Now, buyers are in charge of relationship with companies they choose to do business with. Smart companies understand this new world and build a buying process around the realities of independent research.
Because of the biggest communication revolution in human history, your marketplace has changed. It is time for the New Rules of Sales and Service: Authentic storytelling sets the tone with content as the ling between companies and customers. Big data enables a more scientific approach to sales and service. Agile selling brings new business to your company, and real-time engagement keeps customers happy.
Winning companies are no longer determined by the salespeople with the best closing technique.
Smart companies understand that people have choices of whom to do business with, and they are transforming the way they sell and service customers.
Buyers actively go around salespeople until the last possible moment and then come into negotiations armed with lots and lots of information.
Most sales organizations are built and run as if it were still 1989. The sales model is broken.
Online content has transformed the way organizations reach buyers.
Real-time engagement is about reacting instantly to what’s happening in the market, following up on opportunities in seconds, and inserting your company into stories being reported by mainstream media.
While marketing is the provision of content to many potential customers, sales and service are now about the provision of content to buyers one at a time based on their needs.
Just as online content is the primary driver for successful marketing and public relations, online content is quickly becoming a dominant driver for sales and service as well.
An authentic encounter with a representative from a company in a sales or service humanizes an organization after decades of sameness.
The best businesses have an organization story that underlies everything they do.
Salespeople can’t hoard information like they used to, because it’s all available on the web. So, the smart ones have transformed themselves into a sort of information broker, serving up the perfect content to each buyer at the right time.
The Old World of Sales and Service
Prior to the web, the salesperson needed to be the expert.
Today, in a world in which buyers have the ability to do their own independent research, many customers are more educated than the salespeople they do business with.
The sales cycle has transformed into a buying process led by the customers.
Your salespeople should assume that they are the last place a buyer goes, not the first. They must assume that very little of their knowledge is proprietary. They need to facilitate the sale, not control the information.
We’re in a world now where sales and marketing coexist throughout the entire sales process.
People hate sales calls. Intrusive, interruption-based sales techniques frequently do much more harm than good.
Social media bolted onto traditional sales does not work so well. People hate to be sold, but in the old days they had no choice.
The New Rules of Sales and Service
- The New Rules of Sales and Service:
- Authentic storytelling sets the tone.
- Content is the link between companies and customers.
- Big data enables a more scientific approach to sales and service.
- Agile selling brings new business to your company. (When a buyer is ready to buy, the company must respond with lightning speed.
- Real-time engagement keeps customers happy.
Once there is an honest and inspiring story built into the very heart of an organization, the first step in successful selling is to understand buyers and segment them so that marketing and sales are aligned around customer needs and integrated into a seamless selling process.
In a world in which most sales processes are generic and each potential customer is sold to in the same way, understanding the individual buyer based on the content the buyer has viewed is a revolutionary concept.
In author’s thinking, there are three major periods in human communications:
- Up until the mid-1400s, illiteracy was the norm and life was difficult for nearly everyone. Knowledge was the domain of specialists, often the ruling elite or the church.
- Beginning 570 years ago, knowledge became cheap because it could be reproduced mechanically.
- In the past 20 years or so, information has become largely free and two-way.
More people have access to mobile phones than have access to toothbrushes. More people have access to mobile phones than have access to working toilets.
Author prefers the words rich data instead of big data. Rich data is a term and idea advocated by Nate Silver, a statistician and writer who analyzes in-game baseball activity and elections.
Large companies use big data to generate revenue, either by being more efficient at what they already do or by implementing new sales and marketing strategies that would have been impossible otherwise.
Big data-based sales and service strategies rely on crunching huge data sets that no human with a spreadsheet could ever manage. It’s the future of real-time sales and service that’s happening today in some forward-looking companies.
Your Story
Critical to an understanding of story is how customers tell themselves the stories that define them (their worldview) and how these relate to the products and services they use.
As storytellers, companies need to consider customers’ existing worldview as they work on the ways they communicate to the market.
Once your CEO has set the tone for your organizational story and aligned it with the worldview of your buyers, there will be an opportunity for writing (and telling) stories to your marketplace.
