Selling

For most of our businesses, getting to revenue quickly is key to success. Revenue changes the mood of the company and interacting with buying customers provides a lot of nuanced information.

There’s a lot more to selling than just quoting prices. We find potential customers, manage discussions with their technical staff and ours, meet with their purchasing and business people, negotiate contract terms such as payment terms, delivery method, insurance, specifications, and we issue invoices and track payments.

We also manage the customers’ expectations. Since most of our products are in the early stage of development, there’s always a degree of uncertainty. Making sure the customer truly understands what we can do versus what we aspire to do are critical items.

Our selling doesn’t end when an order is placed. We track production to keep the customer informed of the status, follow up on the date of delivery to make sure everything arrived properly, check in routinely on the performance of the product and provide feedback on all of this to the whole team.

And, of course, we ask for the next order.