Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 58

Our clients would not have engaged with us if we had not been responding to a felt need on their part. All business objectives lace their way through an analysis of causes and a strategy on their way to a statement of a problem to be solved. For example, a client may want to raise revenues and decides that its poorly trained sales force is the reason it is not selling as much as benchmark companies. The chief sales officer of a company asks her head of training to throw out a net to people they know to identify great sales trainers. Your name is given to the head of training by a satisfied client who was asked for suggestions, and you get the gig. Perfect. In short order you're invited to solve precisely the kind of problem you have decades of experience addressing.

But, once you're in and doing your thing, there's no guarantee you'll get a shot at the next problem you are qualified to solve. Maybe you do some sales trainings that go well. But you quickly see that the client also needs to do a better job of recruiting experienced salespeople and updating their compensation system to better align with the goals they are trying to achieve. However, your project lead inside the company, the head of sales training, has a single task he or she has been assigned – to beef up sales training – and has no interest in your other ideas or services. You don't have access to the chief sales officer who decided the secret to more sales is better sales training, leaving you unable to get either the chief sales officer or the head of sales training interested in your additional services.

Hurdle 3: Our client has identified a nail and we were hired as a hammer. Sometimes, however, we see a problem where a Phillips-head screwdriver is a better solution, but the buyer with whom we are working has no interest.