I agreed to speak with the sales person. Responding to his email, I asked, “Do you see challenges that we aren’t addressing well? Why do you think we are a good prospect for your solutions?
I didn’t think it was an unreasonable question. The sales person had reached out suggesting he could help us grow and improve in ways we hadn’t experienced.
At our meeting, the salesperson responded to my queries (He was selling a sales/marketing tool).
“Our solution interfaces with virtually every CRM, We automatically capture most activity, feeding that to CRM and other systems. We leverage AI technologies in our product. Our product has these features and capabilities…..” The sales person went on to discuss all the features and functions of the product. He clearly wanted to demonstrate them to me.
I waited until he paused to take a breath.
“But you haven’t answered my question, you suggested we could accelerate our growth. You must see some things we aren’t doing as effectively as we should. What are they?”
The sales person smiled on the Teams call, replying, “Thanks so much for asking, Dave. I’ve prepared a chart that compares the features and functionality of our solution to the alternatives and to the capabilities offered in major CRM systems….” He showed the familiar chart, the columns were labeled with a number of products, his was in the featured column. He had a long list of features, functions, capabilities with every box for his product checked. As you would guess, there were lots of empty boxes in the other columns.
“As you can see, we offer the richest set of capabilities of all the alternatives and your current CRM system,” he said.
“Let me ask this differently,” I suggested, “How are other companies using your solution to dramatically improve performance? What problems are they eliminating, how are they addressing challenges to their growth? What business results are they seeing through the implementation of your solution?”
To be fair, he did offer one things, “Because we capture so much data automatically, your people don’t have to spend so much time doing data entry…..”
“OK,” I responded, “It’s not a huge issue for us, but I suppose every little bit helps. But I’m confused. You suggested you could help us grow our business significantly, other than spending less time entering data and making sure it’s accurate, I’m not sure what your are doing to help us accelerate our growth…..”
“I understand, Dave,” perhaps the next step is to provide a demo, to show you how we automate much of those activities. We can also show you more capabilities and features that you may find interesting. Can we schedule a demo?”
“Thank you,” I replied, “Let me think about it…..”
Of course, perhaps my experience with this sales person was very unusual…….
I wonder if he’s updated is CRM, moving me from prospect to qualified…. Of course, maybe his system does that automatically.
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