via @ INC by Tom Searcy

I recently read a study that confirmed my suspicion that most people don't remember what we present to them in a sales call. The data suggested that the average buyer in a meeting will only remember one thing–one!–a week after your meeting.

Oh, and by the way: You don't get to choose what that one thing is. Sigh.

So what have sales professionals done about this? They have worked on "honing the message," developing a "compelling unique advantage" and, of course, the ultimate silver bullet: a surefire elevator pitch.

But here's what you're fighting: A world cluttered with information, schedules, packed with more meetings and work than a person can handle. A decision-making process with more people involved in every choice–many of whom know little about your product or service. No wonder so little is remembered; often your audience doesn't even understand much about what you're offering.

What Kids Want to Know

I have a 9-year-old daughter with spring freckles, long brown hair and blue eyes the size of silver dollars. She asks the kinds of questions that on the surface seem so simple:

• Daddy, what do you do?
• Why do people decide to hire you?
• Why don't they hire somebody else or do it themselves?

One of the great things about 9-year-olds: Like many buyers these days, they lack context. Any answer that you provide has to be in a language that they can understand.

What does a procurement specialist know about what you sell–or the IT person, or the finance person? The challenge is this: Can you answer the three questions my 9-year-old asked, for your own business?

Hint: There are right and wrong answers for both.

Daddy, What Do You Do?

• Right answer: "I help companies to grow really fast by teaching them how to sell bigger companies much larger orders."
• Wrong answer: "Our company helps develop inside of our clients a replicable and scalable process for them to land large accounts."

Why Do People Decide to Hire You?

• Right answer: "We have helped lots of companies do this before, so we are really good at it as long as they are the right type of companies."
• Wrong answer: "We have a proven process for implementation that allows organizations to tailor the model to their market, business offering and company's growth goals."

Why Don't They Do It Themselves?

• Right answer: "Just like when you learned to play the piano: Mommy and I could teach a little, but we don't know as much as your teacher, and teaching you ourselves would take a long time and be very frustrating. Daddy is a really good teacher of how to make bigger sales, and people want to learn how to do this as fast as they can."
• Wrong answer: "We are the foremost expert in this field with over $5 billion in business that our clients have closed using this system. Usually our clients have tried a number of things on their own before we work together and have wanted outside help to get better results."

In these cases, both answers are accurate, but that doesn't make them right. In a world in which more decisions are made with less information and context, our responsibility is to get to as clear and memorable an answer as possible for all of the buyers to understand.

BY JANE PORTER, Entrepreneur Magazine

Tom Szaky didn't even try to get his product--a worm excrement fertilizer packed in a recycled bottle--into small retailers when he started TerraCycle six years ago. Instead, he reached as high as he could: Wal-Mart. "If I want to be big and do it quickly, the best way … is to work with the world's biggest companies," he says. "They can accelerate your cycle much more quickly than any other company can."

The Trenton, N.J.-based conpany's first big partnership with Wal-Mart in Canada was just the start of what has become a $14 million business. TerraCycle now gathers unrecyclable trash and converts it into products and packaging for such big brands as Kraft, Pepsi and Mars. Last year, corporate partners spent $45 million on TerraCycle-related marketing--far more than Szaky could have ever done alone.

But breaking in with big companies is no easy feat. For Szaky, it took lots of research, persistence and trial and error. "The biggest mistake small companies make is they don't do enough homework," says Brant Slade, co-author of Think BIG!: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Partnering With Large Companies (Course Technology PTR, 2009). "They think … more from the small business point of view as opposed to thinking from the large business point of view."Here's a checklist to help your business prepare to partner with big brands:

1. Be unique. Make sure your business pitch is carefully thought out and offers value to your potential partner. After Robin Thurston co-founded MapMyFITNESS.com, an Austin, Texas-based fitness social network that offers online routes, training and group activities, he and his partner realized they had developed a geo-location technology that bigger companies wanting online fitness tools and access to a social network could use. With their first corporate partner, Cadbury's Accelorade sports drink, they collaborated on a web interface enabling users on their site to map and share workouts. "You have to have something that is clearly valuable to that big brand that they might not want to spend the time investing in or doing," Thurston says. Now, the company also builds web platforms and mobile phone apps for brands like NBC Sports, Humana and Skechers, whose customers can opt into the MapMyFITNESS social network.

2. Remain persistent. Although Szaky had the worm-excrement-in-a-recycled-bottle market cornered, getting that first deal with Wal-Mart in 2005 still required persistence. After scouring LinkedIn and alumni networks to find the right contact, Szaky called Wal-Mart 10 times a day, every day for three weeks until he finally got through and set up a meeting. Big companies field lots of requests, so persistence is a must. "There are some brands we are working with today that literally were five-year conversations," Thurston says.