A powerful story is an essential component of the new rules of selling.
Integrating Marketing and Sales with Buyer Personas
In the new digital era, the great divide between sales and marketing is rapidly disappearing. Skills and responsibilities that were once clearly defined are now making a transition to allow for more agile and creative interaction.
The salesperson, as the expert on the customer, takes what the marketing department creates and then personalizes it for each buyer or existing customer and passes it on in whatever method is best.
Buyer’s personas are the representative groups of people who buy your products and services.
The way most entrepreneurs, salespeople, marketers, and product managers operate is by making stuff up. In these making-stuff-up sessions, everyone in the room works for the company, and therefore there is no representation of the voices of people who will actually buy the products and services. Because everyone does it this way, isn’t the right way.
Your customers aren’t looking to satisfy your ego, and they don’t really care what you think about the stuff you sell. Your buyers want to solve their problems.
Buyer’s personas, the distinct demographic grouping of your potential customers, are critically important for successful marketing that leads to sales success.
One way to research buyer personas in real time is to monitor the blogs, forums, chat rooms, and social networking sites that buyers frequent.
Your job is to identify the different buyer personas and then research each one.
Taking the time to segment buyers and then listen to them discuss their problems can transform the effectiveness of your efforts.
The best way to learn about buyers and develop buyer persona profiles is to interview people one-on-one and in their own environment. Start with open-ended questions of a general nature. Another line of questioning should center on problems your company’s services are designed to address.
Buyer personas also make it much easier to market your products. This approach is utterly different from what most organizations do. Either they fail to segment the market, and instead create nonspecific marketing for everyone, or they create approaches to segments based on their own product-centric view of the world.
Adele Revella, founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute, cites five specific buying insights that align the teams around the buyers and positively impact those buyer’s decision. Marketers should be able to tell the salespeople:
- Which buyers want to meet with the company’s reps and who will be annoyed by the request.
- Which parts of the solution or company story will have the most favorable impact on buyers, which parts are irrelevant and which objections will need to be overcomed.
- What the buyers are saying about the pros and cons of doing business with each of the competitors.
- How and when different roles within the buyer’s organization will become involved in the decision.
- How the marketing team is providing backup for all of the aforementioned.
Marketing needs to be the buyer expert, not just the product expert.
Buyers won’t open up when the salesperson is present.
It’s time to create a buyer persona profile. This one-pager document will be your guide to creating real-time marketing and public relations programs to engage that particular buyer.
Understanding buyers is essential to great marketing.
A customer journey map, which can be used as a follow-on to buyer persona research, details a representative customer’s experience and includes company interactions from initial contact through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship. It can include virtual as well as human interactions.
When everybody else is just making stuff up in their comfortable offices, a research-based approach to buyer personas and journey mapping delivers a decisive competitive advantage.
Marketing generates the attention of the many people who make up a buyer persona, whereas sales communicate with one potential customer at a time, putting the buying process into context.
The Sales Cycle Is Now the Buying Cycle
Creating appropriate content to develop a lasting relationship over a long buying cycle is possible only when an organization has a compelling story to tell, deeply understands its buyer personas, and has considered the many aspects of the buying process in detail. It’s no longer a selling process. The buyer is in charge.
“Companies need to be educating salespeople about the buying process, making them understand the buyer’s journey, and educating the sales force about what things work to help move the consumer through their buying process,” says Jill Rowley, formerly in charge of Social Selling Evangelism and Enablement at Oracle. “Modern sales professionals aren’t actually sellers. They are businesspeople who provide insight that helps influence what people buy.”
She insisted that for every piece of Oracle content being sent by a salesperson via social medio, four pieces of content from outside sources should be sent. “Social isn’t a shortcut,” she says. “They are just new channels – new ways to find your buyers, listen and relay, engage and amplify. You are still building relationship, and relationship take time. If you show up at the front door for your first date naked, you’re not going to get very far.
Educate and inform instead of interrupt and sell. Although it sounds counterintuitive, your sell more when you stop selling.
