Supplier Corner: You May Be Wasting Your Best Sales People

Your sales team is ready and willing to talk to prospects about partnership. Having your best sales person spend time introducing your company to someone is like:

  • Cracking an egg with a sledgehammer
  • Serving Lagavulin 16 to someone who has never tried scotch
  • Taking your 3 year old to The French Laundry for their birthday
  • Putting out your birthday candles with a fire hose
  • Coating your home in solid gold paint.
  • Teaching your kid to drive in a Bugatti
  • Flying Jetblue from Manhattan to Brooklyn.
  • Delivering the mail in an F-16
  • Buying a new car when you have a flat tire.

You get the point. They can do it, but it’s costly and lavish and at the end of the day, they could use the time to accomplish a lot more, particularly if you have a tight budget. Take a look at events for example.

The Core

For suppliers, generating new business means that industry events are core to sales efforts for the year. They provide an environment conducive to conversations that drive prospects closer to partnership. The types of conversations your best sales people are having at these shows is determined by your efforts prior to the event. A beautiful booth with graphics that pop, a top team and great swag will only get you so far.

Meaningful conversations come from qualified booth traffic. These visitors know what questions to ask, almost as if the sales team prompted them. These conversations are rewards from work that happens well before the show. Industry awareness is the first factor that determines the conversations your salespeople are having at a show. Awareness at scale costs you a lot less than sending your team in to create it on site.

In our eBook “Awareness: The Ultimate Conversation Driver”, you learn about the importance of awareness, the relationship between awareness and sales, activities that build awareness, methods to raise awareness, what happens if you leave awareness solely to your sales or PR teams and the importance of building awareness to optimize your sales efforts and make the most of a sales person’s time.

Download our eBook for free.