Priority selling

Having selected the right sponsor and identified key advocates, the next task is to sell them on the concept of PSM—and the need for an effective system within your company. The first step in any selling situation is to know your audience. It is up to you to do some informal research on the person or people you want to endorse PSM look for insights into their business priorities, their track records with comparable initiatives, and their professional backgrounds. This will help you ... 

Once you have a basic idea of who your audience is and what their priorities are, the second step in a selling situation is to match the benefits of your "product"—in this case, PSM—to their needs. 

Then consider these selling benefits in the context of your company s business priorities, match them against the goals management has established for PSM, and then try to distill the comments into a few key points that summarize the long-term value of your plan to the company as a whole. 

With the growth of the polymer industry, competition has become fiercer and selling prices lower. In view of the competitive situation, priorities of industrial research have changed. It has become imperative to produce the same commodity polymers with better properties at reduced cost by improved processes and in larger units. To stay ahead,... 

Whereas most of the commercial molecular modeling vendors provide excellent support in terms of quickly answering users questions and fixing bugs periodically, it should be kept in mind that some publishers sell the software as is. Also, providing customer support may not be among the top priorities of academic suppliers of software. Obviously, the price of a software product includes the anticipated cost of the level of support to be provided. 

We now have a development man assigned to a specific end-use industry. What is the best way to maximize his efforts First, what are we trying to accomplish in this industry We know from our market analysis studies that there are numerous specific applications where the new plastic will do the end-use job better at equivalent or lower cost. Does this mean that our man should take on a host of end-use applications, selling each in turn with priority dependent upon potential volume and probability of success This is one way to do the development job. However, our experience indicates that more business is developed in the long run by market development activity than by end-use application activity. It is important to understand the difference between these two sales activities. 

You ll visit customers in your area, selling them SB products and services, then feeding the information back via written reports, so you ll need to be able to impress decision makers with your technical ability, deciding priorities and motivating yourself to succeed. 

Since experience seems to indicate that pleas to sales do not have much of an effect, an incentive should be found to motivate sales representatives to make selling the profit-driving products a top priority. This can be done by paying them especially high commissions when these products are sold. 

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