“Clearly You Weren’t Listening…”

Posted by Peter Cohan on September 20, 2011

0 comments | 546 reads

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.

Republished with author's permission from original post by Peter Cohan.

Peter Cohan

Peter Cohan is the founder and principal of The Second Derivative, focused on helping software organizations improve the success rates of their demos. In 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange on software demonstrations. He is the author of the book Great Demo! - how to prepare and deliver surprisingly compelling software demonstrations.

About Peter Cohan |
Connect:

Categories:

Sales Performance

546 reads
Print
Email

0 comments »

Post new comment

Your name: *

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

Input format

Filtered HTML

Allowed HTML tags: <a> <img> <hr> <table> <tr> <td> <th><ul> <ol> <li> </li><blockquote> <colspan> <rowspan><object>
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Images can be added to this post.

Post

Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Images can be added to this post.

More information about formatting options

Notify me when new comments are posted

All comments

Replies to my comment

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

What code is in the image?: *

Enter the characters shown in the image.

MarketPlace

Global Customer Experience Management (CEM) Certification Program

[May 30-31, Frankfurt; July 25-26, Hong Kong] An internationally recognized program with proven track record of success - being run for 34 times in 13 cities with attendees from 50 countries, the program is developed based on the U.S. patent-pending Branded CEM Method which aims to drive customer loyalty and brand differentiation with quantifiable business results. Limited offer: USD300 early bird discount.

Join us on May 29th in New York City. Stuart Ryder, SVP, Mobile Research Lead for Ipsos IOTX & Roxana Strohmenger, a leading Forrester analyst, will be in attendance to share best practices and new trends in mobile market research.

[June 12, Sir Francis Drake Hotel] Gregson Siu, Vice President, Ariba Business Operations, Ariba and Bob Thompson, CustomerThink, will be in attendance to share best practices, new trends and latest research to help you develop your customer experience program.

Social Networking and sCRM International Congress in Colombia

[June 25-26, Bogota] Thirteen international thought leaders will present, from different perspectives, the trends, the uses, and the magic - as well as the reality - of Social Networking and how it impacts the way customers are doing/will do business.

Driving ROI With VoC

Walker has identified multiple ways to measure ROI – there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. This paper will address each and conclude with some recommendations to help B-to-B practitioners evaluate which ROI approach will work best for their particular business need.