Chapter 4 Are You a Nice-to-Have? TARGET PAIN Are SOLUTION Or here? you here? Size Doesn’t Matter with Nice-to-Haves While this might seem like a startup problem, large companies struggle with finding their niche and making sure their need is valid, too. A top-five global software company hired us to help the salespeople of a particular division improve their prospecting. They weren’t doing much prospecting, they were spending too much time researching, and when they called or emailed people, they rarely got responses. The salespeople were as frustrated as the execs: “We want to prospect, but what we’re doing is just a waste of time.” Ideally, they should have created a specialized sales team of junior prospectors to do most of the outbound prospecting, but that was impractical. They needed to do something now. This team of salespeople sold to $1 billion-plus companies and up, like Bank of America, who often had multiple divisions. The company had a product list of at least 10 or 15 respected technology solutions it could pitch to pretty much any kind of executive: IT, sales, marketing, finance, HR — basically anyone. Their email, phone, and time management techniques weren’t the main problem. They suffered from selling too many things to too many targets, in other words, they bounced around too much. They’d target