LAJ ARTICLES

Sales Assembly Line. Part 8. Staffing for Client Intimacy

Enterprise buyers are technology averse. They shun it. Don’t sell them what they don’t want. They want intimacy with sales and service
You may enjoy buying the newest smartphone, but then the Samsung Galaxy 7 happened, that ritualized behaviour ends. The older model phone that doesn’t blow up becomes all the rage.
This is why you should never emphasize technology in a sales process. It is not a durable value.
However wondrous the technology is, the decision maker and the others are on their side of a conference table, are anticipating where your product will break down. Each person on that side of the table has an ‘ideal’ solution in mind and they are measuring your product against that. They are not in agreement on what the ideal is. It is intensely personal. As an example, someone at that table is worried about being replaced by the new product so their ideal is something that works, yet doesn’t threaten their career.
Intimacy in a sales and customer service experience is a premium value.
The technology aspect of a product should be exactly articulated in a presentation but then withdrawn, de-emphasized. Relieve them of the burden of projecting their cynicism and creative imagined worries onto your product.
As a substitute: while you are lifting the technology from the scales, add the weight of customer intimacy, ongoing servicing, education, implementation, someone to hold their hand, take ownership of it. Someone who will answer their phone calls at 9pm at night and a process to escalate an issue for quick resolution. In this way the prospect will still imagine the ‘break’ but they will also incorporate into that the daymare the ‘fix’. 
Every prospect expects things to fall apart, to be slightly ‘oversold’ and disruption, that’s okay. They measure a vendor by the recovery.
The prospect won’t know how your company will respond until something does indeed break down, but if they have sustained, informed, intimacy in the sales and servicing they will be generous and in their projection of the future, they will imagine a human ‘fixing’ response.
Charge more for the human response. It’s a premium offering. Staff for it.
The End?
This is a long essay that I have divided up into its component pieces:
The Cultural Shift
Define It or the Prospect Will
Exploiting the First Mover Advantage
Reverse Engineering a 300% Price Increase
Each Sales Office is a Franchise
Why Good Salespeople Fail
Why The CEO Should Not Be Selling
Intimacy is a Premium
Breeding Your Competitors
SDR’s. Million Dollar Solution. Hundred Dollar Problem

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