Selling to Large Companies

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This article was halfway finished, with the title you see above, when I got an email with this subject line: "If you want to sell better, just shut up!"

Whoa, I thought. Readers often send me emails with the article title as the subject line. But this article hadn't yet left my computer! What was going on?

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Think of any situation where you have purchased something, and, at the end of the purchase experience, things got nasty. Assumptions you had made at the beginning of the process turned out to be incorrect. Promises that the vendor made were broken, and the vendor was very reluctant to make it up to you. The enthusiasm you and the vendor had at the beginning of the process was gone, and in its place were raw nerves, legitimate concerns, and a lot of haggling over "what we must do, now that we know what we didn't know before."

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I don't do this very often, because I always have an abundance of original content, but, in conventional blogger style, today I'm going to refer you to two other articles.

Actually, I wrote one of them, so perhaps my resort-to-convention post only applies to one of the articles - a great post in Ray Wang's blog, "Software Insider's Point of View," posted by John Ragsdale, VP of Research for SSPA, formerly of Forrester.

In John's article, "Reality Check: Sales reps matter more than product," he says:

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Some time ago, I wrote an article about how software buyers were mired in the "skepticism swamp." It's even worse now.

If you're selling software, you have to be able to overcome the massive amount of disbelief that has built up in buyers' minds, thanks to all the promises that have been made to them - and broken. Everyone promised higher productivity, increased efficiency, and plug-and-play. HA.

What everyone delivered was installation headaches, integration nightmares, missing-in-action service, and navigation that required that you know the program intimately before you could do anything useful with it.

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Long-time readers are probably wondering if I've gone off my rocker with that title. No worries, I'm not suggesting that you do anything stupid or lewd. But there is something that you can learn from any performer, even the most superficial ones.