Your customers, prospects and selling partners all have lives and other technology and products they are selling and or working with on a regular basis besides yours. We tend to believe that our customer and partners are constantly drinking our "cool aid" of solutions. Many of them are and have adopted most of our strategies however they dont have the time to keep up with us an understand all of the ins and outs of our solutions as time progresses. Thats our job!!
Complacency will set in and stuff gets added and removed and refreshed from our solutions of which is either a selling opportunity or time to get back in front of customers or partners to get them up to date. Cause if they don't know what we have they dont know that we can solve a certain problem. Another thing to keep in mind is that while we (salespeople) know all of the stuff embedded in our solutions our customers and partners may have a different view. For example: I have a software package that encompasses about 5 different features and all of which are necessities in my eyes. However some partners of mine don't see it that way. Because a bunch of them didn't know all 5 features were embedded. After doing a refresh session with their engineering team they started positioning the package differently which ended up in larger and more business.
Out of sight out of mind!!! Make sure you are constantly updating your customers and partners. Don't assume they know all. Customers are looking to you for guidance. Don't assume they know how to use your product. Dig into their issues and dig into the functionalities of your solution to help their specific needs. Find the need, don't assume, solve the need, win the business!!!
Shawn
SR@ShawnCReilly.com
