Selling the Digital/Interactive Experiences

Nov 17, 2009 Posted by Andy Branch on Nov 17, 2009 in Project Management | 0 comments

Selling the Digital/Interactive Experiences

One of our newer team members hired to help our local business development efforts came to a very important conclusion the other day. It occurred to him that he had been attempting to sell our services to a potentially less-responsive crowd.

To understand how he arrived at this conclusion it is important to understand the agency he is representing. Rain is a digital agency specializing in rich internet applications. If we are able to sell our services it’s because we are able to somehow able to convince a potential client that we can increase their revenue in one of three ways:

Create a rich, interactive, marketing experience that generates leads/sales.
Create a rich internet application which allows them to sell a particular product, service, or some sort of digital content.
Create a rich application which has the potential of improving internal efficiency, thereby decreasing operation costs.

Knowing well that his purpose was to help identify ways in which we can step in and find solutions uaing any of the above approaches, he realized that most of his leads and sales efforts had been directed at non-technical marketing folks who rely primarily on traditional methods of marketing and who possessed a weak knowledge of the potential of interactive approaches. This lead him to two conclusions: First, if he was going to be successful at finding ways to sell our services to these folks he was going to have to do a better job at being a tech evangalist (he needed to do some education before he could ever land a deal). Second, he needed to expand his efforts to include CTOs or CIOs or other decision makers acquainted with technology and who are more apt to accept the possibilities of our unique experience and solutions.

But there was also another thing that presented a challenge. While this new employee is excellent at networking and sales, his ability to both teach non-technical folks or to communicate with tech-savvy decision-makers was limitted. He realized that he was going to have to sharpen his knowledge of the potential of the web technologies we specialize in.

In an effort to point him in the right direction, I sat down and gave him a quick list of some things he would need to be familiar with (at least on a high level) if he was going to be able communicate in a language that would make sense to tech-savvy decision makers or to educate and sell to the rest. I thought it was a list worth sharing to others who may find themselves in a similar position. This list could also serve as a point of departure for producers, project managers, presidents etc who want to expand their leadership potential into the digital/interactive arena.

There’s a lot to learn and this is by no means an exhaustive checklist. But having a basic understanding of the following will get you a long way: