would like to wish you and your family the best this holiday season.

The longer you've worked, the more experience you have, the more qualified you are. Or so the theory goes.

Generally speaking, the theory holds. But not for the reason that most people assume.

It comes down to how you interpret "experience". And based on how most of us have been conditioned to understand the word, the truth of the matter is that one's experience has almost no bearing on how qualified they are for a position.

Here's an exercise: Take someone young – a child, a grandchild, a niece or nephew – walk them through your house and point out all the technology that didn't exist when you were their age. In many cases you'll find that most of the technology hasn't been around that long!

The point is, the rate of change has never been faster. Businesses have changed more in the last three years than they did in the previous ten, and they'll probably change more in the next three years than they have in the last five! So when someone says that they have 20 years or even 40 years of work experience, what does that mean anymore? Sure, they've accumulated some very practical knowledge; more than likely, they're a whiz at performing a set of prescribed tasks. But are those tasks relevant in today's world? Will they be relevant tomorrow? Could be the answer is no. In today's business world, there's no such thing as 10, 20 or 30 years of experience.

But that's not to say that those years of work experience are for naught; it's just that the value derived from that experience comes from the wisdom learned. It actually relates very well to Charles Darwin's often misunderstood "survival of the fittest" phrase. Darwin didn't mean for "fittest" to imply pure strength or size or smarts; instead, it relates to one's adaptability. The same goes here: When it comes to performing a process that didn't exist five years ago, someone who has worked for 40 years has no advantage over someone 35 years their junior. However, the advantage that older person does hold is 35 additional years of accumulated wisdom. When properly valued and leveraged, that's an advantage that cannot be understated. Unfortunately it's all too often undervalued.

As you develop your employees, don't make it about showing them how to get from A to B. Instead, equip them with the ability (the skills, tools, thinking) to figure it out on their own and empower them to adapt to changes in their environment. In today's and tomorrow's business world, experience that instills those skills is the only kind that will truly matter.

Voltaire, that wonderful Frenchman that used to give his Government of the day a hard time, is quoted as saying, "Perfect is the enemy of good." For businesses, the takeaway is simple: If you have a functional and marketable product or service, don't get hung up on perfecting it at the expense of delaying its release... just get it to market. Timing, at the introduction of our ideas into the marketplace, is one of five prerequisites for the success of any business.

Computer and consumer electronics manufacturers, and chip makers for example, are famous for launching new models and variants in quick succession – on occasions updating and releasing a new product variant over 20 times in a six month period! That's because these markets move at such speed that it's counterproductive to withhold their release in the name of perfection. So as long as a company has that functional, marketable product, they put it out there and then use customer feedback to iterate... over and over and over and over again.

But even for industries that don't rely on new technological innovation every week, the businesses that wait to release their product or service until it's "perfect" almost always find that it isn't perfect... and what a waste of time and resources getting it there!

You don't have to be light years ahead of everyone else, and the reality is that as much as you try, you'll never be light years ahead. Aim for what's been coined the 15 minute competitive advantage: "changing in short fast bursts rather than waiting for the breakthrough that transforms everything."

Aim for perfection, and you set yourself up for peril.

Within almost any organization, you'll find that as managers attain more and more seniority, they become more and more wedded to the status quo; no surprises there! Of course this is rarely a conscious choice; it's merely a common byproduct of success (which may not be outstanding but can often be viewed as 'good or good enough'). That's because any accomplished person has gotten to where they are by doing things a certain way, so it's natural to want to promote the same thinking and processes to others. But as the saying goes, the fish rots from the head down. So when senior managers promote the status quo, active inertia infects the entire organization, stifling innovation and any chance for sustained growth.

How can organizations combat active inertia and reinvigorate 'inside-out' innovation? Or better yet, how can they avoid the active inertia disease? As is generally the case, it begins and ends with the quality of leadership and the quality of management. And in this instance, it's in the hands of your people.

In the second part of our interview with Bud Boughton, Bud said that in order for businesses to be successful, they must embrace "an all-hands-on-deck mentality." In other words, they must encourage ideas from everyone in the organization regardless of their age, time with the company, seniority, status, etc. The same practical philosophy applies here: In order to fight or ward off active inertia, leaders must harness the wisdom of the anthill.

Your people are more than capable – you hired them for a reason, right? Then to maximize growth and innovation within your business, you must maximize the value of the anthill. Tap into the collective brains, creativity, ideas, energy, passion and initiative of your people, because the best solutions for the future can often lay a long way from the status quo, including from the thinking of senior management. Just because no one can 'see it' doesn't mean it's not there!

At Fortune, we help facilitate the power of our clients' anthill through STAGs (Short Term Action Groups). Put simply, STAGs are a process of organizational learning that focus on strategic priorities with a view to innovate real solutions for change and growth. They encourage broad based engagement from a deep cross-section of the business so that the power of the anthill can be fully exploited... and they're driven using 'middle-out' change in which middle managers are empowered to go after 'value-creating' initiatives with the full support of senior managers.

As a result the STAG methodology develops leadership skills and approaches that build sustainable innovation 'inside-out', and which can be implemented across the entire organization.

In organizations already suffering from active inertia (which frankly is most of them), STAGs are a great tactic for getting in front of the change curve. If you're not harnessing the wisdom of the anthill, you're not leading, you're following!