PLM sales process is painful. Think about PLM sales rep. For him, PLM sales process is a long journey of building consensus in a prospect organization, following engineering groups and CIO organization, planning meetings, quoting industry analysts, learning about complexity of a prospect manufacturing companies, bringing references from existing customers, lunch breaks and business dinners, pilot projects, new people that organization brings to help evaluation, price quote crunch. Unfortunately, it might end up with a Powerpoint presentation for CIO staff meeting when somebody accidentally putting your PLM vendor name in too small font to be read from the back of the conference room. Sigh…
But PLM sales picture is complicated from both sides of the table. Now think about manufacturing company. The team is evaluating multiple vendors, trade-offs, politics, arguments, revenge for past wrongs, turf-building, multiple groups of users with different interests. The team on a customer side is under significant pressure to make a decision and take the responsibility for a potential failure.
In the past, I shared some of my thoughts about PLM and sales process. You might noticed my PLM Sales Cheat Sheet from last year. Even most of PLM sales today look exactly the same way it was a decade ago, there is something in the air that give you a hint on a future changes. New sales methods are disrupting the old story of “buying from IBM”. The question of Growth Hacking PLM sales is the one you might be interested to learn more about. Growth hacker is a new VP marketing. But this is not about how to change one role. This is about changes of entire enterprise sales system.
I was reading TechCrunch article –Is Enterprise Hyper Growth The New Normal? this morning. It is an absolute “must read” article to every PLM sales rep these days. PLM sales organizations are starving to growth. And this article explains how to get from old school “Elephant Hunting Era” to a new era of Sales SuperReps equipped with new sales and marketing tools coupled with mobile devices and internet. The following table can give you some guidance about practices and tools that future SuperSalesRep will be using.
What is my conclusion? Enterprise software eco-system is changing and it will impact PLM. The old-style elephant hunting approach is going to change. It won’t happen overnight, but the new super sales rep channel will become a source of a future PLM growth. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
