Selling the first day of January

Today is the first official business day of 2007 calendar year in United States and for many companies the first day of the new fiscal year. That means new budget and more room for toys. Today is the day when the future SBSer (ie, the lowest guy on the IT infrastructure totem pole just itching for a pink slip so he can use his 6 weeks of enterprise IT experience as the helpdesk serf to destroy an SMB network with his inkjet business card) gets the task of researching the solutions and pricing.

So this guy (or girl) is browsing the web today, trying to get the pricing on all the possible alternatives and features and so on and so forth. He is not the buyer, not the decision maker, not the influencer.. basically, as far removed from the actual decision as the outsourced office cleaning crew that shows up at 10 PM.

If you are in business of selling software today is the day you will receive 8,000 phone calls out of which 7,999 you will never hear from again. All they want is a number so they can blindly compare you based on the cost alone.

Customer: How much is ExchangeDefender?

Vlad: $1.

Customer: Really?

Vlad: Yes. The cost varies depending on the features and all the stuff you need, how about I give you a demo so you can see all we offer and you can pick what you need.

Now Exchange is nowhere near $1 but you need to give them a jolt to wake them up. You’re likely on this guys list of 9,308,509,283,509,238 people to call today and he is just running through the script. First give them something to wake them up from their job, then let them get interested in what they are looking for – beyond the price.

Second, get them to look at the product. If they are not interested at looking in the product you have no chance in hell with this company, might as well hang up on him right then and there and save some toll free minutes. I’m not suggesting you do that at all but in terms of financial probability that you get a deal based on a script-caller is close to 0.

Third, when you are doing the demo – get their info.

As you’re setting up the demo, find out about their company.

As you’re finding out about the problem, tailor the demo to how your product will solve their problems.

Etc, etc, etc. If this person actually likes their job they will want to make sure the best products go to the top of the list thats presented to the decision maker. They will even go a step further and perhaps suggest why to look at you over your competition. 

The old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” has long lost its meaning. Market leaders are no longer the quality leaders and the person putting their job on the line is not only concerned about the budget but about being required to explain why they selected your software when/if things go wrong. Make sure that guy gets that safety blanket because that is the selling point in 2007 – service, not just software.