Mar/102
Objection Series – “Your Price is Too High!”
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Early in my sales career, I worked for a promotional products importing company in California that was very entrepreneurial. The president of the company would often get distracted from his core business and pursue a good idea, just because he thought it had potential in the market. Because of this, I had the opportunity to work side-by-side with a golf pro, who had a very direct way of handling price objections.
The president of the company had fallen in love with a golf training product, and hired Rod, a golf pro, to help promote it. Rod worked in the office next to mine (this was in the days before cubicles were the norm).
One day, I heard Rod say something into the phone that I later learned was a response to a price objection (i.e. “your price is to high”). In a very direct, almost sarcastic voice, Rod said:
“Compared to what?!?”
I was pretty new to sales, and still a bit on the nervous side when dealing with customers. His approach absolutely stunned me. I asked him about it, and he was very convinced that his approach was correct:
“Listen”, he said, “people pay me 20 times the price of this simple training tool for an hours worth of private golf lessons, and after the hour is gone, I leave. This training tool, on the other hand, is something that people can use anywhere they can swing a club, and they get instant feedback on their swing that is even more accurate than watching how the ball flies or hearing what a golf pro has to say. To object to the low price of this product is to not understand the value it offers. Anyone who objects on price is an idiot, and needs to be told how to value what they get from this thing”.
Now Rod was a pretty crusty old guy, and I am not a big fan of the style with which he delivered this objection response. However, with respect to his logic, he couldn’t be more right!
Too many salespeople hear a price objection from their prospect and agree with it. Then they run back to their company and demand a discount so that they can make a sale. The problem with this behavior, is that the salesperson is functioning as a semi-automated price tag. It is as if there is a basket of apples with a sensor and a digital price display. If a prospects walks up, sees the price and starts walking away, the display emits a signal, and drops the price 10%. This process repeats until the price is just above cost, or the prospect buys – whichever comes first.
In this case, the salesperson has not established sufficient value in the mind of the prospect. This salesperson is not acting as an expert, as we discussed in the blog series about the importance of expertise. This salesperson is not serving himself, his company OR his prospect well. This salesperson can also be easily replaced by another message runner, or when the technology allows, and someone actually builds it, our automated display!
Only the most Neanderthal of prospects shop on price alone. There are fewer of them than you think. The truth is, almost nothing is bought on price alone. No-one in their right mind would buy on price at the expense of quality, reliability, in some cases warranty, packaging, delivery time, etc.
Do you, for example, buy on price? You might think you do, but you probably don’t:
- Do you buy the cheapest shirt in the store, regardless of style, fit and color?
- Do you drive the cheapest car available, or did you pay a bit more for a car you like?
- Do you use the cheapest mobile phone?
- Do you eat at the cheapest restaurant?
- Have you ever had a coffee at Starbucks?
If you said yes to any of the questions, there is something other than price at work here. It is true for your prospects as well. There is some kind of value that is driving your decision. It needs to be in alignment with price, but is not subservient to it!
What prospects typically want from a salesperson – without even knowing that they do – is an EMOTIONAL assurance that their decision to buy from the salesperson is a good decision. They don’t want to make a mistake. They want to make sure that the product they buy matches up with their values (which may include organizational values from their work place). They want to be sure that your product or service comes at a fair price relative to other options, AND to this value that it provides.
A salesperson can help make this happen with a thorough needs analysis to make sure that the problem that the prospect needs to solve is solvable by the product or service that the salesperson offers. Once this assurance has been made, value has been established, and assuming that the price of the product or service is in alignment with the value that has been established, a price objection should not be a major hurdle.
This is not to say that some prospects won’t play the pricing game with you – some people just like the feel of a good haggle. Even in this case, the salesperson who has established value based on a thorough needs analysis and the presentation of a solution that meets as many facets of the prospects needs as possible has more leverage in the negotiation than one who simply offers the lowest price.
Don’t be the low price provider! Before you know it, someone else will have a slightly lower price, and your choices at that stage are limited, and undesirable.
When a prospect argues that the price is too high, it is because the value has not yet been adequately established. Period. Establish value before offering a price, and put yourself and your prospect in the best position to make a deal that everyone will be happy with.
