Don’t forget to support your internal sponsors
Throw them a life line.
It came up again in our monthly business review. A nice sale in our pipeline has stalled. It’s a simple but substantial software upgrade. It’s stalled because our customer wants to wait a few months until the company makes another software systems change. Our internal sponsor in the company loves us, and wants to get the upgrade now because it will help him do his job better. We’ve already made a couple of site visits, had some conference calls, laid out our reasoning why they should go forward with the upgrade now rather than later. Our proposal has made the rounds. We have a verbal that they are going to go forward…eventually. But of course, anything could happen between now and eventually, so what can we do to make it happen now?
My suggestion was to give our sponsor some support in the form of a clear, concise, and hopefully compelling written argument that he can use as a “cheat sheet” when trying to remember everything we’ve told him several times and are counting on him to remember and repeat. Heck, hopefully he will cut and paste some of what we write into an e-mail to executives higher up.
Sure, this is fairly tactical stuff, and not as sexy as working on a brochure, or the next webinar, but could well be as important a step in closing the sale as that initial direct mail piece was, and should not be overlooked. And it is so easy for the marketer to create. We see it as obvious, because we live and breathe our solution every day. Our sponsor sees it, because he’s drank the kool aid. And yet so far we have left it up to him to sell it for us internally.
Two hours later, after getting some good notes about the hurdles ahead of us, our answer to those hurdles, and our list of benefits for doing the upgrade NOW, I crafted a one-page argument, broken into three sections, using subheads, bullets, some bolded elements, and a “for dummies” diagram. Tomorrow, we will e-mail it to our sponsor, who is grateful for the ammo.
