Best Practices•
on November 9th, 2009•
There’s a lot of discussion around “how to sell using Social Media” (we found 1,400 blog articles since July of 2009) and I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with and training over 100 salespeople over the past year. I’ve learned a lot and hopefully my clients have as well. I also do a fair bit of research into tactics used. Here’s some pitfalls I’d like share.
The Blunt Pitch: Those sales folks who put the hard pitch in right up front. These are tactics like putting in your newsfeed lines such as “if you’re looking for a home, I’m the guy from which to buy.” Says who? or “I sell life insurance so talk to me today.” Why? How’re you different? I don’t know you.
Misuse of Valuable Tools: I like taking polls in various places online. Mixx and LinkedIn offer various polls that users can create themselves. I’ve noticed a trend when it comes to sales people using these polling tools; they’ll tend to ask an all too onvious question like “what Social Media tool do you use most for marketing?” While I’ve noticed some very clever use of polling tools to ask broader questions and engage.
Then there’s setting up discussions in places like FastPitch, LinkedIn and ecademy. Here sales people will start discussions that are far too obviously attempts to discuss their product. If you check the comments, well, there are none, or it’s someone from their own company.
Social Media channels and networks are places to engage, and it doesn’t mean results overnight. It takes time. Blunt selling does say what you do and let’s be sure, honesty and transparency goes a long way in Social Media as it does in real life. But straight hard pitches is not engaging and uncovering the broader needs of the person, and so much of sales is how we relate to people. Blunt tactics immediately throw up a wall, one that may not come down like the Berlin Wall.
What do you think?
Best Practices, Thunking•
on September 17th, 2009•
Sales is, for the most part, is a “near-term results” effort. On a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis a CEO is always looking at the sales numbers. Because the purpose of a business is to make a profit and sales helps drive profitability. Otherwise you’re a charitable organization. I’ve seen a lot of expectation that because Social Media seems to be so “instant” with services like Twitter or Plurk and Facebook, it should be able to bring instant sales results. But it isn’t.
Social Media is a managed investment – like marketing and communications. It’s been argued and I agree, that through Social Media there is a true model for Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). Properly researched, planned and implemented, marketing has an ROI. Marketing essentially paves the path for the sales team to close the deals…to ensure they have deals to close in the future.
Social Media enables marketing (and sometimes sales) to foster deeper relationships in the marketplace in order to aid the organization across all aspects of the company. Product feedback for the product management team, company feedback from shareholders, indicators for increased market uptake and feedback to human resources for hiring issues.
Simply looking to engage in Social Media for immediate sales opportunities will only lead to disappointment. Engaging in Social Media means you must be prepared to make an investment with resources; your company’s most precious resources – people. A senior manager wouldn’t execute a marketing campaign without research and planning just as a sales manager wouldn’t let a sales team loose without a good plan – ideally sales and marketing work together.
So it is with Social Media; you need research, then a plan, then you execute. Over the longer term. Look for metrics to measure progress as you would in marketing. Expecting instant results is setting up for failure. We’re not saying don’t let the sales manager near your Social Media efforts, but they shouldn’t expect to instantly expand the sales funnel or salivate over huge sales gains in the next sales period. Social Media takes time to garner results – that means months.
And if you’re calling your agency to create a video that will go “viral” to get those instant results – hang up now. Certainly you can make a cool video – but it’s the public, not your marketing team, that decides if anything will go viral as Shai Agassi so truly stated among others.
We provide a fair bit of training around using Social Media for selling. Most often we are asked “how do I turn friends into clients?” and we’ve seen this question posted on other blogs, by some prominent bloggers. This question has been posed by many. Given the many workshops and private consultations we’ve run, we’ve developed the Horizontal Hourglass Theory and believe that actually closing the deal within Social Media tools and services is the exception, not the rule.
Why then? It’s all about human behaviour and Video Conferencing is the prime indicator. If video phones were so desired and the market really wanted them, we’d all have them on our walls at home or office desks by now. If we really, as consumers, wanted them. We would have quickly adopted those clunky early versions and the demand would’ve driven technical innovation. But it hasn’t. Perhaps Cisco’s Telepresence has the potential. Perhaps. Today, the costs remain prohibitive even to 97% of businesses.
While Social Media is changing our society and enabling greater communication than ever before, we still crave physical contact. To clearly see facial expressions and full body language; all vital parts of building rapport and trust. This becomes obvious when even the Social Media space is filled with all kinds of events that bring people physically together in the same space. Even that Microblogging wonder Twitter has a word for Face-2-Face meetings – Tweetups. Then there’s Podcamps to record podcasts as groups, and SobCon and Unconferences along with the other Social Media events, conferences, gatherings and dinners.
So it is with the sales function. Social Media tools enable you to prospect in new ways, then connect initially, using Social Media tools to provide “evidence” of who you are and progress a deal to the point where it’s time to meet. And meeting is and will likely always be, vital. After the deal is closed and the delivery commences, Social Media comes back into play in helping work through the delivery and after delivery to stay connected with your clients increasing client loyalty. Thus the Horizontal Hourglass Theory (which is a bit cheeky, but we like it anyway.) So while Social Networking and Social Media may not actually “close” the deal, it can certainly help you find more prospects, get closer to the deal point for less cost (reducing your COGS on the balance sheet) and improve loyalty. That’s still bottom line positive impact.
(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Partner)
Best Practices•
on August 11th, 2008•
Tired of decreasing response rates to your email marketing efforts? Maybe you’re just noise like everyone else. Try leveraging a corporate blog by integrating your blog strategy with email marketing and you may find a whole new level of results. Here’s our experience:
We all receive a lot of emails in the run of a day. Next time you’re planning an email marketing campaign, think of how you use your email. Look at your own “inbox” and look to see how many marketing emails you subscribe to, and how many you open and read. I suspect the truth might disappoint you somewhat. Your customers think in a similar way.
So here’s a different approach. Continue the email marketing, but change the message and turn email marketing into a conversation spark. Print ads are a great example; the best ads say the least, yet spark a desire in us to buy, to investigate further or in other words – take action. Email marketing tactics can be leveraged with the same principle. The key here is understanding that email marketing is now just like a banner ad on a website, and its “interruptive” since people are online to “do” something, the Web is not passive like television – this is largely why banner ads don’t deliver good results.
Send your email, but use the principles of a print ad to create an action – the action being to drive them to the blog, not the usual Landing Page. Engage them in a conversation. Part of the reason email marketing messages fail is that as soon as you get such an email your first thought is “I’m being sold something.” So you filter them. You just know the email is going to send you to a Landing Page that’s going to pitch you a product – and you’re busy right now thank-you. It fails right out the gate for 98% of your target!
Using email to drive a prospect to a blog infers that there’s something “more” on the blog, since blogs are considered to be 2-way, the “sell” takes on a different tone. If you invite dialog on your blog, perhaps the prospect will say something there? That’s engagement, and you might also learn about a customer need, and be able to sell them more or handle an objection. So many companies send out emails today, it’s boring. Years ago businesses found high return rates over 8% from email marketing. Today email marketing is lucky to work like regular direct mail and deliver 1-3% responses.
We’re not saying stop the “direct sell” emails, but mix it up, engage the prospect. From the blog, you can drive them to relevant product pages. If they’re satisfied with the engagement in the blog, we’ve found they are 30% more likely to buy or give buying indicators. Your sales cycle is reduced, your leads are warmer and…you increase revenues! Blogs can be a powerful sales tool.