Mar/104
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 3 of a 3 part series
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This is the final installment in a three-part series about the right sales mindset for social media success. In the first blog post in this series, I talked about the importance of being a subject matter expert. The second installment in the series focused on how to position your expertise to help a prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
In this last installment, we tie it all together with the glue that cements business relationships on and off the web – trust – arguably the currency of social media commerce.
In the 2008 book Jump Point: How Network Culture is Revolutionizing Business by Tom Hayes, the author suggests that trust is the new currency of social media. In the book, Hayes describes an evolving internet business environment that he calls “The Reputation Economy”. This is indeed a double edged sword, as Hayes points out. On the plus side, it is exciting to believe that there are lower barriers to entry and success for even the smallest players. Size is no longer required to grow quickly, and into something significant in this new environment. On the other side of the sword, it can seem a bit scary for buyers. Without traditional entities to mediate and regulate person-to-person transactions on the web, how can there be a guarantee of performance and adequate identification of and punishment of cheaters?
The author Hayes postulates and I agree: the answer is trust. As demonstrated by the success of eBay and Amazon with their user generated systems for rating the reliability of sellers, it seems intuitive that as the online business environment encourages more small players (read: initially unknown and for the most part anonymous even over time), buyers will gravitate towards sellers and interest providers they trust. Trust will be a function of past interactions with the seller, by all buyers or prospects, and mechanisms for displaying this trust will become increasingly demanded and relied upon by buyers.
Today, those mechanisms are mostly content based. Outside of Amazon and eBay, many businesses and business people try to enhance their chances of convincing a prospect to buy from them without the benefit of a formalized seller-reliability rating system. So in these conditions, how do we earn trust? For this, we go right back to the sales mindset that I defined in Mastering Your Sales Process and in the first two installments of this post:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
When we embody this mindset in our sales efforts, in social media and elsewhere, we engender trust. People tend to trust those people who seem to know what they are talking about and who can demonstrate that. People trust those who seem to be motivated by the desire to offer assistance in a genuine way. Put these two things together, and you have our definition. Embody this definition, and you will be trusted.
Embodying the definitions means working hard to make yourself and expert in everything that has to do with your product or service, all of the ancillary issues (logistics, finance, etc.), and the business of your prospective clients.
Committing to a business style that focuses on solving real problems in an honest and genuine way means getting past just selling your product, and really working to solve the problems. You will be on your way when you reach the point in a conversation with a prospect at which you KNOW that your product or service is not right for them, and you know what to do next – unequivocally!
This embodiment translates to social media by being the philosophical foundation of your content and aggregation activities. Whether you are posting a blog, answering a question in a forum, or passing on a useful link – come from the place that says “I am an expert who is here to help”, and your content will reflect the right things to lead to trust from those who see your content.
If these embodiments are genuine and well executed, your prospects as well as your connections, followers, friends and whatever else they may be called in the social media lingo du jour will trust you. If they trust you, then you have established the basis for a business relationship.
If this is (all or part of) your goal in using social media, then start every interaction with the idea that:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
In this way, you will build the trust you need to take steps in the direction you desire, and your prospective clients will be happy to be along for the ride.
Feb/100
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 2 of a 3 part series
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This is the second part of a three part series about the right sales mind set for social media success. In the last blog post, part one of this series, I wrote about the importance of being a subject matter expert. This week, I will cover how to position that expertise to help a prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
Imagine this: some salespeople actually think that it is their job to sell something to somebody. Now I won’t say that this is entirely wrong, but it is the same as saying that a hockey players job is to score goals. Let me explain what I mean here:
It is true that salespeople (and those who have a vested interest in them) like it when sales are made, just like hockey players and fans like it when (their team) scores a goal – but focusing on the goal alone is not how you get there – in sales or hockey. Lets start with hockey.
On average, generally speaking, there are about 6 goals per game scored in an NHL hockey game. These goals age generated by 12 players (6 per side including goalie) during 60 minutes of play. Without getting into a lot of sports statistics, it is pretty clear that a lot is going on during those 60 minutes that is not goal scoring. So if the job of the hockey player is to score goals, most of them are not doing their job – hence the problem with defining the goal as the job – true for salespeople as well.
