Why should I care about CI? I’m in Sales!

Calls, pipelines, meetings, and more calls. This is what sales people do: make calls, make contacts, and build relationships. It seems simple, doesn’t it? So, when a marketing person comes in with charts and diagnostics, what happens? The eyes roll, the hands go back behind the head, and you can almost hear the brain turning off.

Why do you think salespeople don’t care about CI? What have you done to show them of their benefit? Salespeople work primarily in the business of relationships, and on the surface it doesn’t seem as if Competitive Intelligence matters. Therefore, they believe that what they need is to get themselves in front of the right people, and their sales abilities will finish the deal.

Therefore, when someone outside of sales approaches them with statistics and magic quadrants, they don’t see the correlation to their efforts at creating and maintaining their relationships with prospects.

Maybe a different tactic is needed. Maybe it’s time for the market research person to use a little salesmanship to promote CI to those who can use it most. Consider these questions before approaching the sales team:

1. What information can I share that matters in a sales scenario?
2. What can it tell them that impacts their ability to win more opportunities?
3. What can I leave out that isn’t critical to their specific needs?
4. How can I present this information in a way that gets their attention?

Whether we realize it or not, we are all salespeople. We need to position our product in a way that attracts the attention of those we wish to influence. Remember that when you try to sell to the biggest skeptic: your own sales force.

Slight Changes

Hello, everyone. This is Mark Larson at Primary Intelligence wishing all of you a happy and productive day. I just wanted to update you on some changes that will be happening with the blog.

Chris Dalley has taken a new position here within our company and has passed the opportunity of managing this blog onto me. Chris is a more prolific writer than I, so I will be enlisting the help of my PI colleagues to continuously bring new and interesting content to these pages.

We hope to give you tidbits on the Competitive Intelligence community in general as well as exciting new developments we uncover while doing our own research.

A lot has changed in the intelligence and market research fields over the past 10 years in which we've been in business. Technology is playing a bigger role as companies want easier access to data as well as better targeted findings.

We hope to keep the information rolling that helps you in your understanding of what is available and what is on the horizon in regards to CI.

We also would love your comments as well. If you have an interesting viewpoint on a topic, or information that would be enlightening, send it to me and we'll look at posting it.

Contact me at mlarson@primary-intel.com or by phone at 801-838-9600 x5046.