A little over a year ago I was in a meeting with one of my business partners discussing how to react to the new marketing reality. The traditional sales approach of cold calling and sending out salesmen to land the sale by educating the customer was no longer working. Refreshing our website and adding a timely blog, following the pundits of the day made no difference. I suspect that adding a proliferation of data on the web only made our competitors more knowledgeable.
Innovation turned out to be the answer. It has to be a financially useful innovation. No, adding pink polka dots, while innovative, does not add real value. And you cannot skip the work of doing the A-B testing to demonstrate that the customer agrees that the “improvement” beneficially changes the total cost of ownership. . We discovered that in this recovery, hidden in the background are a whole lot of innovations that actually improve the total cost of ownership, as seen by the customer. In this case, Tesla style lithium batteries, driverless controls and flat free aperture style tires changed the economics entirely.
The information on all of these wonderful innovations is out there on the web. Information overload applies. None of us has the time to sort through the myriads of web information to separate the wheat from the chaff. Enter the traditional role of the salesmen with the latest twist. The customers want more than just catalogs of information. Salesmen, who can provide them with the guidance on how the latest innovations will improve their operational costs, clinch the sale. A resultant 30% sales growth by my partner shows that this pivot finally was in the right direction.
The pace of innovation is so great that even I get blind sided. After making a $200,000 annual saving last year using the new surface technology, I felt smug. A thin layer of very high cost materials are grown on the surface of cheaper materials. In certain applications this is all that is needed to make the material perform like it was entirely made of the more expensive material. A business partner called me about a new customer application in the same category. The Lord must have been looking after me, because I elected to defer to my expert. This is a good thing because I would have missed a new innovation that doubles the saving because it just was developed in the last 5 years. It is all out there on the web but I did not know where to look or that I should be looking.
Salesmen are more important then ever. In this climate the best help your team can provide is a new and shiney innovative item to break down the customer doors.
