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.

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.    

Here is everything you need to know about social media networking:

It's all about the conversation.

That's it. Whether you blog, employ LinkedIn, spend time on Facebook, Twitter, post questions and answers on Sales 2.0 or even make daily visits to your dog's breed site and forum, you are engaging in a conversation. Conversation is the "informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc.," according to Random House. Okay, so usually it's spoken, oral communication and, for the most part, this is written (but that is changing quickly with the influx of video communication). But I submit to you that the reason you are engaged in any of these social endeavors, and what keeps you going back, is for the interaction with the other people on the site. 

Sure, you are trying to sell them something, but isn't the conversation where sales starts? In a cold call, it might begin with "Hi, my name is..." or "What do you do when you need...." On LinkedIn, it's posting your professional information--your background, your current work--and trying to drum up a following of contacts by talking to them. On Facebook, it means sharing something about yourself with your friends and colleagues. It's all a conversation.

The saying goes that no product moves without salespeople. The point here is that no sales happen without a conversation. And for many products and services today, the conversation is happening on social media.