What's Been Your Best Idea?
Last month I blogged on the importance of knowing, or asking for, the toughest Sales problems solved.
Discussing this further with someone since I recounted an experience from back in my twenties.
When taken along to a meeting with a prospect by a kind of Enterprise bolt-on software module founder. We met the SME supremo. Looking at the business card handed him, he quipped on its job title, "so the MD then". Which in England at the time was the top rung (as chief execs as a species hadn't yet permeated commerce).
To which my compadre, shuffling slightly replied, "yes, for my sins".
An exchange typical of the prevailing culture.
As we settled into our seats and teas were ordered, I was introduced. As "Marketing expert". Which was very much news to me.
There was an embryonic Customer Success, as we'd call it today, thread. With a CLM. Customer Liaison Manager, redoubtably in situ. Principally concerned with getting clients up and running. Which is what I thought I was being asked to build upon. Whilst ensuring solid legacy emerged from product use.
Still, the prospect instantly turned to me;
"So what's been your best Marketing idea then?"
Not wishing to undermine my partner-in-call, I paused for a thought, and answered with reference to bringing a Sales perspective to how users reap the power of what they've bought.
Specifically by hunting for what we'd call metrics inside the client.
The encounter stuck with me.
In the immediate aftermath, driving on later, we riffed on this. I thought in future I'd say something like;
"Well, there's plenty right up there. Best is quite a broad label, any specific tag in mind?"
The angle being you could also prompt for options like most unique, biggest personal impact or most enduring.
That's now language of three decades back. But although speech patterns have evolved, the construct remains valid.
Where your specialism can be described functionally, knowing what are flavours of your 'best' ideas within it will certainly prove useful. Not least of which for interview situations.
Is it weird that I cannot recall ever being asked this question since? No, "so what's been your best Sales idea, then?"
Yet the examples I can already think of to relate here are legion, fitting neatly in the above template.
Where my world might say 'Sales', what would yours say? And what might be your best idea(s) in it?