A more useful way for salespeople to think about their job is reflected in the second part of the definition offered in part one of this blog, originally from my book Mastering Your Sales Process:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
This second sentence in the definition goes a very long way in filling in the gaps between goals, as it were. It is what the salesperson should be doing to get to the goal. It encompasses all of the steps in the sales process in between prospecting and closing. It covers qualification, needs analysis, proposal and objections – the meaty part of the sales process!
This perspective – that the salespersons job is to help the customer make a good decision is not only very validating for the salesperson, but in fact it is what the customer really wants from us. Because we spend more time with our product or service than the client does, we should know more about it than they do. If we are doing our job well, we are helping the prospect to flesh out problems they need to solve and to come up with the right solutions.
If we do this with the expertise we defined in the first post on this topic, then the client feels really good about buying from us, and we reach our goal.
So what does all of this have to do with social media? Pretty much everything!
Social media experts and users go on at great length about the “fact” that in social media, hard sales tactics are not welcome. OK, maybe that’s true, but it is also clear that people use information that they find on the web and on social media sites to help them make decisions about lots of things, including what to buy and who to buy it from.
The sales definition of “an expert here to help” bridges the gap between what users want and expect from social media and what salespeople hope to get done there: starting the process of making a sale that is closable. The way to do that is by living both parts of the sales mindset we have discussed, and learning to embody that in your social media endeavors.
If you are trying to sell using social media, then the thing you are trying to earn as a result of your efforts as the “expert here to help” is trust. Trust is arguably the currency of commerce in social media marketing. We’ll talk more about that in the final post in this series next week.
Feb/103
The right sales mindset and success in social media – part 1 of a 3 part series
PART ONE
In my blog post on January 13, I asked the questions “Does Social Media Marketing Work”. My answer was that it works best when it is driven by great content.
But what is “great content” in the context of sales? In other words, if your goal is to use social media to sell more of your product or service, what kind of content qualifies as “great”, especially towards reaching that goal?
I’ll attempt to answer that questions over the next three blog posts – why three? Well, the answer breaks up neatly into three pieces, and the answer is too long for a single blog post – even by my “anything under 1000 character is OK” standards! So here is part one: Why demonstrating that you are an expert matters.
In my book, Mastering Your Sales Process, I spent a few pages talking about the “right sales mindset” and why it is important. That right mindset is as follows:
“I am an expert in my field. My job is to help qualified prospects make good decisions about solving problems using my product or service.”
Before we start to take this apart, let’s get back to the question at hand – why is this the right mindset for sales success in social media?
Anyone who is using social media that might wind up buying from you as a result of doing so, is probably collaborating with others and evaluating multiple sources of information before making a decision. As such, you COULD position yourself in a corporate communications style of one-way, marketing speak (look at our great products, they do these cool things, etc.). This is the mode of communications that you see in commercials, corporate web sites, etc. However, it is not the right approach for social media.
In social media, it is best to not sell, but rather to help customers buy (arguably true outside of social media as well!). Consumers have become accustomed to hearing companies talk about how great their products are, and in the right context, that is accepted (although it may or may not be believed at face value). Social media is a different kind of communications venue in that allows two-way communication, and fosters more of a “discussion” format as opposed to a “presentation”. In a presentation, saying that you are great is usually not contested, if it is even possible (yelling at a TV commercial doesn’t count). In the midst of a conversation, it is not considered polite (or effective) to talk about how terrific you and your stuff might be.
So what does happen in a conversation that helps engender trust? In a conversation, a person who is an expert on the topic at hand will demonstrate their expertise by the content of their part of the conversation. If the topic is cardiovascular surgery, and you are talking with a cardiovascular surgeon, it will become clear during the course of the conversation that the surgeon has some idea what they are talking about, even if (especially if?) they don’t tell you how great they are at it. Rather, they demonstrate their expertise by addressing the subject knowledgeably. They demonstrate this to you by the way they engage in the two-way dialogue you are having.
If you want to have credibility about a subject in a dialogue, you must demonstrate, not announce your expertise in a subject matter. Once you have done so, you have made an important step towards having the ability to influence your dialogue partner. If they believe that you know what you are talking about regarding a subject that matters to them, and they are inclined to take action, they just might listen to an expert like you.
