So the new product is really useful, cool and innovative. It helps a lot of people and makes things better for customers. Does anyone know that they really need it?

One of the most common mistakes salespeople make is how they introduce newer alarm equipment to their prospective customers.

When I was at a large international integrator we were always releasing new technology. There were many great ideas and new products that could solve a lot of problems for people. The issue, though, was that nobody knew they needed it. As you can imagine, that made things pretty hard to sell.

Our marketing wizards told us to go into companies, buy lunch or bring doughnuts, and enthusiastically give presentations about this cool new technology and how it made things easier. “Lunch and learns” is what they called them.

So we’d go to these companies; people would file in, eat their pizza, barely listen to our outstanding presentation and then they would parade back out. They’d return to their cubicles, we’d get into our cars, and they wouldn’t spend a cent on anything.

Some other people, however, were a whole lot smarter than we were. One of them in the camera surveillance business particularly comes to mind. Perry owned a security company and figured out how to solve this entire problem by charging people for webinars.

Let me explain how Perry did it: He used free and low-cost advertising, along with joint venture partnerships with the Chamber of Commerce, to get people to turn over hard-earned money to come to his “stop employee theft” webinar. He then charged another fee if they wanted to meet with him for a private consultation. On top of all that, he got paid his normal commissions on the equipment they bought.

Perry made money every step of the way. He closed more sales at higher margins and rather than being just a salesman, Perry was now repositioned as an “employee theft reduction expert.”

Could that work for you? What if you put together a webinar covering ways to stop employee theft while introducing your technology? Make it full of great content that really covers the subject — everything from hiring, inventory control, employee supervision and transaction verification (where the camera equipment you sell comes in).

Now, find a partner to promote your webinar for you to their audience. Think about trade associations whose members face severe problems of employee theft (like Chamber of Commerce members, the state or local restaurant owners association, etc.). You’ll be adding value to the association because you are bringing highly relevant, useful content to their members. Most will be eager to participate in a well-presented webinar of this nature.

Your webinar doesn’t need to be a fancy Hollywood production. Just make sure it contains great information of value to your audience and includes a call-to-action statement at the end so your audience knows the next steps they need to take.

Back up your partnership with sales copy and promotional materials that sell the magic and really explain why it is worth the time and money to show up and learn this stuff.

Do you think you could get prospective customers to come to an online webinar to learn about things that you formerly couldn’t give away for free? Perry did. I’ll bet you could too. It’s not nearly as hard as you might think.

I’ll warn you though: your competitors will be really mad at you if you do this.

The Internet made it quite easy and inexpensive (most of the time free) to do the introductory work for cutting-edge products, technologies and applications.

Two of my personal favorite tools for doing this involve webinars and joint venture partnerships. Both allow you to get your message to customers and prospects about how problems should be solved. Well-written, well-promoted webinars and joint venture promotions are worth an army of salespeople because they inexpensively and effectively school customers about your way of doing things. They are terrific tools for generating sales leads and making more sales.

Two of the better webinar software platforms are Go to Webinar and Join.me.

 Webinars and joint venture promotions are a great way to quickly generate lots of sales leads and sales. Try it and write me about how it worked for you.