Above the Line and Below the Line

I took the terminology from a book called Outbounding. I didn't like any of the examples the author used for reaching out to people, which could have been written a lot better. But he's in sales, and he doesn't do what I do.

In every company you reach out to, there are above-the-line people and below-the-line people.

A below-the-line person cares about the technical aspects of what you sell. Feeds and speeds. Does it have this feature? How long does it take to do X? How long will it take my IT department to set it up per user? How much downtime does it need?

Above-the-line people look at what you sell, or the problem you solve, in relation to the company's overall strategy and trajectory. Does this make sense to do now? Do we need to do this at all? Is it even worth talking to these guys? What part of my much larger problem does this resolve, so I can get that underway and focus on other things?

You speak to each differently about different things. On the sales side, we used to call this the two-sale track. I worked mostly in tech in my corporate career, and there was a technical sale and a business sale. The technical sale is below the line: demos, bake-offs, product roadmap, how long it takes to do X, how many megabytes per second. The above-the-line people are VP and up. For them you don't talk about that detail. You talk about where you fit in their overall strategy. They want to build out a data warehouse, or move hard into AI. What part of their strategy do you fit, and what problem there do you resolve so they can look at something else?

The last thing you want in sales is to finally get the meeting with the business buyer, the above-the-line person, and have them ask why you're even talking. This isn't on my plan for this year. All that time convincing the technical people about your product is wasted.

The easy way to remember it: below-the-line people can say no, but they can rarely say yes. Above-the-line people can say yes even if the below-the-line people say no. They can buy something that overrides the choice the technical people favored most. Life's not fair.