I sincerely believe that we can’t sell to someone by annoying them. Maria, my wife, queen of cold calling, always proved me wrong. But then, she proves me wrong a lot of times – that is a wife’s prerogative, I guess.
She still gets customers through cold calling. I know her ‘posture’ when prospecting via cold calls helps ignite the interest in the prospect. I am saying this to clarify that my beliefs are not necessarily suitable for everyone and certainly not necessarily true. You can find your own way in the most un-used or (generally) abandoned methods.
Once I had a tender company (that gives you the details of the new tenders coming up) prospectine me. I came across another offer from another company that gave away the tender info for free, for one year. That was a reputable company too. So, I asked the vendor who was prospecting me what he thought about that free offer and told him that that was too good to skip. (I always believed that an objection in sales is an opportunity.) He abruptly said: “I never thought you people will really buy. What a waste of time” and hung up. Not sure how alienating me would ever get him my custom. Or maybe he really thought I’d never buy!
Recently, a reputable remote management software provider talked to Maria about selling their services and she asked them to talk to me since she plays other roles in the company. To cut a long story short, he couldn’t satisfactorily answer my questions. He went back to Maria and insisted on talking ONLY to her. Maria said goodbye to him since he couldn’t follow our internal process. I see many sales people insist on meeting the decision makers in the prospect’s org, even though the prospects have their internal process. Are we telling them that we don’t care about their internal process? Wouldn’t it be better to explain what our process of selling and see if that aligns? If sales people are born (and not made), their birth mark seems to be pressure tactics.
In the article below they quote this: Gartner, a research organization, predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of interactions between businesses will be executed without human intervention. It is likely that of the 18 million salespeople in the United States, there will be only about 4 million left.
On the other hand, if you’ve been following people like Seth Godin you will know inbound marketing (where prospects call you) yields better results than (outbound marketing).
So, if we 85% of the interactions are automated/computerised and inbound marketing works better…we will need sales people or marketing people only to ‘close the sale’.
For my real estate ageny customers, we send out postcards to prospects and get them to call a voice mail (for a free report). You know why? People are scared to call the office number because they don’t want to be sold. They want to buy and not sold to.
We had an interesting debate recently in Digital Armour (our IT services company) about sales people.
If you look at other professions like Law, Medical, Accounting..they don’t have sales people. The partners or the principals do the ‘selling’. Why in our profession do we need sales people? As business owners we all know, the business owners sell much better than the sales people. Why then do we recruit sales people? The argument was ‘to grow’. I think we need to have ‘sales people’ that have the same (or similar) level of stake and authority in the organisation as the business owner. See how sales works then. Alternatively, have a large enough team to support the partner/principal’s sales efforts – someone who looks after proposals, telephone acct management, delivery management…on behalf of the partner for the customer.
We talk about new paradigms (in bound marketing, internet marketing etc) regularly. When it comes to practising, we just go back to our old methods.
I believe to help inbound marketing start becoming an authority in the area – write, blog, speak and share with your prospects, to help earn trust.
As computing power accelerates, online interaction will become more customer friendly, and B2C online sales models will be adopted by B2B companies. Some software companies have already begun to sell their applications online. After the online sale, customer service representatives will stand by to help answer questions.
Technology is clearly transforming the profession of selling. IBM is currently working on the DeepQA project, which will allow question-answering technology to consistently outstrip the best human performance. IBM’s team has demonstrated that its processing computer called “Watson” can understand natural language and deliver a single and precise answer to a question asked on Jeopardy! IBM found that the average response time on the game show is 3.5 seconds. IBM’s team created a computer that allowed Watson to deliver the right response faster than the average contestant.
At the core of the transformation process is not the software application used, but the computing power that drives the application. For example, in 1992, many computers ran on the 66-MHz Intel chip 486DX. The speed of this chip was 54 MIPS (million instructions per second). Today’s Intel chip Core i7-990X Extreme Edition runs at 3.46 GHz, and it can perform 159,000 MIPS.
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As the number of software applications is exploding and computing power is accelerating, we will see more sales tasks move online, requiring fewer salespeople. Gartner, a research organization, predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of interactions between businesses will be executed without human intervention. It is likely that of the 18 million salespeople in the United States, there will be only about 4 million left.
If today Watson can respond to complex questions in natural language with pinpoint accuracy and in fewer than three seconds, it is likely that 10 years from now, a Watson-like online sales avatar will answer all the questions customers need to ask in order to make a final purchasing decision. I see a clear trend: Outside sales will continue to shrink throughout this decade. Inside sales will grow at a 15 percent rate per year. Sales-support staff will increase over the next decade. New job titles such as chief listening officer, sales transformation manager, sales operations manager, and sales analyst will expand. If you want to stay in sales for the next decade, my advice is to become more efficient, more motivated, more solutions oriented, and more customer focused. The bottom line: If we don’t find and fill a need faster than a computer, we won’t be needed.