Good-Bye to the “Hyphenated-Sale”
It’s time for sales to be sales again! I am tired of the “hyphenated-sale”, time for that go.
All this “marking”, has small to do with selling, as in selling to customers, and more to do with marketing and packaging, as in selling to you and your VP of sales.
Don’t worry I get it, at my age I have seen Tied be “whiter than white”, liquefied, concentrated, made into pucks, environmentally friendly, and more; but none of that changes the fact that it is soap you place in a machine to get dirt off cloth, that’s it!
Same with sales, you can call it Sales 2.0, Social Selling, or “new wave sell” (no really, saw it). The reality is all these things are marks and marketing devices to sell you tools to do something that has been honestly consistent since the dawn of man. While these tools do simplify the mechanics, “selling” for the most part still comes down to the sales person, and what they do with the tools provided, not so much the tools.
There are brilliant sales people who do not use any of the “new” tools. I know some veterans who are selling multi-million dollar solutions to the most demanding clients, and they do it “the way they did” back in the 1980′s. At the same time I know reps who have immersed themselves in the latest tools and methodologies, yet have not delivered numbers, but man do they look excellent in the process. The fact is that to succeed in sales you need to breed demand and interest, Engage with the potential buyer, go through a Discovery process, demonstrate impact, Gain commitment, and finally Do. We can mark and package uncommon ways, but it will not change the fact that selling.
The adoption of technology has always been the hallmark of a better sales person, sales professionals have always been ahead of schedule adopters of technology. I remember the ahead of schedule BlackBerrys, before they even had voice capabilities, just e-mail, it was the sales people who jumped on that ahead of schedule. Question, should we refer to those days as Sales 1.0? If so, then was my Palm Pilot from US Robotics, one I bought in 1996 Sales 0.0?
I remember when the internet came a long and we started by a “GUI” to research prospects, remember Mosaic. Question, would that have been the era of Sales -1.0?
What about the cell phone, how quick were sales people all over that, what impact did that have on their selling or approach, probably no more or no less than the current tools in context. Question, when I picked up my first cell phone in 1991, was I practicing Sales -2.0. If so, then what would we call the arrival of the first phones, Sales -5.0?
Looking at it from the buyers’ side, similar realities apply. Yes, there is in fact more and better information available to potential buyers. But, to refer to Uncle Frank: “Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not wisdom; Wisdom is not truth“. Many choice makers complain of about the volume of information they have to sift through and still have small more than structured data and unqualified opinions, and man, is there a lot of opinion out there, much of it conflicting. They point out that they still rely on knowledgeable sales people to help the sort through the noise. That trusted advisor role is still the domain of a professional sales rep, not their tools. The professional sales rep has the opportunity to be a conduit to best practices and processes, the tools they use to become and convey that to qualified buyers is really a distant second or fourth on the road to sales success.
So let’s stop spending time and effort “Hyphenating the sale”, and focus on selling better vis-à-vis the market’s requirements and our offerings ability to meet those requirements, and your ability as a sales professional to communicate it; not vis-à-vis the latest application someone is “selling you”. Look at this way, you can read a book in hard cover, listen to it on your MP3 player, read the paperback, or on a Kindle, the content is still the content, and no feature on Kindle will turn crap into literature, or take away from a classic. So no more Sales-X, lets just focus on selling well.