In the old days, people were ignorant of what was going on in the world around them. There was no internet, no mobile and no social media.
If you wanted to know something about a product or service, you called up a company and asked them to send you a brochure.
Brochures were useless as they told you how great the company was and how great the products are, (a bit like most websites now) but now we (as buyers) are better than this. In fact, you would take cold calls, read ads because it gave you a window on the world. Now you won’t.
Then came along the internet, social media and mobile and the world changed.
If we want to know anything, that is anything, we just go on-line and find the information or ask a question of our network. Any issue in our private lives or issue we have at work we can look up the internet and get advice.
There is this statistic that has seen to be around for years from CEB, which is now Gartner that people are 57% of the way through the buying process by the time when they contact a salesperson. At our recent onboarding of our Singapore reseller, they said “no way”, we thought they meant it was less than 57% of the way. In fact they thought the figures was more like 70 or 80%.
In the old days, you would place an advert, I as a buyer would know no different and ring you up and buy. Brands were built this way in both the B2C and B2B world.
But Things Changed
The power buyers have, plus the lack of time we have, (we all have busy lives) why would I come to you?
The
clever companies today are providing insightful and educational content for buyers to find and read. Consume, I hear it’s called in Marketing Land. Sales people are still prospecting (regardless of what the cold calling gurus tell you). But we know the modern buyer is looking for an expert. So us salespeople have great personal brands, we create content that our buyers consume, we build relationships online. We don’t interrupt, we don’t sell, we don’t close, we don’t have to. We empower people to buy. This for some is the world of pipe dreams, here at the leading edge of social selling, we have clients doing this daily. Prospecting, getting meetings and closing big and small accounts, all with ease. All through social.
Today, for a brand to be arrogant to think that they can put up a bill board, that I will read it. (I’m way to busy in my busy life to read it, we just filter out adverts). I’m going to read it and think, “I need one of those” and then call you up and buy one is total fantasy.
And in fact lazy. The fact you think you can push your marketing issues, like finding new leads and meeting and pushing this out to an advertising agency is lazy. Of course, when it generates zero, you can blame them. Maybe the messaging was wrong enough, maybe you didn’t spend enough (a common ad agency suggestion) maybe the photo wasn’t powerful enough. Or maybe we just don’t care about your product and service?
A friend of mine disagreed with me, he said, I often see adverts and think “that’s a good idea”, he then went on to tell me that, he then went onto the internet and researched for similar products and 90% of the time he purchased an alternative product to the one advertised. I didn’t say that he had actually agreed with me.
It’s time to stop being lazy in marketing and do some work …. and switch your advertising budget to social.
Please note, advertising on social, for example, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc, is not social, it’s advertising.
Related:
Sales and the World Keeps Changing. Are You With Me?
