Persistence pays off

We have been working over close to one year trying to get a design win with a potential customer. The process has been painful and frustrating to say the least but today it finally paid off when one of the key influencer's agreed to take our product and work with us to build the gives/gets that he could use to gain his management's approval.

Here's what worked for us. First patience. In our case, the customer first needed to buy the right hardware. Since we were approaching him for a software sale in parallel, he would use most of our meeting time addressing issues with hardware - this was frustrating to say the least. We all know how long it takes to set up time with customers. The hardware issues took over a quarter of talks. Then the influencer was pulled into other higher priority project and assigned a delegate. We worked with the delegate for another quarter or so and he agreed to take our product and provided the green signal to have Engineering teams collaborate and co-design. A quarter passed and the key person returned to his project but refused to accept the decision made by his delegate. He presented very valid and pertinent issues that made it clear that the earlier decision was a wrong strategy for them. But we were pissed to say the least. He brought us back to the drawing board - worse he still did not consider this priority enough. Meanwhile we kept hearing from other sources that he was formulating a strategy without our product.

So I applied my second strategy - listen and put yourself in the customer's shoes. The customer had voiced to us why he could not take our product. What if we could work through these issues? This is what we did - it took us another quarter worth of negotiations before we could come up with a win-win situation. We are still working the details on this one - but looks like this time will go through. We are looking to get the customer's senior management approval in next few weeks.

Have you had a really difficult sale? What worked for you?