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
Recent Comments