Mad Men has been one of my favourite TV shows since its debut 6 years ago.
Unfortunately, the show doesn’t exactly reflect well upon sales people, since it focuses mostly on relationship selling and a lot of booze. However, I was excited about the most recent episode “For Immediate Release” as Roger Stirling, the Sales Leader for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, had a great lesson that’s readily applicable to startup sales. Finally! A good B2B startup sales lesson from Mad Men.
If you haven’t seen the episode yet, be warned that there will be a few spoilers in this post.
In the episode, Roger had discovered a great new source for leads, the VIP lounge area at an airport. Using an inside contact, Roger would head down and strike up a conversation with a potential prospect in the lounge before they jumped on a plane. Doing so allowed him to make a new connection and qualify the prospect. In the case of General Motors, he actually jumped on a plane and headed to Detroit to continue the conversation.
At the end of the episode, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce ended up winning the business for a new Chevy vehicle as a result. Now, I’m not saying that startups should hang out at airport VIP lounges and take flights across the world to build relationships, but they should look for new and different ways to secure customers (especially new customers).
For example, a client of ours here at Venture Accelerator Partners has a very interesting mobile solution with multiple value props for casual dining restaurants. Their immediate sales goals are to secure pilots at a number of Toronto-based dining locations. To help them achieve this goal, part of our early part-time sales efforts will include leveraging our network of existing contacts, using Linkedin to generate introductions, engaging in cold calling, inbound email, and even just stopping into to neighbourhood bars and restaurants at off hours to talk and potentially demo the solution for the manager.
When you start your company you may need to do things that feel unnatural to you to get your first customers, learn and improve your product and messaging. If you need some help with sales and marketing, check out our white papers.
