SalesSquawk

The Twitter of Sales

Over the last few posts I have been talking about Social Media from a sales perspective.  During the same time frame, in my research, I have focused on Twitter as the tip of the iceberg, and the more I play with it, the more of its critically powerful secrets to sales it chooses to reveal to me.  Many are normal, everyday, social media connect the dots kinds of things but two have just blown me away and are the harbingers of the future in sales as we know it.

As a sales professional and consultant to organizations and individuals, one of the most important behaviors to change in sales people is the degree and type of listening they are doing.  An old saw reminds us we have two ears and one mouth and at the very least our speaking and listening should be the same ratio.  It was true when first uttered and perhaps more true today. 

You see, the only way to build the relationship with our customers the way we must as sales professionals is to not only understand our customers, but to do so in a way that they know we understand them.  Our relationship is based on their trusting us, their believing we are credible resolvers of their issue and them even having an issue in the first place we might resolve.  By listening through the defense mechanisms they employ when they do not fully trust us, we begin conveying we are not there to take advantage of them and they will open up more to us.  As that happens, we move to a real and legitimate position of proving how the value we bring with our products or services is well worth the investment we are asking them to make.  Any long time sales person knows this and operates there automatically, never giving it a second thought.

Twitter, and its intense, global adoption rate, that shows no sign of slowing has in my opinion, changed the paradigm of sales forever and reset all the sales models back to zero.  It has done this by providing the world something it never really had before, a means of listening to the thoughts of buyers, and a method of “speaking” to anyone interested in what it is the sales professional may be providing.  Once we as sales professionals understand how to utilize the mechanism, we discover twitter provides tools to tune in to only what people in our target customer base are asking for.  When we find that, we skip through a significant portion of the effort to build the relationship strong enough for our target customers to share their needs with us.  We actually find them at the point of thinking about resolving the problem which is where we have the greatest likelihood of not only closing the sale, but doing so to the exclusion of most other providers.  The power therein to find sales opportunities is unimaginable from older sales perspectives.

The other side of the coin is that we can also speak to our target customer base, but only the ones that may be interested in what we have to say.  This is very cool in that when they find us and listen, they not only give us permission to speak to them, they receive us with a higher degree of credibility and authority.  This brings us more of their trust and any conversation we end up having about our product or service is a lot further ahead than otherwise.

My friend Dave Barnhart points out that from a marketing perspective, twitter allows you to “listen” to your customers before developing a product.  The value of this is that you end up building products and services that are in demand upon completion, saving tons of headaches in the sales process and shortening the sales cycle dramatically.  Dave incidentally was one of the key people in my figuring out how critical twitter is to the future of sales and provides an excellent webinar on learning twitter.  I imagine if you meet him you will find like I did that he is one of the few people “get” the business models of social media.

Respectfully Submitted,
Michael D. Goodman
Twitter - @goodmansales

Why Social Sales Matters

I started out simply wondering how to prove the ROI of Social Media as a legitimate prospecting tool for a sales campaign and have since been sucked into the vortex of the known and unknown maelstrom known simply as Web2.0. The interactive Internet has evolved into a culture of relationships, business and Software as a Service companies as exciting as the DotCom bubble when it was first being blown up like Double Bubble Chewing Gum. While this bubble certainly has the capacity to burst and likely will for many of the providers, especially those getting in late, the impact on the global population of participants has forever changed the face of sales. It has not just changed the way we prospect; it has changed the culture, the philosophy and the efficiency of all prospecting. The bottom line on this is that using social media for prospecting, or Social Sales, matters. It matters a lot. 

In the last post I pointed out how Sales Is Dead! That today we are at the turning point of a revolution in sales and our most modern methodologies are now too old. We must adapt to thrive.  You see, when J. Douglas Edwards was the primary sales trainer of his day in the 1950’s and as he passed his material on to Tom Hopkins, the efforts were about qualifying the buyer, presenting the solution and then “closing” until the buyer was too exhausted saying no to fight anymore. The students of sales were taught methods reminiscent of landing swordfish, if there was more fight in the fisherman than the fish, the sale closed. David Sandler, who came along later and really pioneered sales process with psychology, learned his craft from Paul J. Myer. Paul, whom I also studied from, taught, “Create Confidence, Create Desire, Close and Collect.” Sandler adjusted what he learned from Paul J. Myer and taught methodology, psychology and acting to his students, still with the goal of “winning” the sale. Sandler’s approach is far more consultative and understanding of the buyers needs, and of developing a relationship with him sufficient to close the deal, but in the end, remains a process where the sales person uses the information he has that the buyer doesn’t to leverage information out of the buyer necessary to drive motivation to close the deal. 

Social Sales or using social media for finding new opportunities has changed the game dramatically so that buyers are armed with more knowledge than ever before, including what the sales person has always leveraged to control the sales process. If one company is not putting the buyers information out into a search-able, findable format for buyers, than another one is. With the primary components of relationship being Trust, Credibility and Interest then the person who appears most trustworthy and credible, when the buyer is interested and is easily discoverable on the Internet, has a huge advantage in closing the sale. 

