The Clever Offer Campaign

With a new product to pitch, I’m keen to know what issues are currently relevant to my chosen target market; sales teams.  I deduced that one way of researching this, was to check out online job ads for new reps.  My reasoning was that with a cheeky half-hour of surfing, I might uncover either general themes or specific requirements that describe ‘now’, beyond the inevitable “exciting new opportunity…” kind of flannel.

Whilst doing this, one of the recruitment sites tempted me with sample interview questions.  They offered 3 multiple choice options for you to illuminate an example of where you’d done something to increase a new product’s sales.  Two of the possibles were of the ‘make and monitor lots of calls’ meat-and-potato variety.  The third featured a story about how a ‘buy more and get discount elsewhere’ voucher scheme was concocted.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out which answer would show the requisite innovative sales thinking, especially when this latter one was the only option that included a stated sales increase (of “60%”!).

But of course, there is a strong message in this discovery.  With a new campaign to muster, I myself have been thinking of ‘offers’.  My preferred route so far revolved around a free small-scale trial with a specific outcome isolated.  After all, we all know the success probability of an unannounced call-reach-pitch-objection handle-close routine is low.  Yet this process prompted me to conjure more (better) alternative offers.  And I’m making sure they genuinely intrigue and add value to prospects.