by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
We live in a hyper-competitive world, while brands spend time and budget telling us how great they are, to the point where all products are equal. In fact we as humans have created a skill to filter out all of these messages, adverts, after all now it’s all just noise. If a brand, and it’s most of them, tell you how great they are, we just filter it out and don’t listen.
While having a conversation recently with Darrell Amy https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrellamy/ he made the comment that “today, sales people are the value.”
What did he mean by this?
If all products are the same and all corporate marketing sounds the same, where is the differentiation? It’s in your employees and sales people!
Let’s go back to basics.
In the modern world, nobody likes to be sold to or pitched at, we also don’t like being marketed to. Which creates a problem for us sales people and marketers as we were always told to sell, straight out of the blocks. It is one of the reasons why so many buyers search for products and services in “salesperson avoidance” mode, because we know the moment we raise our hand to a sales person they will pitch to us. Yuck!
So What Can We Do?
If we take into account the CEB, now Gartner, research that people are 57% of the way through the buying process before contacting a sales person, then what can we do as salespeople and marketers?
Well you can sit in the office and hope somebody will call but I wouldn’t recommend it. My recommendation would be offer content in a way to insight and educate the buyer as the research. As we mention above, on the basis that companies are all the same and nobody listens to corporate marketing anymore, more corporate marketing content is not a good idea.
The trick is to offer content that is insightful and educational. We after all, when we are buying are looking for those things. Better still as sellers is to be visible on social. There is nothing worse from the old days of cold calling to be told “yeah, thanks for the call, but we purchased one a month ago”. If you are visible and the buyer recognises you as the solution to their problem. They should contact you direct. Getting inbound is “table stakes” now in social selling. In other words, if you are not getting inbound, you are doing something wrong.
So What About Sales People Being the Value?
If we agree that nobody likes being pitched to, then old school pitching of products, even feature and benefit has long gone. Unless we give people permission to do this at a demonstration. The fashion 15 years ago was to walk into a prospect and ask the question “what keeps you awake at night?” and hopefully the prospect would say something that your product or service could help with. Apart from that now being a cliche, our prospects are more sophisticated than that. Our prospects want insight, they want to be educated and they want to be told something they don’t know.
We can do that in a number of ways. We can find content in products such a Flipboard, which is the free app I use. We can get content written for us. The problem, as we stated above that is often “corporate” and “salesy”, which are both no, nos. Or we can write it ourselves!
It’s time for sales people to start blogging!
Before you say never! Try this blog, where we show you how easy it it. Let’s not forget that that you and I have something that nobody else have. Our personalities, we are the sum of all of our experiences, none of your competition have this. And come on we have been trading on our personalities as sales people for years, so let’s use them to write! In fact, our personalities (sales and employees) is all companies have now to differentiate themselves. That is where the money / profit / margin is!
People who read this article also read these:
http://www.social-experts.net/how-social-changed-hotels-and-why-it-matters-to-b2b-companies/
http://www.social-experts.net/why-sending-people-to-your-website-is-a-waste-of-time/
http://www.social-experts.net/could-it-be-time-to-call-a-cab/
