Norb Mayrhofer: One of the keys to being a good salesperson is you have to master the complex and the simple pitch. Sometimes the presentation is very long, sometimes very short. Sometimes the purchaser or the person making the decision needs a lot of convincing. Sometimes they will never be convinced. The trick is to know that one early so you are not wasting a lot of time on them. My suggestion would be that early on with these folks that you are working with you try to get as close a handle on how they will make their decision well before you present any data. What is the criteria that you are going to use before you make your decision, and then try to tailor your work into that. The way we typically do that is we try to establish a joint score card ahead of time, so that it will be mostly driven by the math. The worst thing, hey, it happens to us. The worst thing you can do is you invest a lot of time and energy into something and then for some reason that you never even considered shows up as the reason not to go forward.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:00:48 +0000