When I started on my sales career some 20 + years ago my first Sales Manager said “here is a customer list ring them up make a meeting and find out what they want. Remember you have two ears and one mouth use them in that proportion – ask them questions and listen to the answers, then come back and we will figure out what the best solution is for them” That was his first sales training lesson. That first lesson has been the basis of my entire selling career.
All those years ago it was easier to make meetings with existing and potential customers. A sales person was a little bit like the old travelling minstrel full of news and different ways of doing things. The sales person had information and news that the prospects and customers were interested in hearing. In 2010 the internet is the travelling minstrel with more information and news then any sales person could ever have and available immediately! There is so much information out there that customers are less inclined to spend valuable time with a salesperson, in-fact some sales people struggle to get their story heard above the “white noise” of modern media.
Imagine that in front of you there is a big bowl of metal and plastic paperclips. The metal paperclips are prospects and the plastic paperclips are not. There are several ways to get the prospects out of the bowl, you can pull one out at a time feel it to see if it is metal or not, then put the metal paperclip into another bowl. The problem is you spend the same amount of time on the plastic prospects as you spend on the solid metal prospects. If you spend half your time dealing with plastic prospects you are wasting valuable selling time. Picking out the prospects one at a time was the tried and true method of finding prospects in the past. The problem today is the metal and the plastic prospect look very much the same, separating them is harder than it has ever been. How do you separate the real from the plastic without wasting effort on the plastic prospects? What happens if you drag a magnet through the bowl? The magnet comes out with lots of metal prospects and leaves the plastic ones behind. You have also increased your selling time as you do not have to deal with the plastic prospects.
All those years ago it was easier to make meetings with existing and potential customers. A sales person was a little bit like the old travelling minstrel full of news and different ways of doing things. The sales person had information and news that the prospects and customers were interested in hearing. In 2010 the internet is the travelling minstrel with more information and news then any sales person could ever have and available immediately! There is so much information out there that customers are less inclined to spend valuable time with a salesperson, in-fact some sales people struggle to get their story heard above the “white noise” of modern media.
Imagine that in front of you there is a big bowl of metal and plastic paperclips. The metal paperclips are prospects and the plastic paperclips are not. There are several ways to get the prospects out of the bowl, you can pull one out at a time feel it to see if it is metal or not, then put the metal paperclip into another bowl. The problem is you spend the same amount of time on the plastic prospects as you spend on the solid metal prospects. If you spend half your time dealing with plastic prospects you are wasting valuable selling time. Picking out the prospects one at a time was the tried and true method of finding prospects in the past. The problem today is the metal and the plastic prospect look very much the same, separating them is harder than it has ever been. How do you separate the real from the plastic without wasting effort on the plastic prospects? What happens if you drag a magnet through the bowl? The magnet comes out with lots of metal prospects and leaves the plastic ones behind. You have also increased your selling time as you do not have to deal with the plastic prospects.
The key to running a magnet through your prospects is to be able to automate your email marketing from your website. Producing a Webpage and sending that content to a specific group of customers or prospects, then being able to track who has looked at the email and who hasn’t, then applying different follow up methods to each sub group.
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