Sales and Sales Management Blog

Would You Hire an Administrative Assistant Who Can’t Use Word?
by Nigel Edelshain

Would you hire an administrative assistant who can NOT use Word – or a computer?

No chance, right? You’d think that was crazy most likely. But cast you mind back a decade, or two, and that was not a stretch. Remember when people sent inter-office memos typed on paper with a typewriter? A what? A typewriter.

Guess what? I believe sales people who cannot use social media and Web 2.0 tools in ten years from now will be of the same value as administrative assistants who can’t use Word today. Am I bonkers? Place your bets. Mine is placed.

If you’re reading this and you are a sales person, sales manager or CEO and you’re not informed about Sales 2.0 and how social media can be used in the sales process, get informed. If you don’t, I see your competition eating your lunch – and after your lunch your pipeline.

Sales 2.0 tools will be critical tools for sales people. Why? Because these tools make the inherently inefficient sales process that most companies use more efficient. They are game changers. Way beyond the impact of CRM.

How Broken is Cold Calling?

Let me talk to you about prospecting. Most companies fill their pipeline largely on cold calling and often on the worst kind of cold calling, which I call “smile and dial”. “Smile and dial” is all about volume.  Reps don’t prepare they just dial. Problem is we are all getting more and more screened – harder to reach.

It takes at least 10 dials to even speak to a prospect (I’ve heard of 20 plus dials in certain markets).  Then in the best case 1 in 10 people who connect to our “smile and dialers” will take a meeting (or whatever the next step is in our sales process). 

So here we are “smiling and dialing” 100, 200, 300 or 400 times to get one appointment.  Ouch! My dialing finger is hurting.

So this is state-of-the-art for sales is it?

What kind of production line is state-of-the-art where 399 widgets are defective and only 1 gets through? TQM anyone?

Eight Times More Effective

Good news. Great news actually. As social media and other smart Web 2.0 tools are being rolled out it turns out these tools can help address this lousy prospecting situation. Used correctly these tools can change the odds of getting that meeting and advancing the sales process by an order of magnitude (roughly EIGHT times on average in our testing so far – actually that’s conservative but if I say more you’ll certainly NOT believe me).

How come? That’s unbelievable isn’t it? Well on closer inspection not really.

What’s happened is our ability to get through to buyers has been degrading for several years, certainly post-Google. Buyers started placing less-and-less value on meeting with sales people who would just bring them product updates when they could get all that information online by typing just a few keywords into Google.

It took until about 3 years ago for tools to appear that were really designed to help sales people sell (and for us consultants to figure out how to use some of the social media already out there to help sales people sell). Given that sales people were at such a disadvantage by that time, it’s not that surprising that finally arming them with useful tools is making a big difference.

Ask Paul about Referral Selling

Consider just one key factor. The “big daddy” of all factors that dictates whether you will get into a buyer’s office: relationship. We humans have not changed there. We want to meet with people we know, like and trust. That’s what relationships do for us. And we’re OK if there’s a referral involved. If you tell me “Joe” is OK, then I’ll probably meet with “Joe”.

Guess what? There’s a fellow called Paul McCord who’s an expert on this is. It’s called referral selling.

Yes it is referral selling but it’s time to figure out how to do referral selling at Internet speed. The social networks out there allow you to do this kind of referral selling much (much) faster than you can by meeting with people. The tools expose the “social graph”. They show you who knows who. They set up relationship selling and allow you to start it from your desk.

Ask Paul about referral selling. Referral selling has always been an order of magnitude more effective than cold calling.  But now there are tools to help you do that much faster and more efficiently. Using these tools is called Sales 2.0.

What’s that on the Horizon?

The tide is changing and that wave coming in is called Sales 2.0. It may look small to you way out there on your horizon but its traveling fast now. You may want to get out there and meet it before it breaks on your shore. It could just be a Tsunami in the way we sell.

Nigel Edelshain is CEO of Sales 2.0 LLC. Companies that work with Sales 2.0 improve their sales results 2-3 times. They achieve these results by combining the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media with well-though-out sales processes.  Nigel has sold millions of dollars of IT solutions to major Fortune 500 firms. He was head of sales for the financial services vertical for Starpoint Solutions. While at Starpoint, he sold e-business projects to senior business and technology executives in Wall Street. Prior to Starpoint Nigel worked for Platinum Technology (now CA) selling IT professional services. Nigel graduated from Wharton’s MBA program in 1993 and has an undergraduate degree in Microelectronics from Edinburgh University.

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