Curious Sales Technique

The sales training and mantras of "up-sell"..."add-sell"...so often taught and heard in seminar rooms and lecture halls was ignored recently! I found myself un-selling Lamplight to a customer! Is this right? Would my boss approve of my behaviour?

A recent meeting with a consortium organisation identified they were in need of a system for a new project starting. It was a project that would involve a number of other voluntary and community organisations and as a result they would need to share data and produce combined reports. In short, they wanted to reflect their combined efforts in serving their communities.

But does this mean all having to use the same system for this one project? It could result in some organisations operating multiple systems: would this be right and necessary? Surely the consequences would show staff and volunteers learning two (or more) systems and potentially duplicating data. In a time when resources are stretched, is this right? I didn't think so!

I believe we need to look to providing more efficient, affordable and suitable systems. Allow secure data sharing but not dictating a (potentially) massive organisational change. Fortunately I could recommend an alternative. The consortium organisation choose Lamplight for themselves and by having the Publishing Module, an external web-site will be linked to their Lamplight database. With their permission, information by their members will be entered and automatically transferred. All the consortium need do is send a reminder...sit back...and run the reports!

There would be obvious benefits of the member organisations adopting Lamplight with the ease of running compatible reports, data capturing and having a full case management and outcomes monitoring database, but it is not mandatory and a pre-requisite of joining the project.

Fortunately my boss agreed with my perspective!