How Not To Sell A New Service

I had a really funny experience yesterday that I need to share with you because it highlighted many of the problems that companies have trying to sell new services. I was eating breakfast and reading the Globe and Mail newspaper, a Canadian national paper, a typical workday start for me.

After reading the first few pages I came across an ad in the first section from my bank promoting a new small business service to help get your business online. The package included a $100 certificate for Google Adwords and something called a Small Business Marketing Toolkit. The ad finished by telling you ask your account manager at your branch for more details. I was very interested in this as recently I have been wading through a number of options and trying to figure out how to promote my business online.

As it turned out I had to be at my bank later that day to sign some documents so after we finished the tedious process of signing (why do banks need so, so many copies of everything!) I asked asked my account manager about this promotion. She knew nothing about it which I thought was fair enough because she works in personal banking not small business. So, we went downstairs to find the small business account manager. Turns out she didn’t know anything about it either.

I was having a hard time not laughing by this time. While I sat across from them they then got the national branch service centre on the telephone to ask about this promotion. The first person they contacted didn’t know anything about it and they were transferred to another person. This person knew about it and said the packages were sent to the branch ten days ago.

Terrific I thought, now maybe I’ll get my Google Adwords $100 certificate. Unfortunately not, because no one at my branch had seen these. The two account managers then went to talk to the branch manager who was aware of the program and said that they were going to mail out packages to pre-qualified customers and would have hard copy soon for interested clients. I heard him tell the account managers that the program hadn’t been rolled out yet.

At this point I had to poke my head in their door and say how funny I thought this was. The program had been rolled out as it was advertised that day in two national Canadian newspapers. Further I laughed when I told them that this would make a great story about how not to sell because here you have a program that you spent a lot of money advertising and then wouldn’t you know it, an actual potential client walks in the door interested in the program, and the front line staff at the bank aren’t aware of the program.

The lesson here is that no matter what type of selling you are engaged in you must be absolutely certain that the product that you are selling is real and can be delivered, otherwise you will appear to your clients like you are trying to pull a fast one on them. When you do have your product or service ready to go to market, please, please, please ensure that all of your employees who have client contact are aware of what you are promoting otherwise you’ll live through my experience yesterday.


Dave Speed

Competition

In my last post I wrote about a company that I recently worked with.  When I began working with them in early Fall 2011 we discussed a proposal that they had submitted to a client back in July 2011. This proposal was for a project that the company had experience in delivering and while not a proprietary solution the company felt they were ahead of their competition in being able to deliver this service. The value of the proposal was over $15 Million CAD.

When questioned about follow up activities since submission I was told that they had sent an email and had not been able to get a response from them. This surprised me because it is only common sense that a client is unlikely to buy a solution based on a proposal and an email. I suggested that we should travel to visit the client and follow up in person but the company did not want to spend the money as this client was not in North America. Again, I was very surprised because if an investment of approximately $15k for travel to follow up with the client wasn’t deemed to be a good investment how did the company expect to win this piece of business? In fact, if they weren’t willing to invest in the travel to follow up why did they bother to spend the time preparing a $15 Million proposal.

As I dug into this situation I reviewed the details of the proposal and learned that the company had decided to price the proposal at a gross margin approximately 2.8 times their normal margin. This was done in the belief that they were the only company able to successfully deliver this solution. While other companies around the world had the capability to deliver this solution my client was the only one who had successfully delivered such a solution. This is a good competitive advantage for sure.

The first lesson from this situation is about follow up. If it is worth spending the time to prepare a proposal then you must be convinced that it is business worth winning and must be prepared to do whatever it takes to follow up with the client.

The second lesson is that competition is not just about your competitors who work in the same field. Competition can be your potential client not proceeding with the project.

Competition comes in many forms so always be thinking of how you will find competition, its not always obvious, and how you will deal with it.


Dave Speed