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Today’s question comes from Joey Bushnell out of Hampshire, England who says:
“Hi Craig, I sell custom manufactured foam solutions primarily to large medical manufacturing clients like Baxter Healthcare, 3M Medical, JNJ, and Abbott Labs. My biggest challenge is getting time in front of prospect Engineers to help develop new cutting edge foam medical products. Most of the time Purchasing wants to control that relationship if you aren’t an existing vendor. Warm regards, JB”
Great question. Sometimes its a tough call when you’ve got a gatekeeper in front of you.
But the truth is, regardless of what you’re doing, you’re going to get a lot more out of dealing with the decision makers themselves instead of their gatekeepers. I realize conventional wisdom — especially in the corporate world — may be to make the gatekeepers your friends, but I’ve never made much money banking on conventional wisdom when it comes to marketing.
If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, then you’re going to be as average as everyone else is, so you’ve got to do things different. Here are a couple of ideas Joey can use:
1. First of all, going around to every single engineer has GOT to be a huge drain on your time. If this were me, I’d instead invite them to attend some kind of an informational workshop. I’d even go so far as to try and get this workshop approved for professional Continuing Education credits, so they actually have professional incentive to attend.
Even if you have to pay to have someone there to actually teach them something, I’m sure picking up even one client, will more than offset your costs.
And in your workshop, part of your presentation of course, is you showing off all the newest toys (medical products) you want to sell them. I’d also do things like have a contest giveaway, and make the prize be some kind of trip or tour that takes the winner behind the scenes to see how these products are developed.
In other words, you want to do something to get them involved from an emotional standpoint. And since these guys are engineers and probably not the most socially lubricated people in the world, set up interactive kinds of networking so they won’t have to break the ice with one another on their own.
2. The other thing I’d do is create a 2-step lead generation program, and offer these engineers some kind of a free report/DVD program that they can ask for. Something like, “How Even The Laziest Engineer Can Develop Award-Winning Medical Equipment!”
This report will talk about how great medical devices are created, and it will give the opportunity for a limited number of these guys to brainstorm with you, in creating some of their own devices that can realistically change patients lives.
The people who respond first, would get that opportunity.
The DVD would show how most devices are developed. You can also interview key production people at your company and share their background, their philosophies about business and their work… and some of the success stories that have come out of these projects.
I’m not intimately familiar with your business, but I think you can pretty much get the gist of what I’m trying to do here, no? You want to create involvement devices to ‘hook’ these engineers and get them attracted to you and what you have to offer.
NOT by selling them something, but by making them part of your creative process.
As opposed to you setting up appointments with them, and chasing them down.
Does this make sense?
I sure hope so, because if you do this… you’re going to make a lot of money by doing things very differently from everyone else in your industry.
Keep in mind my favorite saying, especially when it comes to things like this: I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission.
It will serve you well.
Now go sell something, Craig Garber
P.S. Most people can tell you where the money is, this book shows you how to actually get it!
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