After a marathon of demos this week, we’ve finally gotten through them all… hooray! With five demos under our belt (two previously and three this week), I felt like an old pro when our sales reps’ started going through all the features in their products. (Do I know what progressive profiling means? Pssh… obviously!)
What struck me as the biggest difference between the demos was not—as it probably should have been— the various software products, but rather, their respective sales guys. Each sales person’s presentation style was drastically different from the last. To prepare you for all the flavors of sales people we encountered, here are three caricatures of who you can expect to meet in your marketing automation search …
(Please note: All names have been changed to protect their original owner’s identity. Plus, almost every sales person we talked to was actually named Matt.)
Friendly Frank
Frank starts the call off with questions about your weekend, whether you have any kids, and asks if you want to join him for Happy Hour when he’s in town visiting a client next week. When he pitches his marketing automation software, it’s clear he’s done his research on you, because it seems like he knows you better than your best friend. Sure enough, when you login to LinkedIn, there is Frank’s name on “Recent views of your profile.”
- Pros: He’s done his homework and understands your business, so he can better pitch the product to fit your needs.
- Cons: It’s so easy to talk to Frank, you might get caught up in the details of your weekend and not come away with a good impression of the software (other than “I really like that guy!”) Read the rest of this entry »
