There are two pains we see a lot of:
- Too many leads and can’t work with them
- Little or no leads
This is happening to industry after industry. The old rules have continually been eroding. I think everyone knows this, but fear and comfort keep everyone selling the old way. That is, until it doesn’t work anymore.
Some people fold up shop and consider it a good run. Others are seeking a new strategy for how to connect with buyers.
Often, the money opportunity has not changed. Quite the opposite is true. Most markets are growing with the enhanced distribution of social, search and mobile technologies. Learning how to tap into how people buy and augmenting a selling process with a buying process is the gap between those that are able to play in the new game.
If the pain is high in your industry, here are some things we suggest doing:
- Positioning. Assess how you are positioned in the mind of the buyer. Are you a salesperson or an expert? Expert takes a lot of work. A salesperson is someone we like to avoid.
- Attention. How are you attracting and growing attention? If your only strategy today is interruption, you will be tuned out.
- Systems. We don’t like inconvenience. We are used to doing business with world-class companies all the time. You are being compared to them. Why present your offering and method of doing business in a deficient way? Automate where you can. Make buying and servicing easy and convenient.
- Pipeline. Your pipeline has moved. It is not based on your sales conversation. It is based on what people are doing right now interacting with your value proposition, content, systems and process. You have to have systems to see this and track what is happening in your sales funnel. Pipeline management is in the cloud now.
- Referrals. It’s easy to find out your reputation now. It is a click away. It used to be inconvenient. Is it easy to learn about what people think? Are you embedded in the social media conversation so an outsider can perceive and grow trust?
It’s not easy to reinvent yourself, however, when the pain is high and you need to figure out how to sell again, consider the questions. If you are open, you will realize that noone is going to wave a magic wand to take you back a decade to have things the old ways. You have to move into the new way of selling and marketing yourself that connects.
It’s an inbound world today and your audience is waiting for you to show up.
What needs to change in your business?