3. Think big. You have to think like a big brand to partner with one. For MapMyFITNESS, that means developing large-scale projects. "A big brand doesn't want to talk about a $10,000 project," Thurston says. "They want to talk in seven figures and really big user numbers." For example, Thurston and his partner proposed that big companies give away their product with subscriptions to the MapMyFITNESS website. The size of their user base--nearly seven million today--was large enough to interest brands like Procter & Gamble's Febreze.

4. Plan for fast growth. If you're growing too quickly to keep up with demand, you'll lose money--and probably your partner. Szaky learned that lesson through experience. "The more we grew, the more we lost," he says. While TerraCycle's sales reached $6.6 million in 2008, it had a net loss of $4.5 million. The next year, Szaky began developing agreements with companies to handle production for him. Today, 40 companies make and sell TerraCycle products for major retailers and TerraCycle turned a profit of $100,000 in the last year.

Polka Dog Bakery, a Boston-based dog treat maker slated to expand into 1,763 Target stores this May, let the retailer oversee production and distribution in order to make the partnership feasible. "It would have been too much for us to expand at that capacity," says cofounder Robert Van Sickle of his 11-person company.

5. Prepare for scrutiny. Make sure your financial and legal affairs are in order. Since TerraCycle works with multinational companies, the company gets audited every two months. After failing the first few audits in his early partnerships, Szaky realized he needed to focus more on developing proper procedures. "If you are going to go down the path of working in big businesses, having your house in order is critical," he says. "You are going to get the growth but you are also going to get a lot more scrutiny."

6. Build on existing partnerships. Don't rush to find the next partner once you successfully link up with a big company. MapMyFITNESS gets a lot of new business from expanding existing partnerships, Thurston says. Companies are often more willing to consider developing a licensing partnership, for example, if they're already buying advertising on your website. "Too many entrepreneurs chase after the next client instead of recognizing the current client could mean a lot more revenue for them if they simply explore other revenue channels," Thurston says. Partnerships now account for a third of his company's total revenue.

The biggest enemy of top-line growth is analysis and its best friend is appreciation. Sure, in a small minority of companies and industries, like the smartphone business these days, there is explosive growth, and if an analysis is done of past trends, it shows lots of opportunity for top-line growth.

But in the majority of businesses, if the available data are crunched, it shows a slowly growing industry — one growing with GDP or population. That generally convinces the company in question that there aren't really opportunities for top-line growth, and that in turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fundamental reason is that analysis of data is all about the past. Data analysis crunches the past and extrapolates it into the future. And the past does not include opportunities that exist but have not yet happened. So, analysis conspicuously excludes ways to serve customers that have not been tried or imagined or ways to turn non-customers into customers.

Thus the more we rely on data analysis, the more it will tell a dour story on top-line growth — and not give particularly useful insights. The data analysis of P&G's home care business — hard surface cleaners, dish and dishwater detergents — would have indicated that there weren't many opportunities for top-line growth circa 2000. These categories were growing at something between population growth and GDP growth, clearly candidates for harvesting or maybe sale.

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation —deep appreciation of the consumer's life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

For instance, suppose your consumers have to clean floors. It's easy enough to appreciate that mopping a floor is a fairly miserable task. Think about what it involves: getting out and filling a bucket, dragging the bucket around and repeatedly jamming the mop in and out of it, and then dumping out and cleaning the bucket. If you appreciate your floor-cleaning customers, you'll be looking to help them avoid having to go through this experience every time they have to clean a floor — because not every floor will need such a heavy-duty approach. It was out of this appreciation-triggered insight that the electrostatic Swiffer anti-mop was born and produced massive top-line growth, approaching $1 billion in sales in a decade.

A similar thing happened with Febreze.

There was a slowly growing market for air fresheners that masked odors emanating from hard-to-clean household items like furniture, drapes, and carpets. However, odor masking was hardly an optimal solution for the consumer. Appreciation of the consumer's feelings would have revealed that genuine odor elimination was the underlying desire.

Out of that appreciation came Febreze, which captures and eliminates the odor molecules in fabrics. Not surprisingly, it also produced spectacular top-line growth where the conventional analysis showed that there wasn't much to be had.

Organizationally and behaviorally, analysis and appreciation are two very different things. Analysis is distant, done in office towers far from the consumer. It requires lots of quantitative proficiency but very little experience in the business in question. It depends on data-mining: finding data sources to crunch, often from data suppliers to the industry. Appreciation is intimate, done in close proximity to the consumer. It requires qualitative proficiency and deeper experience in the business. It requires the manufacture of unique data, rather than the use of data that already exists.

In my experience, most organizations have more of the former capabilities and behaviors than of the latter and hence most struggle with top-line growth. The biggest issue isn't the absence of top-line growth opportunities but rather the lack of belief that they exist. And that is driven by the dominance of analysis over appreciation.