(Originally posted June 24, 2009)
This is a story that offers an example of a poor tactic for soliciting new business.
As a business manager I would frequently receive appointment requests from potential new vendors. A sales person for a potential vendor called me to offer a foreign currency exchange service. I’ll call him Joe. We did significant business in other currencies so we were a good prospect.
The approach taken by Joe was to announce that his company could deliver savings on the cost of currency transactions and he wanted to meet with me to show me how. He made this claim without asking me who we dealt with at the time or what kind of costs we incurred. He neglected even to ask about our volume which has a significant impact on foreign exchange costs.
Joe didn’t know if he could save us anything. He was making promises he didn’t know he could keep. Nevertheless, whether he could have saved us money or not became irrelevant because I value integrity over cost savings. The best way to ruin integrity is to make promises you can’t keep. He didn’t get an appointment. If Joe had approached me maybe with a request to analyze our currency exchange programs to see if he could improve on them, he might have had a chance.
The moral of the story isn’t the importance of integrity (though it is important!). The moral of the story is the importance of identifying what is important to your potential customer. The business Joe worked for was well known and no doubt had lots of customers who were attracted to the savings he (said he) delivered. While Joe may not have been able to learn in advance that cost was not my only criterion, a different approach would broaden his chances of getting a meeting. He thought cost was the eye-catcher he needed to get in the door. The eye-catcher he should have used was an offer of a no cost, no obligation second opinion on our existing program.
A professional business developer follows a process that starts out with identifying issues and challenges facing the prospect. If your product or service is so weak that you instead need to resort to high pressure or unethical tactics to make a sale maybe you should think about getting into a new business.
Doug
