Why the old selling paradigms will never work again.

It’s great isn’t it watching Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room or Wolf of Wall Street and the macho world of sales. Really brings it home to you what a tough business selling is.

Except that…it isn’t any more.

It seems to me that all sales gurus and even the vast majority of sales methodologies are predicated on the belief that “coffee is for closers” and that salespeople must be tenacious and aggressive. Just do one more dial, polish your “if I can just have 2 minutes of your time” scripts and "never EVER let a prospect go" are the cornerstones of driving salespeople to perform.

Once upon a time, this was true. Once upon a time the buyer was uninformed, they had no way of checking if your product was good and it was next to impossible to discover other players in the market. In short, this was a seller’s paradise.

Today though the buyer is knowledgable and informed and Google provides them with an infinite resource to plug any knowledge-gaps they might have.

But it seems that often sales hasn’t changed with the buyer.

The often-quoted CEB (now part of Gartner) research showing that there are an ever increasing number of people in the buying team (currently 10 or more) and the buyer is 2/3 of the way through their buying journey before the seller even knows they exist.

Yet often sellers haven’t changed. Well, they might have changed superficially. They might use email rather than the telephone and even InMail on LinkedIn but these are often just window dressing.

In 2021 what the buyer is looking for is a "guide" to take them through the purchasing minefield. They want someone who is knowledgeable and someone they feel they can trust and, perhaps even more crucially, someone that exudes this expertise and trustworthiness when they show the seller to their boss.

Salespeople need to create a persona that makes them appear like the sort of person the buyer wants to deal with (ie NOT a salesperson).

So, what exactly does this mean? Is the whole world of sales obsolete? How can salespeople be effective?

First, it means that the playing field has changed and consequently, sellers need to change too. It means that the old cornerstones of selling simply don’t work because the buyer has moved-on. Salespeople shouldn’t be scared of this though as it’s a huge opportunity and not one where you need to “teach an old dog new tricks” but one where the old dog has far more to offer in most cases than the young pup! Salespeople simply need to think about the skills they have developed and modernise how they use them - listening, rapport building, suggestion - these are vital to closing deals no matter what the environment.

Second, the world of sales is NOT obsolete. Cold calling is DEAD (whatever cold callers might tell you) but the telephone is very much alive and well. With the exception of a face to face meeting, telephone (and Zoom) is THE most effective way of building a relationship and the salesperson’s 20 years of skilled telephone use will be hugely beneficial to making them succeed. They will need to deploy those skills in a slightly different way, but the skill are a huge asset.

Also, a much overlooked salesperson’s superpower is their ability to navigate the politics and process of purchasing and that will never change.

What does need to change though is that an experienced seller needs to become a “modern seller” in order to maximise their potential.

Third, salespeople need to make themselves look credible. The ONLY people who like salespeople are salespeople. Buyers are, frankly, scared of Alec Baldwins and Al Pacinos. So salespeople need to make themselves look like they are an asset for the buyer to be engaging with - knowledgable, honest, helpful, generous all of those things that really good salespeople are (but often hide).

The best way to do this is to create an individual, compelling, friendly social profile. If the buyer looks at your profile (and they will) and all they can find is a load of information detailing how you extract the maximum revenue from your prospects what sort of effect is that likely to have!

Salespeople usually aren’t technical experts for the products and services that they sell but they invariably are experts and understanding how their products and services solve client issues so they should major on this.

The problem for sales as a profession is that the whole “just make one more call” mentality (whether that’s via telephone, email or InMail) simply isn’t effective or appropriate today and the fact that things had already changed should have been apparent at the beginning of lockdown.

Sales needs to change, it needs to modernise and think bout what is really going to work in the modern environment rather than harking back to old beliefs, old metrics and KPIs and old techniques.

If your pipeline is full and you’re going to smash your target then you don’t need to worry.

But if you think that “there will be green shorts next quarter” or “marketing’s latest campaign will give me some fresh leads” or “we have a new product launch coming along in a few weeks” means that everything will be okay then I suggest that you have a “Plan B” because plan A is going to fall very short of your expectations.

To find-out how to create a bright future with a full pipeline…just ask one of us!

Ot just go back to hitting the phones!