'Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety', Mike Evans

Where you won before, you can win again. That's Cambashi Senior Partner Mike Evans's message for manufacturing IT sales and marketing execs faced with some of the toughest selling conditions in recent memory.

Evans told attendees at Cambashi's Annual Seminar at Gaydon, Warwickshire, that sales wins are out there. But only, says Evans, "if you put yourself in the shoes of the people running these businesses." They will do anything to maintain positive cash flow: "That's the key to many of the decisions about where to deploy the sales force."

Consumers are still shopping, "So apply common sense to what you see. Ask yourself what are they buying, who sells it, who makes it and what goes into it."

Even in industry sectors with highly publicised problems, such as mobile phones, "people are still selling a hell of a lot of mobile phones." Other strong sectors are health care, digital televisions, ("more like computers than the analogue TVs they replace") and even cars: "People are continuing to buy the premier brands, so the industry is shifting in that direction."

All sectors will cut out inessentials - fewer prototypes; less parts duplication and fewer engineering change orders; less scrap, rework and unnecessary inventory. "And what achieves those things," Evans argues, "are computer solutions."

Many manufacturers will concentrate management effort on cost reduction and outsource necessary distractions - like IT provision. Every enterprise wants to work the assets it is prepared to spend money on - people, machines or computing power - harder than this time last year or last week.

And they want to make winning products: "Manufacturers need consistency about how they get ideas to market and get them there fast. But some ideas fail, some succeed and they don't know why. If more people could look at designs, they'd have a better idea of what would succeed or fail."

Any application that supports these aims will get a fair hearing. But Evans warns that it's line of business managers (LOBs), who will spend 60 per cent of the IT budget next year. "You've got to knock on a lot of doors," says Evans. "You've got to influence a lot more people than you had to influence in the past, and you have to talk success metrics and cash flows."

Corporations are reining in maverick purchasing so, when you've sold your application to the LOB, "you'll still have to sell the deal to procurement. And you can't use the same arguments".

Now, more than ever, the secret of successful applications selling is to make sure prospects understand the need to keep moving, to keep investing in solutions which can help them improve performance.

If your proposition is attractive enough, then progress and sales are still possible, but your proposition has got to be more attractive than it's been in the past.

Where you've done it before, you can do it again - but only if you analyse carefully what it was that helped you succeed.

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