» Sales tips http://www.jesubi.com Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:01:52 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The need for professional persistence http://www.jesubi.com/82/the-need-for-professional-persistence http://www.jesubi.com/82/the-need-for-professional-persistence#comments Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:46:00 +0000 Bill Johnson http://www.jesubi.com/?p=82 [...]]]> 9 years ago when I was the VP of Sales for Aprimo, Merrill Lynch was one of the accounts we were targeting as a potential customer. Aprimo sells an enterprise marketing automation solution and at that time there was not much awareness of the EMA, EMM or MRM space so there was a lot of brute force involved in getting out name out. With Merrill Lynch we were targeting several executive management positions within marketing. We knew that calling into those positions required a dedicated persistence that was not obnoxious. We would make up to 12 to 14 attempts spread out over 3 months. Several of the marketing executives we finally spoke with weren’t interested, until we hit upon a Director of Marketing for one of the lines of business on our 13th attempt. He said he would take a meeting and over the next 4 months he became our champion which led to the initial purchase of Aprimo’s software suite. Because of our team’s persistence, Merrill Lynch became a 7 figure customer of Aprimo’s. Sure it would have been easy to have quit calling after 4 or 5 attempts, but then we would have been like so many other vendors, hoping to get Merrill Lynch as a customer instead of having them as a customer.

The professionalism in our approach helped win our contact over, we didn’t call 12 times in a day or 12 times in a week, but spread the calls out over a 3 month period, always leaving a professional voicemail with our value proposition and a specific call to action.

We were tracking that persistence with excel spreadsheets back then, but now with the creation of Jesubi we have enabled that functionality within the core product application. Check out Jesubi and maybe Jesubi can help you win your next major opportunity.

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