I recently had a big revelation. I was talking to a guy that does marketing through Linked-in. I was already intrigued by the idea, so I met with him. He spun things in a whole new light for me. I realized that up til now, everything I’ve done is pretty much bottom up selling. I try to convince service technicians or maybe managers that they need what I’m offering. When in reality, I’m pitching to wrong people.
The key things I took away from our talk was that you really have to sell to the people with the money. While it’s great to be able to convince the end users how great your stuff is and how much easier it will make their lives, in the end of the day, I’d be depending on them to sell it to their management, who in turn would need to keep selling it up the chain. How could I possibly expect someone 3 layers removed to be able to sell my stuff as well as I can? When I looked at it, my bottom approach was pretty much expecting someone else to do the work for me… it’s not going to happen (at least not often).
The people I need to sell to are at the top. The people with CXX in their title are the best place to start =) Now, this of course brings up a whole new set of issues for me, including fashioning a new message geared toward the CEO, CTO, CFO etc. Today’s message to any of you out there just getting started, think carefully about your audience. I didn’t, so now I have to change my thinking. The good news is that it isn’t wasted work. If you can’t convince the people that will use it that it’s good, they’ll push back and you likely won’t get the sale. The key is to be able to sell your stuff all the way down the line. My next mission is putting together a new message for the top down selling approach.
thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike