Situation: A company’s key marketing partner has excelled at analyzing key potential customers, the right decision makers within those customers, and completing sales to them at a premium price. The CEO wants advice on what more they can do with this partner to leverage and boost sales. How do you rapidly ramp sales?

Advice from the CEOs:

• The company’s current strategy is to start a customer on the company’s product to add additional functionality. Once the customer learns to use the product, they work to extend the customer to other products from the company.
• It is difficult to win with a “push” sales strategy. The situation described is like that of Linux competing with Microsoft. Everyone knows how to use MSFT, and for most of what they do MSFT is good enough. It takes a particular level of pain or need to justify the pain of transitioning to something different.
  • The only alternative is to show a significant pay-back for the pain that the customer must endure in order to convert, large scale, to another solution.
• The company’s target customer will be the key manager who will shut down the line because they don’t have the company’s solution. This forces the purchase decision above the manager’s boss to the executive suite. The company’s solution then becomes the alternative that saves the day.
  • Seek a forum or trade show that will put the company’s solution in front of these key managers. Through this venue, create buzz that will make the company’s the booth to visit.
  • It is critical to have a compelling story for potential users when they respond to this gambit and visit the company’s booth.
• The solution to this dilemma is the same as the solution to the company’s overall strategy.
  • The company’s offering, at this point, is just another alternative available to the customer. While the company has a compelling product, it is not world changing and the company lacks the market presence to make its solutions first to adoption.
  • The solution is to focus. Stop what the company is currently doing and take the time to develop a technology strategy.
  • Once this strategy has been defined, focus efforts on developing the killer application that becomes the reason that people must come to the company to satisfy their need.
  • Once this killer application has been developed, positioning and gaining traction with the customer will become easier.

[like]