Sales Stories

This post is the first in a series of stories on selling.

This stories in this post are from the book Hope is not a strategy.

On targeting the pain point

Early in my sales career as an account manager, I was in the back of the room while one of my product specialists was presenting a system. We were extremely proud of the functionality and about halfway through the presentation, our product rep put up a slide and said, "Now, if you were a hospital, you'd really like this feature."

What!? I was utterly stunned. I thought to myself, "They're not a hospital-they're a bank! They're never going to be a hospital; they'll always be a bank!"

How preposterous, the idea of showing a hospital feature to a bank.

But this is no less preposterous than showing somebody a solution to a problem they don't have-or a feature for which they have no need. You might as well show a hospital feature to a bank.

On trust

The evaluation process was grueling. Two vendors were pitted against each other and were required to do detailed benchmark implementations in the evaluation of their products. It was an exhausting, detailed process with perhaps twelve to twenty people on each vendor's side.

In the end, we won by a couple of points, but we broadened that advantage into a business partnership. Their executives met our chairman. We had a corporate visit. We continued to talk about implementation and support and widened the gap. We actually reached a measure of business partnership before they signed the contract.

At dinner the night before the contract signing for multiple financial systems, the client said, "Oh by the way, do you have a fixed asset system?"

"Certainly"

"How much is it?"

"Seventy-five thousand dollars."

"Add it to the proposal."

I thought, "They just bought a system sight unseen. How could they have required such detailed evaluation in the beginning and now they have bought a system they never even looked at?"

But they went further.

They added the graphic user interface for all the systems, which they knew was in the prototype phase. There were no references for this three-hundred-thousand-dollar product at that time. The opportunity went from six hundred thousand dollars to almost a million dollars, and forty percent of it was on products they had never seen.

How could they evaluate in the beginning in such detail and buy products sight-unseen now?

The answer is trust. They trusted our products based on the ones they had evaluated. If those worked, then these must. They trusted us as a company because they had met our top executives, they'd been to our headquarters, and they knew we were a stable industry leader with a good track record of delivery. And they trusted us personally because we understood their business and we had become friends

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