There’s no crying in baseball and no second place in sales

We’ve all heard that sales is like a relationship:

• You go on a few dates — (research and qualifying an opportunity)
• You then become serious — (you answer prospects questions and educate them)
• You get engaged — (term sheets go back and forth and then CIOs and CFOs may get involved — considered to be like parents)
• …and then you get married — (sign the contracts and then you ship/install the product/service)

This idea is the inspiration behind one of the ads we’re working on right now. You see, next month Illumineto Spark will be formally launched with supporting ad campaigns running on LinkedIn, Facebook and countless other websites. We’d love to hear what you think about each of these ad concepts. So without any further delay, here are some of the ideas we have cooking:

In this first ad, we’re playing off of the theme above — sales is like a relationship. Not always easy. And in sales, if you want to stand out from the others, you need to show you’re different, show you care about your prospect’s needs. Illumineto Spark helps sales reps personalize the sales engagement by empowering reps to quickly find content from any number of corporate or personal cloud storage sources, then uniquely package and deliver the information to the prospect. Reps that use Illumineto Spark will definitely make their prospect’s feel special.

Next up, “No participant awards.” This ad reminds us of when Tom Hank’s character in the movie A League Of Their Own said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” In sales there is no second place. You either win the deal or you’re a zero. This ad plays (we think quite nicely) off that fact. With Illumineto Spark, sales reps will win more deals by being able to respond faster to a prospect with meaningful information which helps the prospect make a faster purchase decision. How’s that for closing a pipeline?

A recent Salesforce report stated that sales reps waste 30% of their time just trying to find the right content to share with a prospect. That’s crazy. In this ad, we’re highlighting that lovely, painful fact. Folks that have been using Spark have told us they end up discovering content they didn’t even know they had available to them. You see, with Spark’s ability to look across Salesforce Content Libraries, Google Drive, Dropbox, Websites, YouTube and more, it’s no wonder sales reps are not only finding great content, but getting a significant amount of their day back so they can do things like, you know… sell!

So, would you click on these ads if you saw them on social media sites? Do they grab your attention? Would you become engaged with us (free trial) or go for it and get married to us?