Perhaps you’re freshly back from Cannes or already have a half dozen industry conferences behind you this year. In those environments you’re trying to make the market better for your sales team: Frictionless buying, data standards, uniform measurement and making sure your offerings fit in with the most recent agency/holding company data/buying mousetraps. Over time, if you’re successful, demand will improve: the market will get better, and budgets will grow.
But there remains an unanswered question: how will your team be better than the market?
Yesterday at 3:26 pm, on the shore of Lake Champlain staring at the dark side of the moon during totality, I found something truly worthy to share. What kept repeating in my head was. "Tell them to start looking at it from the other side." On this side of one's career, there’s a certain clarity about what has ultimately mattered, what and who have withstood the tests of time and circumstance.
Once your would-be customer has vanished into the mist, it may be too late to do anything about it. They’ve likely disappeared because they either weren’t serious about your offer in the first place, or for some reason no longer are. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get closure. And it certainly doesn’t mean you couldn’t have prevented this from happening in the first place.