101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas
IDEA 27:
TACKLE A NEW CATEGORY OF CUSTOMER
However experienced you are, you may find yourself faced with selling in circumstance where you have no experience, indeed no frame of reference, and where the nature of a business area and those in it are to a degree alien. It is a mistake to think that if you can sell everything and anything. Your lack of experience may show and blight the results you want.
Idea
From consultant and author Frances Kay ….
This is another example from my personal experience. First, let me say that most people who write books – business books, at any rate – do so at least in part because it is visible and helps build a positive profile. Frances Kay agreed with this. She wanted to add a book to her credentials, but was unsure how to go selling the idea to a suitable publisher. This is a specialist area, and probably hundreds of proposals are received for every single book that is published, so the strike rate can be low. So she looked around for someone who had been published and presumably gone through the necessary learning curve.
She settled on me (I have written more than 50 books), and made contact to set up a meeting. I was able to give her a crash course in how to approach, pitch an idea, and deal with a publisher. This certainly saved her significant time, and allowed her to make a much more precise and suitable approach than she might otherwise have done. (She says this; I am trying not to blow my own trumpet here). She subsequently had her book on networking, Brilliant Business Connections, published (by How –to Books), and an excellent book it is too. She has gone on to write a number of other titles, including New Kid on the Block (published by Cyan), about how to deal with the first moments on taking up a new job.
In practice
- The principle here is clear: there is no point in trying to reinvent the wheel if you can liaise with someone who has done so already, and extend your sales approach through acquiring something of their experience.