The Sales Café

While wrestling with your personal social media strategies, ponder this: over the past 18 months, your opportunity as a salesperson to influence the early stages of a buyer's shopping experience has changed radically. Most of your one-to-one prospecting tools (especially cold calling and event networking) are practically useless.

Let's think about recent history for a moment.

I am a salesperson of a certain age (meaning in my mid 50s). I began my B-to-B selling career in 1983, right at the tail end of the three-martinis-for-lunch era. Until about 1982, business buyers expected to be entertained, and a salesperson needed to possess charm, fortitude and an expense account just to get into the game in a serious way. Not being much of a drinker, I was lucky to miss all of that.

As the economy recovered from an awful recession and companies re-engineered for a new era, buyers found themselves doing two people's jobs and had little time for lunch, let alone blowing their minds out for the afternoon. Today that same buyer (be they VP of Sales, CIO, or Staffing Manager) does five people's jobs and barely has time to return a phone call!

In the early to mid-1980s, we entered a twenty-year period that witnessed the professionalization of salespeople. Until roughly 2007, to be a salesperson meant you needed to fill yourself with unbelievable amounts of information to prove to the busy buyer that you could improve their world. You needed to do this in five minutes or less before they would begin to tell you their problems. Charm barely or rarely got you in the door. You needed to arm yourself with product and technical knowledge, competitive and business acumen, team building and leadership skills. You also needed to be a strategist, a consultant, a PowerPoint expert, a great speaker, and a pithy inventor of high-impact value propositions and elevator speeches. Salespeople learned to become knowledge workers, technocrats, leaders, managers, field generals, and politicians. Charm and humor were still required.

Wow, what a change! Most of you readers weren't conscious of this change because you've spent most or all of your career practicing within that environment.

Today, our selling world is changing again. The proliferation of social media and the maturation of Web research tools has truly empowered the business shopper. By the time your prospect returns your phone call or email, they've checked you, your company, your competition, your competition's salespeople, and perhaps even your friends out. They've educated themselves about your product or service and the differences between you and everybody else. What does this mean?

Marketing is the art of communicating and influencing "one to many." The digital universe provides a multitude of channels that allow for easy consumption of product and personal information. Today, the buyer might not allow you in the door until they've completed their research. Does this mean that salespeople are now relieved of the need to know it all before the buyer will talk to us? Not really.

We either need to learn how to partner very closely with our marketing department or become our own marketing department. Our personal and product appeals need to be cleverly crafted and widely placed so that when the buyer is shopping, they can find us.

We are truly selling in a marketer's world.

Since the dawn of commerce, there's always been a thin line between marketing (telling the story of your product) and sales (getting someone to exchange something for your product). At one point in time, it was a chicken for some seeds while meeting on a dirt road. "This chicken will lay a golden egg for you." "These seeds willl grow the finest beans." (You get the picture.) Today, it's money/credit for products and services online. But we all started by telling our story. And, depending on which side of the line you lean (marketing or sales), your story might have a slightly different purpose, with a unified goal of making the sale.

I've always been sheltered from the sales side of my work. I worked on the "creative" side in publishing. The suits handled all the financial stuff, we creatives just made sure we offered the best content for them to sell. My only cold calling happened when I needed a quote for a story. It just didn't seem like sales to me. As my career evolved, I knew a lot of people who were already familiar with my work and my style. Through word of mouth, they hired me and, well, word gets around, so I get to write this column today.

You might say that I've been selling all along, that my quotas were calculated in word counts, white papers and blogrolls, that my leads have been honed meticulously throughout the years with every informant. My sales career is a work in progress.

Marketing and sales are intrinsically tied, but there is a definite space between the two. I experience it every day. Follow along as I tell the story of my journey to bridge the gap.

People buy from people. Trite but true, whether it's B-to-B, B-to-C, complex or simple business relationships. Successful salespeople never lose sight of that little fact. Talk to one and ask them. Look in the mirror and ask yourself!

What complicates things is how many options there are for meeting people, from Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to plain old networking meetings held by local organizations, and everything in-between. Perhaps no matter how much your company spends on marketing, sooner or later, the buyer is going to check YOU out, on their own, without your knowledge. They want to see if you're the kind of person they want to do business with.

Knowing that, how will you position yourself? Do you want to portray a conservative persona on LinkedIn and a cool one on Facebook? Would you rant on Twitter or "keep your powder dry" knowing that your potential customer might be shopping you instead of your company? One thing is for sure, when everybody shops the Web, your presence is required and your privacy is not the buyer's concern. 

Companies spend an enormous amount of energy and money trying to control the buyer-seller conversation on their websites. However the trip shoppers take, of their own choosing, on their way to a buying decision tells us an interesting story. When we analyze the traffic on our own site, we see people moving from the home page to the blog, to the team page and then out of the site, moving on definitely to LinkedIn and probably to Facebook or Twitter. I think this is common.

So, the moral is YOU, whether you are the owner, CEO, VP Sales, or an account executive, may have more to do with how enticing your product or service looks to the buyer than any feature, benefit or research paper that the marketing department can come up with.    

ELA's lead generation survey results are in!  Nearly all respondents are from or with sales organizations where they are responsible for the relationship or partnership with their customers. Everyone expects salespeople to generate new leads, every month.

The best return on time invested included local networking/public speaking and asking for referrals.  Over 80% thought the lead generation approach used was vital or important to developing trust.

Respondent advice on lead generation ideas sorted into four primary buckets.

• 1) Reward lead generation activity as part of overall sales process
• 2) Focus on the Customer in all interactions
• 3) Be professional including making and keeping commitments to prospects
• 4) Always provide value by knowing your product and value proposition

Since relationships are based on trust, then the lead generation approaches like asking for referrals, networking, and public speaking must cultivate trust between the prospect and the sales person.  Let's create a list of tips for each approach that are both effective and build trust.  I will post a short ELA RTG blog entry on each approach over the next few weeks.  You can enhance the approach by adding your comments and ideas. 

Thank you to all who participated.

• One plant has great product.
• Another plant has great product and is always reliable.
• Plant number three has great product, is reliable, and competitively priced.
• The fourth plant has great product, is reliable, competitively priced and helps your business succeed through service that makes you more competitive.
• Our final plant option has great product, is reliable, competitively priced, helps your business succeed through service that makes you more competitive AND doing business with them is easy and fun.