Brother-In-Law in Business (BiB) - Business development idea

Companies appoint sales people to bring revenue to the organization. Almost 99% of the times the sale is made not just because of the sales person it is due to the other factors that play a major role for e.g.

• Value prop of the product or services that you sell
• How well you understood the customer problem
• How the customer understood your product
• How well you know the decision makers to influence your product ... and so on.

How well you understand the customer pain point and how well you know the decision makers covers 50% of the sales cycle. To me the entire company staff in some form can act as sales agents to sell your product or service. This potential is not discovered and made use of by most companies. Some have a referral fee based compensation but that doesn't help as the non-sales people don't constantly look for sales opportunities and are consumed with their day to day work. You need a system where sales guys can reach out to non-sales staff on a regular basis to pick their contacts. Here is how you can use your non-sales staff in sales.

Penetration Strategy

Make your sales team do the home work and come out with the pre-qualified list of customers you want to cover. Publish the list to your internal organization(intranet). Make your employees go through the list on a regular basis and let the sales person know if they have any of their family or friends work for these companies. Normally you will have some one's Brother-In-Law working for the companies that you want to enter. Use these entry points to understand the people, pain points, politics, budgets, infrastructure etc. Now you are in a better position to go in and sell. Come out with a good compensation model for the employees who introduce you in that organization. Most non-sales staff may not know how they can help sales. Just having a referral fee may not attract the help you need from them. You need to come out with creative ways of extracting information from them.