I’ve come across an interesting new book about Sales Benchmarking. Of course benchmarking has been around for sometime in other disciplines, but is rarely applied in sales. The concept is simple, look at your competitors or peers’ sales operations and use hard data to compare yourself to them.
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Continuing on from my post about jargon, something that stuck with me from the seminal dotcom, the-world-will-never-be-the-same-again-whoop-whoop, book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” is the phrase “corporations should speak with a human voice”. The premise being that we as consumers, even as business people in our working lives, have become cynical and distrusting of stiff language designed to keep us at a distance “We value your business. Your call is important to us.”, and that people want to deal with straight-talking people like them, not corporate automatons.
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Here are a few direct and indirect questions to be used as a starting point for attacking an incumbent vendor / current solution.
• How do you feel about (incumbent vendor)?
• What do you like/dislike about company / product?
• What would you like to improve upon?
• How could it be better?
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