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“There’s a great opportunity here for us. This new product of ours is going to grow our revenue significantly in 2010.”
I’m watching a situation in one of our clients which I’ve seen many times before. A CEO has the vision for a new product. The senior executives agree that there’s an opportunity here to make money. They believe they can deliver this product as well as anyone else. OK, everyone is on board. It’s a go! Let’s start selling this baby!
So over to the sales team. In our client’s case they’ve put together a brand new sales group so they can “crush it” selling this new product. It’s a strong group of sales people: smart, experienced and determined. They should “crush it”.
But suddenly some annoying reality is setting in…
The sales team has only a short time to make this happen – better happen this year or they probably won’t be around to crush a grape next year.
The sales team has no marketing collateral or content yet – nada. In fact, neither the marketing nor sales department has figured out what the value proposition is for this new product. So there’s no email templates, no call scripts, no web landing pages, no white papers or ebooks, no blogs…
The company has a CRM system and it even has some names of prospects in it that are useful for this effort. But those useful contacts are lost in amongst tens of thousands of irrelevant contacts. And guess what? Those “useful” contact records have not been update for a few years – it’s a new territory no one has worried about it for a long time.
And toughest of all almost no relationships. If there’s one thing that makes selling easier it’s existing relationships. When I look around at how most sales people sell in our clients I see sales people “going back to the same wells” over-and-over.
In this particular client I notice the sales people with the existing products going back to the same accounts this year that they did last year. They are signing renewals of last year’s contracts. Nothing wrong with that. It’s efficient. But it’s not for our team that is selling this new product. They don’t have existing relationships. They don’t have that option.
All this stuff is details to most CEOs. Just make it happen. This is a great product with great potential. Our sales team just needs to pick up the phone (a lot) and deals will come.
Wagons ho!