Video Transcript
Hi it’s Steve Richard from Vorsight, on the road at Palo Alto, California. I’m here after spending three days in Huston, Texas with an infrastructure software services company.
It brought to mind a great lesson from my past, from working with a sales manager I wanted to share with you today. That’s the order in which you sell yourself, your company, and your product/service.
What tends to happen is people try to learn everything about the product or service they’re offering, especially with software, and they want to spew all the features and benefits of that product or service offering. So, when you get into an interview and you say, “Hey, sell me this pen.” When you ask that question, people tend to say, “Well, the pen is light. The pen is smooth. The pen writes well,” and they are talking about the features and benefits of the pen. My manager taught me, this is actually completely counterintuitive, but that’s exactly the opposite way you want to do it because people will never buy the pen until they buy you first, and the company that makes the pen second.
In order, what you want to do, especially if on the phone for the inside sales part of the process, number one, you need to build rapport by selling yourself first. If people don’t buy into you, and they don’t feel comfortable having a conversation with you, you’re done.
Number two, you need to sell your company. You have to be able to tell an interesting, compelling, intriguing story about your organization that gets them to pay attention. There are so many people out there selling pens, right?
And then number three, finally, you get into the product and service specifications; the features, the benefits of the pen itself. So in order you go, number one, sell yourself, number two, sell your organization, number three, sell your products and services and of course is in the context of a conversation. You want to wrap around a conversation and not just be spewing information at them. Hope that helps.
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