Effective organizations take website visitors’ buying cycles into account when delivering content and organizing it on the site.
Don’t push product. Teach people something. Share your expertise.
It is essential that your salespeople understand that buyers go through the buying process independently of the salespeople’s involvement.
After your marketers have delivered compelling information to demonstrate expertise in the market category and provided knowledge about solving buyer’s problems, you want buyers to express interest. The goal of the middle stage of the buying process is to have people “raise their hand” somehow. This is not the time to sell. You’ve still got to move them through the buying process a bit more.
“Salespeople get invited into conversations much later these days because of online content,” says Neil Fletcher, product sales manager in the United Kingdom for Siemens Metals Technologies.
Tremendous success comes when great online content and an educated and interested buyer meet a skillful salesperson who understands the new realities of the buying process.
Once the deal is closed, there are two more steps. You must continue the online dialogue with your new customer. You should also provide ample opportunities for customers to give you feedback on how to make the products (and sales process) better.
When the right information hits, we want people to contact us in the way that’s most convenient.
The next time you have to design a sales strategy, think about how you would approach it if you were trying to date the buyer instead of sell to them.
Author suggests the first offer be totally free, such as an e-book or white paper. Second incentive can require a registration.
True leaders forget about the competition.
Do we need salespeople? Atlassian has no salespeople and they use only a self-service model to sell is product. But they still have a lot of people who help clients.
Agile, Real-Time Social Sales
The concept of instant engagement with buyers is an important way to close more sales.
Roberge describes the best salespeople as participating in a kind of doctor-patient relationship. The best salespeople out there have the business acumen to be able to have that conversation with a buyer at a company, and have required intelligence to be able to tell a slightly different story on every single sales call – a story that’s precisely attuned to that buyer.
When buyers express interest, they expect contact right away. Now. Not tomorrow. Not this afternoon. Now!
When you build to a higher volume of leads, you will need to systematize the response. It is best to use an algorithm when dealing with high-volume response because the clock is ticking, but implement this only with constant human monitoring, and quickly adjust and make changes as required.
Once you’ve got a system in place to manage your inbound leads and respond to them in real time, you’ll need to define the buyer’s needs within its context.
The cold-calling approach doesn’t work with a buyer who has done his research. Agile sales means engaging the marketplace at precisely the right time.
Today’s online tools can notify you instantly when something is said about your industry or marketplace.
Twitter is a great way to stay on top of breaking news, as many media outlets now use the service to drive traffic to fresh content as it appears.
For salespeople, live streaming opens up the possibility of sharing all kinds of information that can serve as a way to reach potential customers.
Real-time sales and marketing present amazing opportunities. But just like bond trading, real-time, agile sales require a combination of both people and technology to be successful.
The real-time mind-set recognizes the importance of speed. It is an attitude to business – and to life – that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right.
IBM’s code is called Social Computing Guidelines.
The idea of predictive analytics is a very powerful one. The companies doing the best work with predictive sales analysis understand it requires both technology and human interaction. People often ask author if a computer is smarter than a person. The answer is no. They’re just faster.
CRM as it exists today wasn’t designed and built for a world in which the buyer is in charge. CRM platforms were built in an era when sellers controlled both information dissemination and the selling process. The problem with CRM systems is they don’t work well when buyers are in charge.
Sales force automation is in trouble according to Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index. People installed the technology prematurely. An automation tool is meant to automate a process, but if you don’t have a process, you make a chaos.
CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara believes that sales software should be about how a salesperson can participate in a buyer’s journey by telling buyers things they don’t know.
It is no longer a sales funnel, or even a circle. It’s a pretzel in which you have no idea where the journey starts and stops.
A sales person’s personal brand plus their network equals their professional net worth.
HubSpot co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan thinks that sales need to lean into change and embrace it. He says that buying signals are essential for sales-people to know about, yet they aren’t part of typical CRM implementation today.
The New Service Imperative
Great service means more repeat sales and happy customers sharing their experience, which results in faster growth for your company.