Step one in generating great content in the context of sales via social media is to embody the first part of our sales mind set: to demonstrate that you are indeed a subject matter expert regarding the subject at hand.
Step two – the subject of next weeks blog – will focus on how to position your expertise to help the prospective customer decide to allow you to influence their buying decision.
Feb/108
Do you have the right personality for sales?
WARNING: This post is a bit of a rant – if you are feeling a bit squeamish at this moment, you may want to read this post later!
I participate in the Question and Answer forum and in sales groups on LinkedIn with great regularity and enthusiasm. One question theme that comes up again and again is about sales and personality. So what is the right way to think about the idea that someone does or does not have a good personality for sales, and how might personality related factors impact their effectiveness as a sales person?
The answer to the second question is a little bit trickier, so let’s start there. Most people who believe that personality factors influence sales effectiveness seem to equate personality related factors with the ability to communicate well with prospects. As such, those who have the “right” kind of personality or the right personality factors are better able to connect (or bond) and communicate with their prospects. Personality based sales assessments, and the idea of the “natural born salesperson” cater to this (here it comes) MYTH!
So what is the reality here? Most communication experts will tell you that in most cases, the key component that causes communication to fail is on the listening side of the equation. Problems occur when people either don’t stop talking long enough to listen; interrupt the other person; or don’t jump in, but follow their own line of thinking internally as the other person continues to talk.
Active, effective listening is a SKILL that can be taught. If communication is most often derailed on the listening side of the equation, and listening can be taught (as opposed to being a personality trait that one either has or doesn’t have), then it just can’t be said that personality is the most important factor in business related, effective communication.
Sure it helps when the salesperson and the buyer can “connect” on some personal level, but to take that a step further and postulate that this ability to make a personal connection is among the key drivers of sales success – as many seem to believe – is a step too far! The idea that this kind of connection is an essential factor in sales or business communication is folklore. It is certainly nice, but not as critical as an unexamined speculation might lead you to believe.
This is not to say that people with extreme personality issues can be effective communicators, but as soon as you move away from the extremes, personality becomes a marginal factor in business communications. Period!
So what about the first part – that there are specific personalities that are good for sales and others that are bad for sales? At first glance, this also seems to make sense. Many people have a stereotypical image of salespeople in their mind, and it is not a long leap of logic to go from stereotype to personality type. In reality, anyone who has worked with more than a few successful salespeople over the course of their career has seen that a wide variety of people with very different personalities can succeed in sales, and those who seem to fit the stereotypical sales persona sometimes fail and sometimes succeed. It is hard to meet someone with a lot of experience with salespeople who makes a strong case for personality as a key driver of sales success, because they have seen that personality can vary against the metrics of success.
So does personality matter? Here is how to think about it. If you understand the bell shaped curve, then you can believe that many arguments that make sense on either end of the curve tend to fall apart in the middle.
This is the case with the myth of the sales personality. If personality could somehow be plotted on a bell shaped curve (I have no idea how you could actually do that, but imagine with me for a minute), then those people at the edges might have difficulty selling because of the extreme nature of their personalities.
However, for those in the “fat / tall” part of the bell-shaped curve, there are many other factors upon which their sales success depends, and the success they find in sales will vary based on these other factors. Sales success won’t necessarily correlate to the findings on our imaginary personality bell-shaped graph.
Salespeople are not born, and there is no correct sales personality. Professional selling is a skill, and a skill that can be taught. Psychopaths may struggle, but the average person with the desire to succeed and the commitment to do what it takes to get there is trainable, regardless of their non-extreme personality type.
Do you disagree? If so, please comment – but in your comment, please do provide an example of a personality type that is a bad personality for sales. I am eager to hear what you come up with, and to compare that to the many successful salespeople I have worked with and the wide diversity of personality types that they represent.
Feb/100
Objection series – “I need to think about it”
Thinking things over seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. That is why so many poor performing salespeople accept this objection at face value when they hear if from their clients. The “I need to think about it” objection can be a hard one to get past, until you know how and why you should. This is a long post, but we’ll tackle this often thorny issue, so if it is one that gives you trouble, please read on.
