Every deal counts for media technology companies today. Sales pipelines are slimmer; competition is tougher; and buyers are smarter than ever. Your customers and prospects focus on how technology can help them make money or cut costs. To survive and thrive in these tough times, you need to be trusted advisors to your customers – not just another vendor among many. You must invest limited sales resources wisely, get into opportunities early, demonstrate deep understanding of customer business issues, communicate credible business and technical value and win every possible deal.
Only Sales Performance Associates is focused exclusively on the needs of media technology companies. We help our clients achieve sustainable, repeatable and predictable revenue growth by improving sales and marketing processes, methods and execution.
Our Media Technology Sales Conditioning© methodology helps clients:
- Identify more and better sales opportunities
- Improve pipeline size, qualification and velocity
- Increase sales and revenue forecast accuracy
- Grow business within existing accounts
- Sell value and reduce discounting
- Win more competitive opportunities and
- Boost revenue and profits
Media Technology Sales Conditioning© is NOT Sales Training
Research shows traditional sales training is almost always a waste of money. Few companies see any initial increase in results that last more than a few months. As you can see in the chart below, Media Technology Sales Conditioning© methodology is not traditional sales training.
| Traditional Sales Training | Media Technology Sales Conditioning© | ||
| Event-oriented | One or two day “drive by” seminar without reinforcement or recurring/remedial training | Engagement-oriented | Three to nine month series of programs to assess and address your critical sales challenges with continuing hands-on contact and recurring and remedial training to make sure it “sticks” |
| Packaged | Boilerplate topics using “sanitized” fictional examples | Customized | Customized program based on a through top-down analysis and using your real sales opportunities to address your real sales challenges |
| Lecture | Instruction via PowerPoint; Typically fails to engage or be relevant to participants; Very low long term impact | Participatory | Learn by doing approach that engages participants in workshops and exercises built upon their specific sales opportunities and challenges |
| Silo Approach | Addresses roles in disconnected silo fashion (one program for salespeople, another for sales management, etc.) regardless of inter-related company-wide needs | Holistic Approach | Assumes that “everyone is in sales” and that executive management, sales and marketing management and front-line sales have connected and interdependent roles critical to sales success |
| Point Focus | Point solutions to problems (e.g., prospecting, qualification, benefit communication, etc.); Does little to help clients become more than “just another vendor” | Process Focus | Aligns the selling process with your customer’s specific buying processes; links corporate goals to sales and tactical marketing methods and processes; delivers a “new sales mindset” needed to change “dime-a-dozen vendors” into high-value “trusted advisors” |
| Industry-agnostic | Uses a one-size-fits-all-industries approach; Ignores special circumstances of media technology sales environment | Industry-specific | Built BY successful media technology sales and marketing leaders specifically FOR companies in today’s dynamic media technology marketplace |
Next Step: No-risk Exploration of Media Technology Sales Conditioning©
As you launch into 2012, make sure your entire team is equipped to succeed. Contact Us and explore how Media Technology Sales Conditioning© from Sales Performance Associates can help.
Jim Cundiff is Managing Partner of Sales Performance Associates LLC. The firm delivers sales and marketing conditioning tactics, methods and services to help media technology (broadcasting, new media, IPTV, and digital signage) create and win more business. He is the former VP of Sales and Marketing at BASYS Automation (acquired by Avid Technology), Associated Press Broadcast Technology – as well as other media technology companies. He can be reached via email at jcundiff (@) sales-perform (dot) com or by telephone at [+1] 404-492-6093.