Selling One Customer at a Time with Showcase Workshop Founder Millie Blackwell
The Nitty Gritty:
- Why one-on-one sales strategy is beneficial and how to identify a new prospect
- How to court prospects
- How being “ridiculously helpful” gets customers to a success point
My guest on this week’s episode of the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast is Millie Blackwell, the CEO and co-founder of Showcase Workshop. Showcase Workshop provides a sales content management tool for large businesses with sales teams that sell face-to-face and who need to be armed with videos, presentations, brochures, spec sheets and more on-site to make the sale. With a mission to eradicate ring binders and printed sales collateral, Millie and her team work to ensure that every field sales rep has the content they need on their tablet or smartphone.
Millie and I discuss one-on-one sales strategy and how she identifies a new prospect, the steps she takes to start courting them and how her team is “ridiculously helpful” to new customers and that makes it easy for them to stick around.
One-on-One Sales Strategy
Face-to-face selling is how large corporate companies buy things.
–Millie Blackwell
Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Millie and her co-founders had the idea that if they built it, sales would come. However, they quickly realized that one of them needed to go out and be the face of the company to sell the product. Even though traditional face-to-face selling was what Millie knew, it was also what the prospects of Showcase Workshop—large corporate companies—expected, so that remains a key sales strategy. This is also the strategy deployed by companies you might not expect from Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce who all have teams dedicated to selling face-to-face.
Millie learned by trial and error which industries would be interested in the Workshop’s tool and determined that her ideal prospect needed to be companies that were selling products with a fair amount of complexity, have a sales team that sells face to face and use collateral to sell. She shares all the nitty-gritty details about the Showcase Workshop’s sales process in the full episode.
How to Court Prospects
Create some credibility right from the start.
–Millie Blackwell
The Showcase Workshop has a two-pronged approach to sales. They advertise on LinkedIn to reach small- and medium-sized businesses. For enterprise customers, Millie narrows down her search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator to specific job titles and sends intro emails to those contacts. Since enterprise deals are more expensive to acquire, Millie works a small number of those leads. She spends about one-third of her time on sales at the enterprise level which involves searching for a new lead, contacting those leads and nurturing them.
“Ridiculously Helpful”
Showcase Workshop is a little more complex than other software systems, so when prospects are within their free trial window and Millie’s team sees them sign in, they will be “ridiculously helpful” and reach out to the prospect based on certain actions they are doing. Their goal is to help the prospect get to a “success point.” After they become a client, the Showcase Workshop team continues to provide exemplary customer service which allows them to boast a client churn rate below 2% annually.
When you tune into the full episode you can learn more about Showcase Workshop’s sales process, Millie’s learning experiences with content marketing and what’s next for the business.
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