One of my sales principles is this: be wherever the users/decision makers/decision influencers of what you’re selling gather.  By “gather” I mean the conferences they attend; be they large (national) or small (regional). I have had fellow sales people tell me these small, local/regional meetings are a waste of time.

I should have put this disclaimer at the start, but it’s my website, so I’ll put it here. Disclaimer: It is acknowledged that I’m not the stereotypical salesperson.  Type A personality I am not; highly competitive I am not.  When selling services, I believe that people buy/purchase/select services and solutions from someone they know and trust;  also known as relationship selling.

So all that is to demonstrate through this short story:
I recently attended a virtual and regional conference on managing clinical supplies for clinical trials.  There were ~80 people in attendance.  I noticed one or two salespeople for manufacturing and packaging companies, none from drug supply management software companies.  At the end of the meeting, a request is made of the attendees for topics they’d like to hear about at the fall meeting. A specific request was made on the topic of managing study drug pooling by the drug management software.  The leader then asked if anyone had recommendations on who could speak to this.

Posted in the chat window was this: the name of one of the software companies followed by the names of two of that companies’ project managers. 

I trust the moral of this story is obvious.