by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
I had to laugh the other day, some Guru was wittering on about how sales hasn’t changed and if we all went back to cold calling everything would be fine and dandy. (It may comes as no surprise to you but he sells cold calling courses. In other words if we all turned back the clock and pretended the internet, social media and mobile didn’t exist, then he would, of course, sell more courses. Or am I being overly cynical?)
Now before you think so, it wasn’t the fact that this was all announced on social media, that made me laugh, though I do chuckle about these messages keep popping up on social media on how cool Cold Calling is. Yes the very thing he campaigns against, he uses to spread his message. Surely if cold calling worked so well, he would phone me and tell me? Maybe it’s because he knows that I won’t take the call, won’t return his voice mail and then will block him, but I digress.
The thing that made me laugh so much was the statement that the guru made was “it says so in my book so therefore it’s true”. What?
Now let’s stop and think about this for a second. Just because you say things in a book does not make it true. That’s why there is such a thing as a section on fiction. People make a living writing about things that don’t exist; Game of Thrown’s, The Hobbit and Harry Potter, none are true. I realised that I may have smashed at least one person’s reality and I’m sorry about that.
Even research isn’t true. Shock! Let me explain. You ask a bunch of people, “a sample” some questions and they answer. Hopefully they explain the current position or what it was like in the past. In my last company they did an employee survey where we were told they didn’t track the employee taking the survey, but of course they tracked the IP address. So everybody hyped up the answers. Did you feel crap, average or awesome about the role? The smart people, or were we stupid? All said awesome. Of course nobody listened to the results as we knew it was a fix, even though it was presented as fact. The emperor had no clothes.
I’m not saying that all research is rubbish but it isn’t fact, though often presented as such.
So next time somebody quotes you their book and says is therefore so, laugh like I did and move on.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/back-slapping-content-you-know-in-your-heart-of-hearts-it-doesnt-work/
https://dlaignite.com/why-sales-play-books-dont-work/
https://dlaignite.com/why-your-marketing-is-very-seriously-broken/