Any seller who does not appear trustworthy or credible BEFORE the buyer contacts them, no longer gets to play the game with that buyer. Because of that, the rules of social media and the “non-sell” are critical. Sellers must provide regular, interesting content in locations where their targets are likely to be. The content needs to avoid the pure sales pitch mindset and simply move into a place where the sub-text of their message is supporting their buyers by providing information sufficient to attract them. They buyers, upon finding the information, are now in control of choosing to contact the sellers for more or not. What is critical and revolutionary here is that if a seller doesn’t provide that information then another one will, forcing everyone to put their information into play for all buyers. 

We must be in the game or not get to play at all. This forces us, the sellers, to put lots of content on the Web, including our knowledge, our personalities our successes and even our failures. We must become transparent to our buyers. This is 180 Degrees from the mindset of landing a fish, isn’t it? To gain control of the sales process in the world of the Web, we must give control away. At least, we must give control away at the prospecting phase so that we can appropriately attract those who want what we have and choose to engage us in conversations about how we can support them. 

Afterwords, if we fail to support our customers, we better remain cognizant that the methods they used to find us, and we them, are the same methods they will use to report our successes and failures to the next generation of our buyers. Just as many websites now use a 5 star rating system to get your feedback on companies, products or services, the buyer has many, many places to report they didn’t like you or they did. What do you suppose happens to your trust and credibility in the world if your customers see numerous reports of unhappy customers? 

Social Sales matters to business, not just because it is a cool new way to attract new customers, Social Sales matters because it fundamentally changes the way we approach our sales process and by necessity, drives transparency, dignity and integrity back into the world of selling. 

I don’t know about you, but I think that is an awesome transition. 

Respectfully submitted, 

Michael D. Goodman

Sales is Dead! Long Live Social Sales

The most powerful industry of its day was the railroad and the day it died, it never knew.  When passengers were stolen by the airlines, automobiles, and others, it could only watch dolefully at the reduction in business.  Later, the power businesses of local communities were the newspapers.  They held the eyeballs of the population and through them grabbed brain share and swayed opinions.  They survived the advent of TV but the internet is wielding the final blow to many newspapers across America.  We can get our news when we want it, how we want it and for free today.  I think broadcast television and radio are on their way out also.

Understanding the phenomena is key to understanding the next thought.  Sales is dead.  Certainly we have seen a shift over the last twenty years where “old school” selling, shoving desire for a product down the throat of a buyer has given way to “consultative selling” where spending more time building a relationship with, and understanding the buyer are the only acceptable means of growing business today.  Unfortunately, I think we are seeing that pass away also and unless we want to stare at declining numbers with the same doleful expression of the railroad executives, business better get a clue.  Social Sales isn’t a passing fad, it is the future of prospecting for every business in the world.

Social Sales is a term I am using to express the use of social media in the prospecting effort to generate new business.  It is the advent of “communities” and “tribes,” Twitter, blogs, Linkedin, Face book and more.  Social Sales is literally the tens of thousands of ways for a sales professional to convey his value propositions across the internet in the hopes of attracting an interested prospect into his/her sales cycle.

Not to be confused with Social Media which is the use of all the same media, though for the purpose of connecting with others, socializing in as close to a real manner as the virtual reality of the internet will allow.  Social Sales include all those people who participate in social media environments for the express purpose of gaining more eyeballs to their value proposition.  Social sales participate in the social media milieu for the purpose of trading content/expertise/service/products for money.  What is critically important is that Social Sales MUST follow the rules of social media to be effective and that is why Sales Is Dead.

If that seems like a bold statement, Sales is Dead, consider this.  Every generation alive today is conversant with the Internet.  Every generation is comfortable searching Google or other search engine to look for whatever they are interested in.  Where once the sales person was the owner and distributor of solutions and information to the customer base, today, customers come to the company with a rich knowledge of product, pricing and previous customer satisfaction.  Where once, sales professionals had reach to customers proactively to gain at least enough attention to express a value proposition at the sales professionals discretion, today every contact method has built in screening tools to keep out unwanted or spam like content.  What this means is that buyers today can avoid any prospecting effort they choose to and sales professionals have lost many of their tools to control the sales cycle until at least the prospect has not only expressed interest but decided to engage in the cycle with the sales person.

If we in sales are to remain competitive with everyone else seeking our customers’ dollars, we must put content in front of their eyeballs that attract their attention without being offensively salesy.  We must gently put our value propositions in front of our potential customers’ eyes but do so in such a way, that recognizes a very clear capacity to ignore us if we are no longer interesting or trust worthy.  When a customer expresses interest in our value proposition, we must absolutely provide service and support that gains us points in forums and rating systems we have absolutely no control over.

When we review our sales processes, we darn well better make sure we have trust mechanisms, credibility mechanisms and interest catchers all in our prospecting effort and throughout the entire sales process including implementation and satisfaction after the sale. We must have these elements in a place where our customers eyeballs are, and that is most effectively the Internet. Without that, we may win business over the short term, but like the railroads, will watch our customers begin going to where they find a better answer to the questions they are asking.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael D. Goodman
www.twitter.com/goodmansales
http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldgoodman

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