How to sell to innovation managers
Treat them like a conduit, not like a champion
When you’re a startup founder doing warm outreach to very large enterprises you are likely going to get introduced to innovation managers – folks with titles like Innovation Partner, Innovation Manager, VP of Emerging Technology etc — whose job is to serve as a bridge between the startup community and leaders of the company’s business units.
While it is relatively easy to book an intro meeting with an innovation manager, it is also incredibly common for nothing tangible to come from it as innovation managers have neither the operating responsibility to champion a purchase nor the executive authority to sign off on it.
It’s easy to get lulled into a false sense of security during an intro call as your innovation manager will appear super interested (after all their job is about talking to interesting startups) and ask you to send a copy of your slides to circulate internally but if you leave your first meeting with that as the only next step you won’t turn the conversation into a concrete sales opportunity.
The key to successfully selling to an innovation manager is to treat them more like a conduit than a champion — focus more on understanding the organization, stakeholders and process and less on mining for pain points and pitching your product. Doing this well requires you to modify how you run your sales calls. This post gives you a guide on how to do that and covers:
How to run an intro call with an innovation manager
How to follow up after an intro call
How to prepare for a group call
How to run a group call
How to leverage an innovation manager during a POC and procurement
How to run an intro call with an innovation manager
The primary goal of your intro call is to identify the group of stakeholders who are likely to be interested in your solution and the process for getting in front of them.
This means that you don’t want to spend time trying to mine for the innovation manager’s pain points, as they aren’t the champion.
Instead, modify your discovery to quickly start talking about the group that the innovation manager works with and what their problems are. Use the following questions as your guide: