The Sales Café

Did you know that people who hold a cup of coffee or a hot drink are more prone to agree to things than people with a cold drink?

This tip, called the Coffee Cup Effect, came from the Twitter feed of @atra_intelexis (Alfredo Trabulsi) and it's had an extraordinary effect on my day, making me wonder:  What other things can we do to help people say Yes to us?

If we are in sales or marketing, it’s our job to make people agree to what we are offering them, whether it's a specific product, service or idea. I suppose the best place to start is to be agreeable ourselves. The next step, it seems, is to extend that feeling and proffer something warm and sweet. One successful sales person I know carries a large bag of Tootsie Pops around with her and hands out two with her business card. “Who doesn’t like a Tootsie Pop?” she asked me. And, by her sales results, she’s on to something.

I know that bringing chocolate and sweets to a meeting makes people more agreeable—especially during the mid-afternoon slump time. The word "Free" gives people an all-over warm feeling, too, as does the sound of their own name. (This depends on the tone of voice, however. Hearing my name spoken in a condescending way makes me quite disagreeable.)

In the end, it’s whatever you are selling that must light the ultimate sales fire for the customer. Without a strong product, service or idea, you just might leave them cold.

What do you do to get a prospect or customer to warm up to you?

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.