Xactly : How to Prove Product Possibilities to Your Prospects – Perfectly!

This guest blog was written and submitted by Zachary Gilula, an Incentive Compensation Expert at Xactly! This is part one of his two part thought leadership piece on creating value with your prospects. Part two will go live next week, so stay tuned to the Xactly Blog!

Outbound lead generation is a difficult task, especially in an era of 'disruptive' technologies that toss around ambiguous terms like Big Data and Cloud Computing. The theory of Diffusion of Innovations, popularized by Everett Rogers, explains the different consumer groups and how they each adopt new ideas and technology.

The five groups of consumers, in order of adoption, are as follows:

• Innovators (2.5%)
• Early Adopters (13.5%)
• Early Majority (34%)
• Late Majority (34%)
• Laggards (16%)

We're going to speak specifically about creating urgency to buy from the Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards. Mind you, the timeline of moving through each of these categories can be years depending on what we're looking at, but they invariably encounter the same problems.

A company pushing a new product or idea will need to continue to create pipeline outside of marketing efforts and that will fall onto their Lead Generation teams. The strategy and messaging of these individuals needs to at least address the following inevitable objections:

1. What do you do? More importantly, why do you exist and how can you help my organization and me?
2. Why are you better than what we currently use?
3. Why is it important I spend time now learning about your product? Why not look at this next year?
4. How can I justify spending so much money!?

If you have ever held a Lead Generation position or participated in some form of cold-calling, let's pause for a moment as you encounter nightmarish flashbacks of terrible conversations you've had where you felt the need to crawl into a hole and disappear for a year…

Ok, we're back! The problem most companies face when they're speaking with prospects that aren't familiar with their pitch is that they don't equip their lead generation ground warriors with ammo to overcome these OBVIOUS objections.

You need to expect to hear, 'I've never heard of you', 'We already have a system in place', 'This isn't a priority right now', 'That's way too much money for something like that', and of course, the sound of a dial tone when you realize you didn't have the CEO at hello.

Now this isn't a new idea and we're not about to drop the one and only golden ticket to obtaining a qualified pipeline, but there are simple and effective steps that can be taken to create an effective lead generation team that yields results.

What are those steps, you ask? Well, they're in Part Two of this post - so stay tuned!

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