The Great Lies of Sales & Marketing

“Pick up the phone and bang out more calls today than you did yesterday.”

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If you can still make money banging out calls then knock yourself out. But in my 14+ years of selling I am seeing this form of client development really diminish as an effective use of a sales person’s time.

And if the return on your time investment is diminishing, the answer is NOT to spend more time doing it. That’s just dumb. Besides, unsolicited phone calls performed by product-pushing, commission-hungry sales people is just plain annoying!

Today, when you hear a “rah-rah” guy on stage getting you pumped up to pound out phone calls, get thick skin, ignore rejection, “they’re not saying no to you but to your offering,” picture this: your son’s 7th grade flag football team lining up against the Dallas Cowboys with a great attitude and screaming as they plunge into the pile of 300 pound men.

A handful of little ones will survive by quick-footed, focused, intelligent luck but the odds aren’t in their favor. Even if they do survive is that the goal? To survive? Or is the goal to prosper?

If your thick skin and positive attitude when dialing for dollars are your only weapons in sales you’re running into a painful game that will end ugly. And as this next decade unfolds, the problem’s going to get worse, not better.

Look at it this way: 30 years ago factory workers began facing competition from machines and cheap foreign labor. The worker cost $22 per hour but the robot only cost $1.75 per hour but could work 24 hours a day, didn’t take breaks, have babies, hurt its back or steal toilet paper from the men’s room.

Are you willing to work for $1.75 per hour?

Lots of you in sales are doing just that when you add up all of the time you spend preparing and following up and cold calling and chasing leads and preparing proposals and sending literature and hoping and praying your ship comes in.

Websites and Marketing Automation and Salesforce Automation and drip campaigns are displacing old school sales people. (When was the last time an Encylopedia Brittanica sales person came to your door? They were quite common just 40 years ago. How can they compete with Amazon or Borders or Barnes & Noble?)

The answer, of course, is they can’t. That’s why they are a thing of the past. My kids will never meet a door to door encyclopedia sales person because they can’t compete and provide their customers with the level of service or selection we’ve come to demand.

A person selling books door to door is not much different from an insurance or telecommunications or computer sales man today.

But there’s HOPE: IF you carve out a niche (I’ll cover that in later installments) and IF you use automated tools like your website and Infusionsoft and direct mail, you CAN become more efficient, more competitive and more profitable, which means you will win.

As an added bonus you won’t pester and annoy your prospect base in the process and it’s amazing how motivated you’ll become!

I’ll say it again for you hard-headed types: You MUST carve out a niche, and you MUST use communication tools to deliver relevant content in a timely manner with the cunning and planning of a fox.

Most of your competitors will not do this. Most websites not only have no particular purpose in mind, most are just static brochure sites that just sit there and inform – barely – those unfortunate enough to stumble upon them. Most people don’t have a clue how to create a direct mail piece that will make the phone ring. (That’s why they think direct mail doesn’t work.)

BOTTOM LINE:

1) You MUST have automated marketing tools that do the grunt work for you.

2) You must adjust, modify, tweak, measure and test those tools until they’re effective.

There is no silver bullet. A lot of what you try won’t work the first time.

But the good news is, once it works, it will usually work for YEARS.

That’s why time spent on marketing is absolutely the best time investment you can make – IF you’re educated about what truly works and what doesn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll another big Lie in the realm of Sales and Marketing:

“You’re not giving enough presentations!”