Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Are you upselling existing users of Seibel, or prospecting new customers? Are you targeting IT staff or other departments (like marketing, for the marketing component)?

Oracle must have a ton of sales tools for your use - white papers, testimonials or case studies, webinars, articles... Have you tried using those?

Seibel CRM is a really powerful tool, IMO. It seems geared toward big businesses and I would imagine that there can be a lot of pain in the implementation process if it's not done well. You may need to educate your prospects a lot in your sales cycle.

I would work with my marketing team to make sure that I am prospecting to the right people. Targets do shift. I would ask them to provide a matrix of customers who have purchased in the last 24 months that shows the #/% of customers by company size, job title, industry, and company revenue.

Your or your marketing team could speak with customers who have recently purchased so you can learn why they bought from you. Do the same for sales you have lost - why did they not buy from you?

Remember that no matter how awesome your product, don't assume that your customer wants it. Find out their pain points and sell to them. For example, you can talk price but if your customer is more concerned with service, you're not on the same page.

You should start a blog that talks about the issues most interesting to your customers. It is a great way to develop relationships with cutomers over time, and is not that hard or difficult.

Just make sure to avoid this common URL mistake on blogs.