Using Business Intel Correctly - Global Sales Mentor | Zach Selch

I'm here in the Sinai at an old Israeli base overlooking the Suez Canal. And this is really where the '73 war started out. It was a horrific war for Israel, a big surprise. And, but from a case study perspective, studying it to me is fascinating. And one of the things we see here is How did the war start? The Egyptians— these bases are all made out of packed sand, which is fantastic for protecting against artillery shells, because the shell hits, it diffuses the energy in the shrapnel. But what won't it withstand? A water cannon, right? You can wash these bases away with a water cannon. And for weeks and months ahead of the— for months ahead of the war, the Egyptians were practicing with water cannon. And soldiers were reporting this. This was going up the chain of command. People were talking about it. They didn't figure out what it meant. So they had the information they needed to know that people were going to attack, but they didn't utilize it. And very often we have the information we need, the intelligence we need within our companies, and we don't utilize this. And I'll give you a couple of examples. You know how it's really very beneficial to get into the sales process earlier rather than later? If you can get in Pretty much as soon as the customer decides they want to buy something, before they've even thought about what they're going to buy, you can, you can grow your sales dramatically. And a couple of times I've put in place part of the sales process where we gather information internally as part of a team. So as an example, years ago I had a team and we figured out that when people left their jobs, if they weren't old enough to retire but they were pretty senior, if they left their jobs They went to a competitor. But if they disappeared, it meant they were joining a new company that we hadn't heard about, which was a potential customer. And so one week at a meeting, we realized— I tasked everybody, if somebody senior left, you had to figure out where they were going. And if you couldn't, you had to bring it up at the meeting. So we realized we had 4 people who had left, and we didn't know where they went. It was obvious they were going to a new company that we didn't know about. So we made some phone calls and some inquiries and we found them. And we found them literally at the point where they were putting on paper the ideas for their new company. And they were such a new customer that we were able effectively to end up selling them a $30 million portfolio because we got every one of our products specified because we were there so early on in the process. And another similar case I found that when we knew when a hospital was going to start maintenance early on, it was easy to sell to them. But if we got to the point where it was just before maintenance, it was much harder because then they were speccing 3 systems and all of that. Our distributors had people in their organizations who were talking to the hospitals from the very beginning about maintenance. They were in there and they were talking to the right people. So if we could get our maintenance people, the distributor's maintenance people, to talk to the hospital maintenance people and find out as soon as a decision was made to do maintenance, say 3 years from now, we could send salespeople out and they could say, yeah, we hear you're going to do maintenance in 3 years. Let's start talking about our product. And we get spec'd. And just these type of simple uses of intelligence, information that exists within the company, you can dramatically shoot your sales up. And I've done it myself twice, and it's very, very helpful. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, talk to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.