We meet with many sales leaders, sales teams, sales people and marketers and we are often overwhelmed with a drive to look and say exactly the same thing as the competition, to market and sell like the competition. A sea of blandness.A sales guy, whose just finished my first book (Social Selling – Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers) has contacted me (he loved the book by the way). He was desperate, “marketing is forcing us to share all their boring content, none of us salespeople think it add anything, it’s not insightful or educational and talks about us, what can we do?”
It’s a problem that many people face.
We are aware of a sales enablement team that have a process that if you follow it you will become so much like all the sales people out there it’s a wonder any of the sales people sell anything. We were on a call with them and I was open mouthed. It was literally bullying people by phoning them. And if I cannot bully you then, you get your manager to do it as well.A company emailed today about their amazing event. Now they have some supersonic artificial intelligence product and they are emailing me, to attend an event. Now I’m not in the market and probably never will be. This is desperation spray and pray. Let’s not forget it’s nearly the second decade of the 21st century.Before Christmas I was talking with a CIO and he mentioned that he had competitors contacting him using the same email template.At my pervious company, we go a new starter to present the company pitch from he previous company and competitor. While this is naughty, it was interesting. All of our USPs where not, of course USPs. It comes as no surprise that a competitor was claiming the same USPs as we did. Here we were enabling a sales force and mobilising a marketing team to put a message out into the market that was incorrect.I don’t want to sound boastful, but we proved the ROI of Social Selling 4 years ago with the article “How to get 10 meetings a week with Twitter”. Now let’s say you and us are really shit and you only manage one. If you had got one C-Level meeting each week for the last 4 years, per salesperson would your pipeline and results be in different shape?
So what as a business can you do?
Going back to my friendly CIO that I spoke to before Christmas for him things were pretty simple.
First he wanted somebody to understand his industry issues. Second he wanted somebody to understand his business issues. Third, he wanted somebody to be relevant to him. Fourth, he wouldn’t deal with “arseholes”, or “assholes” in the US.Of course, there are always people who will say, we don’t have time for that, there will be lazy sellers and lazy marketers. Who want to merge into that sea of brown and bland marketing, why? As they want to short cut and of course, there are no short cuts in sales and marketing. You find and close deals, not by cutting corners but by graft.
