During this past week, I lost an opportunity partly because I had been trained how to sell at Xerox in the early 80s.

This opportunity included integrating their marketing strategy and execution with their sales process. To net this out, our plan included using PR, direct mail, email and social media to create awareness and uncover interested prospects. We would start by building a predictive model from their existing customer information and use that model to target the right people with relevant information and offers. To respond to the offer, the prospect would be asked to visit a landing page where we could measure what they were clicking on and actually ask them some questions, if they were game. Based on their activity, the interest could be scored, and folks exhibiting behaviors indicating a higher interest level would be prioritized and sent on to the sales force. The sales force would be trained in advance with an opening statement reflective of the prospect’s interest, some non-threatening talking points and a relevant offer to allow the prospect to investigate further. The verbal conversation would be reinforced by an email or direct mail with the same offer depending on the prospect’s preferences for communication.

I hear through the grapevine that one of the people on the committee thought this would be too pushy based on my Xerox experience. I learned a lot at Xerox but here it is in a nutshell: