Tuesday, September 20, 2011

“Clearly You Weren’t Listening…”

I’ve come across an affliction that, untreated, can cause serious chronic trauma to sales teams and forecasts:  Ignoremucitis.  This terrible disease manifests with the following symptoms:

1.       Sales team does a great job in qualification and discovery, asking many excellent and thoughtful questions.

2.       Sales team then presents a demo that essentially ignores everything that was learned.

3.       Customer chooses to purchase from a competitor or does nothing.

Additional collateral damage can include loss of sales team credibility, negative buzz from customers to other customers, and an ever-increasing spiral of trying to increase the sales “funnel” with more leads and more unproductive demos…

This horrible disease is curable.  For individuals, a single application of the Great Demo! book (applied topically, not to be ingested) has shown remarkable efficacy in studies done by the FDA (Famous Demonstrators Association).  For team-sized epidemics, the FDA recommends an initial dose of Great Demo! Workshops, followed periodically by refreshers to maintain desired antibody levels against future outbreaks.

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