Persistence pays. I was in sales and marketing for 50 years and always left a detailed phone message. By the time I actually talked to the potential buyer they thought that they knew me
You sound better when you smile. I did a lot of business over the phone and smiling when you say it gets people on your side.
I had a joke of the week and people would call me to find out what it was in the pre email days. (When confronted with a glass with half it's volume filled with water, what does the engineer say? “The glass was misspecified!”.. there are only a few good engineering jokes!)
You can Outlast bad management. Both where I worked as well as in companies I worked with, I found that just sticking around was sometimes enough for that bad management to go away and progress again could be made.
True marketing has nothing to do with promotions and sales and SEO and all the other things that people think about when they think about marketing. I was a true product marketeer in that I was defining markets that that product would serve as opposed to finding prospects for a product. That's real marketing because it affects the design of the product and answers market needs that are known. Good upfront product marketing justifies the investment, and we know where our prospects are because we identified them before we built the product. At one point my clients were 487 of the Fortune 500, they had needs worth solving!***
A good demonstration beats a sales pitch every time.
You can't learn when you're talking.
*** I I mentioned demonstrations as a means to close the deal and or present dramatically a point to be made. There was a stock crash in 1987 and I was responsible for a demonstration that was performed in front of 200 New York stock exchange brokers at an IBM facility North of New York City. I had lunch with a former president of the exchange who appreciated the demonstration…
Another memorable demonstration was at a trade show. It was telecommunications and Northern Telecom had brought a central office switch into the parking lot and huge cables onto the show floor to connect to it and the outside world. The big deal that week was ISDN where you could have data and voice over the same line. The show was just getting set up and they were ready to do a demo, so I asked if I could see it. They showed it to me. And then I told them if you show that to any of my customers they'll never do business with you again.
Their eyes got very big, and they got a lot bigger when I handed them my business card and they realized that I really was representing the Fortune 500.
I let them know that yes you had data and voice over the same line and you hung up the phone call, but the screen share with the banker is still up on the real estate broker's desk because you didn't hang up the data call. So now whatever the banker does during the day the real estate broker will see it…I think you agree it's less than ideal.
They had spent $300,000 to get ready for the trade show and never showed that demo to anyone!
But that's what you get when you have engineers designing a demonstration…
(A Coworker once put a competitor out of business by doing demos at a trade show! I was an unknowing pawn in that game and did my part.)
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