Marketing
Issue No. 46 - April/May 2009
Be provocative to create the sale
by Dr David Corkindale and Dr David Corkindale
In order to get sales you need good salespeople. Presumably to save money, one of the biggest electrical retailers in the US, Circuit City, fired 3400 of its best salespeople, who happened to also be earning the most. The crazy logic was that the firm could hire cheaper sales people and boost profits.
Within 18 months the firm filed for bankruptcy after sales steadily fell after the sackings. Lesson: good salespeople sell stuff. However, in the business environment we are entering even good people may struggle particularly if the potential customer does not have a budget to buy stuff just now. How do we still get sales when a customer has no budget? The answer is what is called Provocation Selling.
The principle is simple: rather than compete for a share of budget consumption you must stimulate budget creation. To achieve this takes a well-devised and executed campaign. Let’s look at how to do this.
Who to target, on what basis?
Following Geoffrey Moore’s well–accepted and used ‘chasm’ framework for mapping the sequence of buyers for something new, there are four types of potential client from the Visionary, who can quickly see the opportunity for gaining advantage over rivals from adopting your product, service or idea, through to the very Conservative buyer who needs to be convinced of the immediate pay-off that will come with little effort or hassle on their part. The different sales pitch to each type of potential buyer is set out in F...
