NLP sales and business development Podcast - Erik MacEachern

Sales and Business Development - Discussion between Michael Beale and Erik MacEachern, November 2007.

Erik MacEachern, whose business MacEachern Associates provides niche management consultancy and business development services, explains his view of sales and business development in 2007.

(Please allow 2 minutes for the MP3 file to download if you want to listen to a recording of the interview)

http://www.ppimk.com/nlp-podcast/erik.mp3

Michael : Good morning Erik. Firstly thank you very much for taking part in this call. Would you tell our listeners something about who you are and what you do?

Erik : Good morning Michael, and thank you very much for inviting me to take part in this call. My name is Erik MacEachern, I run my all small business called MacEchern Associates. I spent twenty-two years working for a telecommunications company here in the UK called BT. I left there in 2003 and set up on my own and now running a business that is actually becoming a part of other peoples business’s.

I’m an assistant engineer at heart, with a general management and sales marketing approach to management. What I do and what my business does is basically trying to understand complexity out there in the real world and help organisations to find ways to resolve that complexity, solve real world problems by identifying and implementing solutions, usually technology based, but not always – sometimes just common sense – implementing solutions to those problems.

Michael : What does sales or business development mean to you?

Erik : Sales to me is simply a process of building relationships with people who are perhaps within ones target market and who one might hope to become ones customers – building relationships with those people, with those organisations, then going through a process of understanding their world, understanding their problems, understanding their needs and desires and then it gets to a stage where one can enter into a contractual arrangement with those organisations to meet those needs on an ongoing basis. I like to look at sales as building long term relationships that deliver benefits to both sides of the relationship.

Michael : And do you see sales and business development as being the same or as being different?

Erik : Personally I see sales as being a subset of business development because one might look at ways to achieve market attraction in a certain area simply through selling. But one might actually have to step back and go through a process of working out ‘well what is the value proposition that one is trying to sell?’ and what is the best way to sell front line sales or are you better to look at partnering with other organisations – and that to me comes under the area of business development that can sit above what some people might perceive, or define as sales.

Michael : Taking your current business, what products or services do you supply? Who are your current target customers? And how do you sell to them, or what channel do you use? So firstly, what products or services do you supply at the moment?

Erik : We could take one of our clients first of all who is involved in the online training, e-learning. The product or service that my first client sells is an online training service, an online training offering, and we sell at this point in time to a defined market geographically defined, to be in the UK in the first instance, as our first step. In terms of business sector, the sector that we’re selling into is the professional institutes, professional associations, professional membership sites, that have subscription paying for members.

What we’re actually selling to the institutes is a value proposition that helps them to raise the level of professional competence in their memberships. To do that in a way that actually generates cash for the institutes, so we’re not going to want to sell them something for which we want them to part with money.

Listen to the full interview: Erick MacEachern sales and business development