Bag the Elephant by Steve Kaplan

Author:Steve Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Published: 2008-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

11

Recruiting Great Champions

Courting and Cultivating Your Inside Sales Rep

As you begin to meet with your prospect and your relationship grows, you will need to establish your credibility and gain access to the levers of power. For those tasks, you need a champion.

A champion is an individual in the prospective company who goes to bat for you by trying to get her company to use your services. A strong champion can shorten your ramp-up time with the client and do wonders for your company image. She speaks on your behalf during closed-door meetings and passes your name around to her co-workers.

Simply by interacting with different people, you’ll usually gravitate toward the champion who’s meant for you. Everyone’s a potential champion—and you’ll need as many as you can get. Once you mesh with a potential champion, work to make her your own. Help her be successful by giving great service and quality. As you learn more about what she views as important work, come through for her. I had one champion who merely wanted to know how everyone else in the company was reacting to her marketing ideas. I was a great source of information for her, and she made sure I kept getting business by supporting me in the company.

A strong champion can shorten your ramp-up time with the client and do wonders for your company image.

My first champion at Procter & Gamble was Daryl, an assistant marketing brand manager who worked on the Pert brand. Daryl wanted to try one of our programs, but there was a problem—we weren’t an “authorized core vendor,” a term I had never even heard of. Daryl took it upon himself to make sure we understood everything we needed to do in order to become an authorized supplier. He went out on a limb for our small, unknown company, and I’ve never forgotten it to this day. As the years went by, we added many new champions, across many departments, to the fold.

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