Ask what you can give your clients instead of asking what they can give you
Form and lead an industry group instead of mindlessly joining every one you find
Make education-rich sales pitches to rooms packed with
engaged potential clients instead of cold-calling prospects
Get yourself invited to speak in front of audiences instead ofs imply attending events
Earn the trust to be introduced to referral prospects instead of given leads
Interview industry luminaries instead of simply downloading their podcasts
Build a strategic-partner network instead of waiting aroundt o be asked to partner
Write for respected industry publications instead of just putting them in your RSS reader
Listening Is the New Prospecting
While it has become much more difficult to gain access to prospects via phone
and e-mail, it’s actually become much easier to understand the individual needs
of a prospect, due in large part to social media.
Salespeople need to create their own socially driven listening stations, add
social profiles to their customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and stay
on top of what customers and competitors are doing.
When you listen actively instead of prospecting, you’ll find that potential and
existing customers will voluntarily—and publicly—scatter sales clues.
Educating Is the New Presenting
Formerly, salespeople were encouraged to perfect their pitch. Pitching was the
primary sales mechanism, and many sales training courses still teach it. But in
reality, over time the pitch became little more than an effective manipulation
strategy, full of proven psychological principles and gimmicks.
Today’s salesperson must be ready to teach, publish, and demonstrate his or
her expertise. You should be ready to answer questions via blog posts, engage in
social media conversations, and conduct online and offline seminars as a way of
educating prospects.
It is very hard for salespeople to turn the pitch off once they are used to
relying on it 24/7, but the ones who do are reaping the benefits.
Insight Is the New Information Sharing
Prospects have access to the best information in the world at the mere click of a
button. They have access to everything we sales professionals share online, as
well as what our competitors, customers, and partners share about us and the
industry in general.
In collecting information, prospects can either become very smart or very
confused about what’s being sold. Today’s salesperson must act as a filter for the
mass of available information and provide insight, context, and guidance about
it. Your role is to help prospects understand the questions they need to consider,
Perceptive listening to a client :
What’s the one thing you love about what our company
does?
If you referred us to a friend, what would you say about us?
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your business right now?
What’s the one thing you love most about coming to work here?
If you referred our company to a friend, what would you say?
What’s the biggest challenge you have in meeting your goals right now?
In a cold January morning in 2007, a hidden video camera captured
thousands of commuters simply walking past violinist Joshua Bell as
he played some of the most complex music ever written, on an
extremely valuable Stradivarius violin. Most didn’t seem to notice the difference
between Bell’s virtuosity and the skill of an everyday subway musician.
Just days before, and then again after this experiment, Bell performed to sold-
out theaters filled with ticket holders willing to pay top dollar and ready to
deliver thunderous standing ovations.
In the context of the subway station, ordinary people did not recognize Bell’s
genius.
We don’t live in a vacuum. Every idea we have, song we hear, or sales pitch
we connect with is filtered through a number of elements, including our mood,
the environment, and our unique understanding of the world and our place in it.
All of these factors affect the value and importance we place on what we believe
in, what we deem worthy of our time, and what we buy.
In the same vein, while salespeople’s mastery, skill, or point of view may be
important and well thought-out, the context in which their ideas, introductions,
and pitches are delivered is equally—or sometimes more—important.
In many ways this book is about changing the context of how you, as a
salesperson, are received and perceived.
So let me ask you this: Are you ready to hone your virtuosity as a salesperson
and put it on display in the places where people willingly pay a premium to
engage such work or are you content to hang around in the subway hoping for the scraps of interested passersby?
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