First of all, you need to realize that “I need to think about it” is indeed an objection. In my book, Mastering Your Sales Process, I define objections as “questions that must be addressed after the proposal has been presented.” For the sake of contrast, questions asked BEFORE the proposal is presented are a normal part of the needs analysis process. I mention this now, because the best way to avoid objections is to get the questions answered during Needs Analysis before they even become objections, and they are still just questions.
However, if you have proposed a solution and there are questions outstanding, you will get objections. Sometimes they are very specific and relate to facts and figures in your proposal. Sometimes, they are not very specific, and reflect a general unease or uncertainly in the prospect about moving forward. For example, “I need to think it over”.
From the clients perspective, this usually means that they are not ready to make a decision. They may or may not know why.
They may know (and may or may not have told you) that they need to talk to someone else in the organization. They may know that they need three proposals before making a decision, and yours is not number three. Or it may be something else that they are able to articulate.
On the other hand, they may not know why, but they just are not ready.
In any case, what should you do when your client hits you with the “I need to think about it?” objection.
By realizing that it is an objection, and accepting my definition of an objection, the answer becomes clear. As a sales professional, you need react to this objection by realizing that you need to understand what still needs to be thought about. It would be best if you could be involved in that process of discovery.
So how do we get there?
Most people who work in a professional environment accept the chaotic nature of their own work schedule. Based on this premise, you can reply to the objection by saying something like:
“You know, that is entirely reasonable. We went over a lot of information, and it makes sense to consider it all thoroughly. However, as soon as we leave this meeting, we’ll both be hit with 1000 other things to distract us. So, since we are both (all) here now, and the information is fresh, perhaps you can help me understand what specific issues you still need to think about so that I can provide you with any additional information you might need in order to consider the problem more thoroughly.”
The logic here is clear. If there are unresolved issues, it makes sense to go over them while all are present and the information is fresh. This is especially true if there are multiply buyers in the room.
In using this approach, you have not rejected the prospects need to consider the problem, you only suggested that you do it together, and now. If you are successful, you are effectively back into the sales conversation, and if you can identify and resolve a few specific outstanding issues, you can put yourself back into position to set up the close.
But what if the tactic is just a stall? What if the prospect has no intention to buy or to buy from you? In this case, your approach will flush this out as well. When the answer to your suggestion is non-specific, you may want to say something like:
“You know, lots of times people tell me that they need to think it over when they have already decided not to move forward. If that is the case, can you just tell me now so that we can both save some time in the future?”
Any answer to this questions is good. If they say “yes”, then you know that you don’t have to waste time following up in the future. If they say “no”, then you can try again to flesh out the issues, or at least to agree on next steps. Either way you set yourself up to be efficient, and you demonstrate confident professionalism to the prospect.
Whatever you do, don’t just accept the “I need to think about it” objection”. Addressing it correctly offers opportunities to remain engaged in the sales process, or to learn that you should disengage. Either is better than accepting the objection, and the corresponding fate of the (usually) pointless follow up calls that come with it.
Jan/104
How the competition can make you hurt yourself
I was recently involved in a negotiation on behalf of the holder of intellectual property and a small (relative to industry average) potential contract manufacturing partner.
After only a very short set of preliminary meetings, the contract manufacturer sent us an unsolicited, highly detailed proposal for a partnership. This was the smallest mistake they made, and it was no small mistake. As a note on this point alone, a professional salesperson (or negotiator) should certainly work to learn as much as possible about the needs of all parties and the feasibility of various solutions before formally proposing a solution.
But it got worse.
During the course of the preliminary meetings, our side made it clear that we would require the sourcing of a highly complicated, capital intensive and critical component of our product from a well-known and well-respected component manufacturer. The component manufacturer that we specified was considered one of the best in the world, and was used (with positive results) by almost every major manufacturer in our field.
In the proposal from our prospective contract manufacturing partner, it was suggested that this industry leading, highly acclaimed component manufacturer was grossly overcharging us, and that the small contract manufacturer should also produce the (very complicated, very expensive) machines that make the specialized component – an extremely ambitions suggestion. They further suggested that they could make the machines for less than half the cost of the world famous component manufacturer, with twice the capacity, and in less time.
It sounded too good to be true, and that is just how we interpreted it. This unrealistically ambitious suggestion came at a time when we had just begun exploring our relationship, and well before we had explored many of the much more basic issues related to our potential partnership.
