40 may be the new 30, and blue may be the new black, but what’s hot and what’s not when it comes to selling in 2010? I reached out to my sales network across North America and asked this question. The responses were very enlightening, and they are pasted, verbatim, below.
The key themes were:
- Hard selling and cold calling are “out”. It’s now about conversations, value, facilitation and relationships.
- Leveraging social media for lead generation and networking is “in”.
- Leveraging mobile and cloud technology is “in”.
Please add your “what’s hot” and “what’s not” in the comments section!
| What’s In | What’s Out |
|---|---|
| You (the salesperson) must bring more value to clients than your company website does. | Ignoring the time/effort needed to build trust with prospects first. (Trust is at an all time corporate low these days.)
Mark McCarthy, Director Training, Deluxe |
| Generating inbound leads from Google and social media. | Cold calling and trade shows.
Mark Roberge, VP Sales, HubSpot |
| Conversations
Inbound Web Tools in the Cloud |
Pitches
Outbound Web Tools on your hard drive Miles Austin, FillTheFunnel.com |
| Product Rationalization – Strategically selling profitable business. | Product Proliferation – Taking an order for anything.
Terry Burton, Center for Excellence |
| Facilitating the buying process with well informed prospects instead of “true selling”. | Smile and Dial. Being enthusiastic at the start of a cold call. Your prospects know you’re selling! There’s a time for enthusiasm but it’s not at hello!
Sean McPheat, Director, MTD Training |
| Using social networks to find new hires, prospect new business, and gain insight from customer feedback.
How much info you can capture in real time. Using your mobile device to go online. |
Companies blocking social networking sites like Facebook.
What you thought you knew. Using your laptop to go online. Lisa Gschwandtner, SellingPower.com |
| Optimizing all social media digital assets for universal search results. | Not measuring your social media ROI and its ability to drive sales.
Michael Ryan, VP New Biz, Overdrive Interactive |
| Utilizing a well balanced, well thought out “sales mix” inclusive of phone, email, snail mail, creative approaches, networking, referrals, social media etc.
Moving your online relationships to real time by actually doing something with those followers, friends and connections. |
Utilizing the phone as a stand alone new account acquisition strategy. And while we’re at it, allowing your thinking to go down the road of choosing between the phone and other approaches. It shouldn’t be an either or decision when they can all work brilliantly together!Getting caught up in a competitive “my network” is bigger than yours and keeping your focus on the “quantity” within your network.
Paul Castain, VP Sales Development, CGX |
| Using phone surveys to qualify prospects and score leads. | Trying to control the conversation with one-sided statements.
Kathy Tito, CallCenterServices.com |
| Adding value, building a relationship, having a 360 view of your customer. | The hard close, selling on price, talking down your competition.
Michele Balcom, Sales Mgr, Pease & Curren |
| Permission marketing.Helping buyers self qualify themselves. | Cold calling.The “hard” close.
Philippe Le Baron, President, LB4G |
I would like to drill down a bit and mention that specifically Linkedin is (re)gaining momentum and I have leveraged it as a prospect tool as well as a Xref: when a cold call is necessary and I get a name / history snapshot / convo starter — a bit of a faux pas for some — they need to lighten up. I received a response from somebody demanding to know how we are connected before the invite was accepted. She declined even though we had 7 shared contacts.
Fremont[Click to quote this in your comment]
Fremont… Thanks for your comment. I’d like to add that some of the new sales 2.0 tools , like SalesView from InsideView, can feed LinkedIn connection data right into your CRM, along with Twitter buzz, news source information and more. Instead of manual lookup, the process can be automated.
- Marci Reynolds
Marci Reynolds[Click to quote this in your comment]
What’s In.
Sales and Marketing Alignment. Appreciation and a common use of language
What’s Out
Expecting technology to be the silver bullet in Alignment.
Working in silos and playing the blame game.
Rod Sloane[Click to quote this in your comment]
Rod,
Great addition to the list! I attended a conference last week and one of the speakers discussed how sales and marketing roles are blending and he introduced a new title- “smarketing”.
Please visit the Sales Ops blog again!
Best,
Marci Reynolds
Marci Reynolds[Click to quote this in your comment]
Great blog.
What’s in – Trusted advisor
What’s out – Corporate sales pitch
Today, the purchaser is seldom an impulse buyer. They research the product (on line), seek references from trusted advisors and only then do they engage the vendor. The seller needs to recognise that the selling process from this starting point is very different – it is more about building trust and integrityand less about price and features.
Rob[Click to quote this in your comment]
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