Selling in a New Market Space: Getting Customers to Buy Your Innovative and Disruptive Products

Book excerpt: Your new product has changed the rules of the market. Now, you have to change the rules for selling it . . . Providing a truly innovative product or service is the difference between life and death for companies today. But once you’ve produced it, you have to answer the next big question: How do I sell this unique offering to customers who don’t even know they have a need for it? Brian C. Burns and Tom U. Snyder compared 27 highly successful emerging-growth and start-up corporations with 78 less successful companies in similar fields. The difference, they learned, lies neither with the product nor with marketing but with the sales strategy. In short, the losers relied on conventional sales methods; the winners deployed a unique sales strategy that focused on how organizations make decisions. Selling in a New Market Space helps you develop a sales strategy to approach potential buyers the right way—the first time around—using what the authors call the “Maverick Method.” This game-changing guide explains: What Maverick sellers do differently and why they hold the key to your success Where to find salespeople with the skills for selling to a new market How to create early market segments and marginalize competitors When to transition them away from Maverick selling Don’t be a victim of your own success. What good is the product you put all that money into if you can’t sell it? If you want to get the most out of your innovative offering, you need to create a new class of salesperson. With Selling in a New Market Space, you have the tool for driving your new product to the limits of its potential.