This did not bode well for our perceptions of this prospective contract manufacturing partner!
As a general proposition, it is important to show prospective partners that we are competent and capable potential business partners for them. However, making unrealistic claims early in the process is not the way to do it. Especially if this happens before needs are fully understood, and true capabilities are established. The situation is made even worse if these claims are packaged in the context of an obvious attempt to undermine an existing relationship, and even worse than that when attacking the existing relationship is not necessary. In all of these cases, it just appears desperate (and probably is).
This kind of poor execution usually just winds up hurting the efforts of the needless aggressor. Attacking the competition rather than working to learn what problems exist that can be solved together is not the correct behavior of a professional salesperson, and certainly not the most productive.
A small child may be able to brag to his friends that his fathers new car can go 1000 miles per hour, but when you make a similar gesture to your prospective client in hopes of having them reconsider a more realistic offer from one of your competitors, you are hurting yourself far more than you are helping your efforts to secure the business.
Jan/100
How the talk inside of your head is hurting your sales
Do you remember what it was like when you first learned to drive a car? How about riding a bike? Using a computer for the first time?
If you remember your early experiences with these things, then you may remember what was going on inside of your head at that time, and how different that is from what goes on inside of your head now as you do these same (presumably now familiar) things.
When we first learn something that requires a lot of concentration and/or that has a lot of “moving parts”, we tend to talk to ourselves a lot. We feed ourselves reminders about what we need to remember as we go through the mechanics of executing the task at hand.
“OK, check the mirrors, put the gear shift into ‘drive’ – no wait, first push the break….”
“OK, single click the ‘start’ button; highlight ‘applications’; select ‘Word’; click the ‘file’ menu and click on ‘new’….”
After a short time, these things become routine. Part of the “background operating program” in your mind. Now you pull the car our while talking on the phone, sipping your coffee, or checking your makeup. You open a new word document as you multitask through 10 other things both on and off of your computer screen.
I am not a fan of multitasking, but I’ll save that rant for another post. My point now is that when you have achieved a certain level of comfort with the set of steps involved in accomplishing a task, then you are able to execute that task with a greater level of attention.
Wait a minute, what? Shouldn’t that be a smaller amount of attention? I just said that instead of concentrating on the steps, we can now concentrate on other things as the mechanical actions are run in the background?
That is not the right perspective – here is why. If your attention is focused on the minutia of your execution, then you are not fully present for the larger experience of getting your task done. For example, if you are backing out your car, and you are focussed on the minutia of the mechanics, it is easier to miss the fact that someone just walked behind your car.
So how does this all tie back to sales and selling? As you undoubtedly know by now, I attribute a lot of the elements of sales success back to the development of and the proper execution of a well-developed sales process.
With respect to this concept then, the salesperson who operates with confidence within the framework of a well-developed process is able to concentrate on “other things” as the mechanical elements of selling operate quietly and predictably in the background. If properly applied, these “other things” should include actively listening to the prospect; taking copious notes about the conditions and concerns of the prospect; floating trial solutions and noting the degree to which they resonate with the prospect – and why or why not – according to the prospect, etc.
In contrast, a salesperson who does not have a clear path, who does not have a visceral feel for the next steps and interconnected nature of the full sales process at a near unconscious level will spend his or her mental energy worrying about the right way to respond to the remarks of the client, as opposed to “effortlessly” arriving at their next strategic move by better understanding the needs of their conversational counterpart.
Samurai warriors aspired towards a mental state of what is called Mu Shin – or no mind. This served them well when they fought another Samurai. These fights usually played out as both Samurai standing in a fighting position, with swords drawn and ready, and within striking distance of each other for perhaps hours. The first Samurai that moved (due to less mental strength and stamina) often revealed an opening which the other exploited, usually with deadly consequences.
These Samurai would not have been well served to stand in their fighting position thinking about all of the possibilities that might confront them. They were successful if they “owned” that information, and were able to tune out that internal noise in exchange for a keen awareness of the present moment.
You as a salesperson need to own your sales process, and the steps and elements that comprise it. In this way, you will be able to stick to your path, and remain engaged with your opponent (prospect) in a way that leads you to the best result. An informed position, free from internal noise, that allows you to direct the course of action forward as is most applicable based on your observations and your internal knowledge.
