As a student of Geoffrey Moore’s best-selling books Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, The Gorilla Game, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend a VIP reception with Moore at the TEXCHANGE June meeting. I was particularly excited by the topic of Moore’s presentation “Provocation-Based Selling” because of my long history of launching tech startups.

Moore has made the study of disruptive technologies the focus of his books and research. His insights on marketing and selling breakthrough products have shaped my strategies for so many companies and I’m sure his new insights on selling disruptive products in a down economy will be no different.

Moore set the stage for his presentation by making the important point that when you are selling disruptive technologies there is no budget allocation for your product. Prospective customers may love your product, but when there is no money available for discretionary spending, you have to help the buyer create budget before you can sell them.

He advocates a combination of referral marketing and provocation-based selling to help startups break into markets that are structured to favor incumbents. You have to use referral marketing to get the meeting with the Line of business (LOB) executive who has the authority to move budget around. And, then, use provocation-based selling to create fear, uncertainty and doubt about the impact of “not doing” something about it.

On the Referral marketing front, Moore advises companies to directly target the company, learn about the LOB executive, then seek out a common connection to get referred for a meeting. For me, services such as ReachForce have helped me map out the LOB execs in an organization, but I augmented it with products like LinkedIn and Facebook to find common connections.

Often, your business partners will be the key to getting a referral. Building out a referral program for these partners has always been an excellent way to motivate them to make the introduction or even take you along on a sales call. Of course, it’s always helpful if you can provide those business partners with a compelling reason to put you in front of their buyers. For example, maybe you could offer training or educational materials on a topic that helps them sell more products as well.

Once you’ve nailed that all important meeting, Moore advises that you sell them on the fact that they have a serious problem and determine what type of buyer they are:

• conservatives: convince them you can save them money
• pragmatics: give them the symptoms you believe they might have in their company of a serious problem your product solves
• visionary: show how your product will set them apart and open up tremendous new opportunities to pursue

Then, ask them to make a commitment that if you show them that your solution can benefit them, they will take the action to make budget available. Press them for a commitment. If you’re not convinced, then disqualify them.