Most organizations have reactive customer service. Within an organization, customer service is usually an afterthought. Worse, it’s not uncommon that customer service is considered a cost center, and executives are rewarded for reducing expenses instead of keeping customers happy. Customer service isn’t a department, it’s a state of mind. Without employees who care, great service won’t happen.
In the new world of web and mobile content delivery, the best organizations communicate with customers in any way they prefer.
Focusing a great deal of attention on buyers during the buying process and then relegating those same buyers to poor post sale service means customers are far more likely to leave.
Truly excellent customer support and complaint resolution is best handled in the medium the customer prefers, be it Twitter, Facebook, email or the good old telephone.
If companies insist on conducting a survey, it must be real, meaningful research – not just some inane measure of an aspect of the business that results in an internal report that nobody reads, let alone acts upon.
Guy Letts founder of CustomerSure is saying that what people teach about customers is wrong. Listen, filter, act doesn’t work. He advocates the model of listen, act, filter. First react and do what you can and then look for patterns and trends and insights about how should company develop. First step is to make sure that you’re ready to respond to customer issues in real time. If not, don’t do the survey.
Agile, Real-Time Social Service
There’s no doubt we’re living in a real-time world. Most companies are reluctant to embrace this change. Big business is designed to move forward according to plan, at a measured and deliberate pace.
Today consumers set the pace. Developing a real-time mind-set requires sustained effort: encouraging people to take the initiative, celebrating their success when they go out on a real-time limb, and cutting them slack when they try and fail. None of this is easy.
There are certainly similarities in the skills and experience required to do telephone-based customer service and for interacting with customers on social media. However, in comparison, the biggest difference is the public nature of conversations on social networks.
When you communicate with customers in an agile and human way, you build a relationship with people much like you would if you met them in person. There’s no secret to building great customer service. The answer is to be human.
Humanize in order to delight your customer.
The way you communicate with customers is meant to build a relationship with them. You need to understand your audience and use the words and phrases that they use.
The proactive approach to customer service – anticipating needs and being available around the clock, means people are more likely to use your business next time.
Cliff Pollan, CEO of Postwire is saying that the easiest dollar is always to save the customer you have. The second easiest is to sell more to the customers you currently have. And the most difficult is getting new customers.
The more people you have in an organization, the tougher it is to communicate in real time. The challenge is to develop a new balance, that empowers employee initiative but offers real-time guidance when it’s needed – like a hotline to the higher authority.
The Social You
When news break about a subject that you know intimately, you have an amazing opportunity to seize the moment in real time and share a knowledge with the world.
If you are a sales representative, you need to be social. To make the new rules of sales and service part of your world, you must change your mind-set. You will need to understand customers, you will need to create a content, you will need to be aware of what is going on in the real-time news and on social networks.
What is the return of investment ROI of social network.
Most people, especially those new to a social network, don’t share and engage enough. They’re too busy selling. I’d suggest you should be doing 85 percent sharing and engaging, 10 percent publishing original content and only 5 percent or less about what you are trying to promote.
While each social network is different, the concepts of personal branding are similar and can be carried over from one network to another.
The secret to building a following on social network is that there is no secret. You must participate.
Your Social Company
Matt Petitjean, vice president of marketing at ADP, Inc., says there are four important components to the social selling process. He articulates his strategy throughout the organization using this four-part model: tools, communications, training and measurement.
ADP also uses a social media database that includes a large collection of content ready to be used by its salespeople.
With the new approaches of consultative selling, agile sales, and real-time engagement sales managers need to look for a new set of skills when hiring salespeople.
A salesperson can build trust from having a great LinkedIn profile, asking smart questions, making observations about the business, or giving someone a free information tip.
Managers need to build time into people’s daily routines to allow them to participate in social media and cultivate their personal brands online. At HubSpot, training on social media is an important aspect of sales-people’s introduction to the company.
In a world where most sales processes are generic and each potential customer is sold to in the same way, the concept of understanding each individual buyer based on what content they have already consumed is revolutionary. It’s a fundamental theme of the new rules of sales and service.
IBM definition of social selling is the ability to build your social graph and be connected socially as a seller – to attract, engage and connect.