The alternative, all too common, is a course of client engagement clouded by internal noise, which is a function of a lack of discipline about how to properly do the job of professional sales, and how to manage the sales process that you move through with each and every client.
Jan/107
Does Social Media Marketing Work?
In my blog post last week I wrote about questions. I’d like to continue that theme, but from a slightly different angle.
In the last year or so, I have seen a similar question come up again and again in the Question and Answer forum on LinkedIn: Do social media venues such as LinkedIn / Twitter/ Facebook, etc. work as vehicles for generating business.
The majority of the answers provided in the forum, like those in most debates, fell onto one side or the other – yes it does, or no it doesn’t. With respect to this specific question, I had a revelation while watching a Disney movie with my kids over the holidays. The revelation was that the factor that makes social media work or not for a business is the same thing that makes the Disney machine work: Great content.
The idea came to me since we had just come back from a Disney on Ice show that introduced the kids to Ariel of The Little Mermaid (and to Disney Popcorn – profit center number 2 for Disney). We went home and later rented the movie (number 3). In the middle of the movie the kids asked when we could go back to Disneyland (number 4).
Disney is a great example of an effective integrated marketing company. Exposure to one kind of product leads naturally to interest in another.
Social media is best thought of the same way. It is infrastructure. Asking if Social Media works is like asking if plumbing works to deliver fresh water. This is really two questions. The first question is “does the plumbing work”. The second question is “will the water that comes through the plumbing be fresh”. Very simply put, the water will be fresh if it is fresh, the pipes are clean, and the pipes do their job and deliver it.
If you have content that resonates with your audience, and you can connect to that audience through the infrastructure of social media, then social media may help you reach your business goals. If you content is not interesting to the audience, then no infrastructure – social media or otherwise – will help.
As sales and marketing professionals, it behooves us to stop evaluating the potential effectiveness of tools and communication vehicles with binary questions based on someone else’s opinions. If we know our business, and know our audience, then we can use the tools that present themselves to us to reach them. From there, we need to connect via great content. If we fail to do so, then social media will work to help your prospects leave your content just as fast as they came.
So does Social Media work? Sure it does. Will it work for you? Depends what you put into the pipes, who you ask to turn them on and how you do it.
Jan/104
Asking the right questions
I love my iPhone. Since it is a mobile device, I use it out of the house and office a lot. Hardly a week goes by without someone seeing me use it and asking me the wrong question:
“Is that a good phone?”
Why is this the wrong question? Good is a matter of perspective. The iPhone is a great phone. For me. It may or may not be good for the person asking the question, and the question they asked won’t help them to figure that out.
I like the iPhone because I rarely use the phone, but often need a wireless modem, e-mail checking on-the-fly, navigation to find a new office while not driving (I use public transportation a lot), and I like that I can also use it in place of my iPod – one less thing to carry!
I have been told that many “power phone” users don’t like the iPhone. It is not well suited for them.
So how is all of this relevant subject matter for a sales blog? It gets back to the question people ask me when they see me using my iPhone:
“Is that a good phone?”
Weak salespeople love questions like that (for example, “is that thing you are selling good?”). It allows them to respond by showering the asker of the question with all of the reasons that the product (or service) in question is indeed good. It typically leads to a conversation in which information is pushed in one direction or the other rather than shared and collaborated on.
The better question for sales people to ask is, “What is it about that item that you like?”, or, “how well does that item meet your needs?”. When asked the “bad” question (is that good), then a better response from the sales person should be some variation on the theme of “well, it depends what you are looking for, or what problem you are trying to solve”.
These questions allows the salesperson to learn what is important to the prospect, which in turn sets up a more effective sales conversation. It invites the prospect to speak, and to define their needs. These are good sales questions. It is more than just a matter of being open-ended, which is important, it is about evoking the things that are important to the prospect about the product or service in question.
People (other than many engineers I know) don’t want to buy things because you bombard them with a bunch of features. People buy benefits. Asking your questions with this in mind will help lead you to the place where you can discuss benefits, specifically the benefits of your solution that are most important to your prospect. This is kind of conversation you want to have if making a sale, or any kind of informed decision is your goal.
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