Sales & Marketing Management - October 2007 - (Page 8)

the Pitch SALES STRATEGY Spotlighting Your Services Seal the deal by giving your prospects a taste of your talents president of Waterhouse Group Inc., a sales consultancy in Orange Park, Fla. Many sales teams would recoil in horror at the idea of giving away services for free. Green says that’s because they see selling as less of a collaboration and more of a battle to win business. “[They feel that] they have a limited amount of intellectual capital and can’t give it away,” he says. More and more experts, however, are agreeing with him. Dave Lakhani, president of Bold Approach, a sales and business consultancy in Boise, Idaho, says experiential selling is appropriate “when done the right way.” The idea is not to solve a prospect’s problems, he says, but to demonstrate just enough of a company’s service to make them indispensable. Too many sales teams “over-deliver in that initial meeting,” he says, leaving clients feeling as if they can solve the problem themselves using the tools they learned in that sales meeting. The key, Lakhani says, is to solve a single, key problem—but choose one that doesn’t come close to solving all of their issues. For example, an accounting firm he works with analyzes tax savings for their prospects during sales calls, but only in a specific area, to demonstrate how much money the prospect could save. But they don’t leverage that information across the whole company; to do that, their services would have to be purchased. “The point at which I rein in [my pitch] is the point at which it becomes highly customized,” Waterhouse says. In other words, give clients a taste, but not the whole meal. —Betsy Cummings N o matter what service is being sold, too many sellers hawking professional services take a single approach in pitching it—they let the service’s features do the talking. Instead, they might be better served by showcasing their company’s services on the spot during a sales call, says Charles Green, president of Trusted Advisor Associates, a sales and leadership consultancy in Morristown, N.J. It’s a process he calls “selling by doing,” as opposed to “selling by telling.” A more competitive market, along with tools like the Internet, is driving sales organizations to provide more specific information to solve prospect problems and wow clients, says Steve Waterhouse, DONE DEAL FINDING STRENGTH IN NUMBERS GuardianEdge relied on a strategic telemarketing/lead generation firm to spot the potential deal. Then, two of GuardianEdge’s salespeople worked with a delivery partner, who helped GuardianEdge implement a presales process in which they delivered software and services during the three-month sales cycle.This allowed the prospect to experience the company’s enterprise data software programs before buying the actual product. A risky move, perhaps, but one so unique to the industry that GuardianEdge felt it was worth the risk. “It’s difficult [software] to deploy,” Foreman says,“so it takes strong relationship building,planning and architectural development”to close the deal.And partnerships are required to make such an intricate proposal run smoothly, particularly when it necessitates installing software on 18,000 laptops (as it did in this case). With partners working together, Foreman says,“we convince prospects … how important it is to test and build architecture”before they deploy it.Seeing the software in action, he adds, is key to closing the sale. —B.C. www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com corbis Sometimes closing the deal is as much about partnerships as anything else.That certainly was the case recently for GuardianEdge, a company based in San Francisco that safeguards enterprise data for organizations.First,says Jay Foreman, senior vice president of worldwide sales, GuardianEdge relied on one partner, then another to land a sales lead and ultimately close the deal. With target clients in healthcare,financial services,and governmental and high-end manufacturing,GuardianEdge knows that it may take more than their own manpower to land new business. To close a $600,000 deal with a Midwestern healthcare provider, 8 SALES&MARKETING MANAGEMENT OCTOBER 2007 http://www.salesandmarketingmanagement.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Sales & Marketing Management - October 2007

Sales & Marketing Management - October 2007 Contents Editor’s Letter Management Strategies Why Prospecting Gets No Respect Sales Strategy: Spotlight your Services Marketing: A Social Intelligence Primer Management: Steer your Team to Success Motivation/Incentives: The No-Pain Way to Gain Training: Looking for Yesterday’s Learning or Tomorrow’s? Technology: Get Trade Show Satisfaction with the Video Massage Focusing on SMB Solutions The Best Sales Force The Hottest Job Industries Overseas Aggravation Gadgets & Gear: Pen and Ink as an Art Form Books that Improve Strategic Thinking, People Skills and Sales One Foot Out the Door Work/Life: Calling in the Fitness Cavalry. Take-Aways: Bite-size Strategies to Help You Sell More, Market Smarter and Manage Better

Sales & Marketing Management - October 2007

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