The New Rules of Sales and Service

How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business

David Meerman Scott

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119272441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

The essential roadmap for the new realities of selling when buyers are in charge

Sales and service are being radically redefined by the biggest communications revolution in human history. Today buyers are in charge! There is no more 'selling'—there is only buying. When potential customers have near perfect information on the web, it means salespeople must transform from authority to consultant, product narratives must tell a story, and businesses must be agile enough to respond before opportunity is lost.

The New Rules of Sales and Service demystifies the new digital commercial landscape and shows you how to stay ahead of the pack. Companies large and small are revolutionizing the way business gets done, and this book takes you inside the new methods and strategies that are critical to success in the modern market. Real-world examples illustrate the new marketplace in action, and demonstrate the brilliant utility of taking a new look at your customer and your business. This new edition has been updated to reflect the current reality of this rapidly-evolving sphere, with fresh strategies, new tools, and new stories. Whether you're an independent contractor, a multi-national corporation, a start-up, or a nonprofit, this book is your essential guide to navigating the new digital marketplace.

David Meerman Scott provides up-to-the-minute analysis of the current state of the digital commercial landscape, plus expert guidance toward the concepts, strategies, and tools that every business needs now.

Among the topics covered in detail:

• Why the old rules of sales and service no longer work in an always-on world
• The new sales cycle and how informative Web content drives the buying process
• Providing agile, real-time sales and service 24/7 without letting it rule your life
• The importance of defining and understanding the buyer personas
• How agile customer service retains existing clients and expands new business
• Why content-rich websites motivate interest, establish authority, and drive sales
• How social media is transforming the role of salesperson into valued consultant

Because buyers are better informed, and come armed with more choices and opportunities than ever before, everything about sales has changed. Salespeople must adapt because the digital economy has turned the old model on its head, and those who don't keep up will be left behind. The New Rules of Sales and Service is required reading for anyone wanting to stay ahead of the game and grow business now.

1
The Old World of Sales and Service

“I'm fed up, and I won't tolerate this anymore!”

I've heard many variations on this theme in recent years.

We're fed up with unwanted phone calls interrupting us at home and at work. We hate wading through hundreds of unsolicited emails. We've had it with intrusive social media messages. We're tired of poor service from companies that don't treat us with respect or that send us into a phone mail maze that wastes minutes of our time and never connects us with a living person.

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We wonder why there is so little humanity when we interact with the organizations and businesses we patronize.

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The Old Sales Model: “Dialing for Dollars”

My first sales job required me to make cold calls to bond traders and convince them to buy economic consulting services. We had lists of names and numbers to contact that came from directories of people who worked in banks, securities companies, savings and loan associations, fund management firms, and government agencies.

My sales colleagues and I would psych ourselves into the right frame of mind each morning by drinking a few cups of coffee, maybe telling each other a few off-color jokes (common in the 1980s testosterone-fueled Wall Street markets portrayed in The Wolf of Wall Street book and film), and discussing the latest stories in the Wall Street Journal. On a typical day we might set a goal to contact every person overseeing trading at all the savings and loan associations headquartered in Arizona.

It was brutal work. Most people were unaware of our firm. And my call was but one of the many sales intrusions each prospect would receive during a business day.

We hated cold calling—“dialing for dollars.”

But the technique was necessary because in the years prior to the World Wide Web there were few other ways a potential client might learn about our company.

Unfortunately, many organizations are still operating as if it were 1986, and they continue to focus massive investments on interrupting people with an army of salespeople making cold calls.

Companies like the one I worked for in the 1980s relied on direct sales efforts that required lots of money. The sales commissions were high. (A big reason I stuck with my sales job even though I hated it was that I made good money for someone who was in his early twenties.)

Indeed, many large organizations have complex and expensive sales training programs with expensive in-house and external experts focused on educating the sales staff in the latest techniques. Complex enterprise software packages are implemented so salespeople can micromanage each sales encounter.

The Voice of Authority: When the Salesperson Was the Expert

Prior to the web, the salesperson needed to be the expert. The buyer didn't have the ability to go online and conduct independent research; an important aspect of the sales process was the buyer's education by the seller.

Prior to launching her own business as a digital consultant and storyteller, Joanne Tombrakos enjoyed a corporate career in sales. She worked 25 years at media companies selling radio advertising and later advertising to cable television networks. She worked at smaller companies like Beasley Broadcast Group and large operators including Time Warner Cable. “When I started selling and for many years after, I was the expert,” she says. “I would go to a client and I could tell them everything they wanted to know about radio and television. But when you are selling one medium, you have to know all the other competing media. You need to know print, and when the Internet came into play we had to know that.”

Today, in a world in which buyers have the ability to do their own independent research, many customers are more educated than the salespeople they do business with. However, many companies and the salespeople they employ have not adjusted their strategy accordingly. They still rely on cold calls, and they still approach the sales process as if they have the informational upper hand in the relationship.

“That's the biggest shift for salespeople,” says Tombrakos. “They're no longer the expert. Today the client knows as much, if not more. The salesperson has to be better prepared. Most salespeople are not using visual tools to help them. Many aren't even doing something as simple as pointing people to the web. I have a lot of friends who are still working in television ad sales, and they continue to dig in their heels. I think many salespeople are blind.”

While the sales cycle has transformed into a buying process led by the customers, Tombrakos says that there are many simple things a salesperson can do to remain an expert in the new world of digital information. “When I get a new client, I start following them on Twitter. Salespeople seldom take advantage of opportunities like this, as they are still terrified of the digital world. There are so many new ways that salespeople could use digital tools to establish themselves as an expert. It could be something as simple as sharing information on LinkedIn. If they share information with a client, they are likely to be perceived as an expert in a particular area. They should be the one who informs their customers, ‘Hey, I just read this great new book with some fantastic ideas.’ They should be making new connections and establishing their credibility, but most companies are not training their people on how to use digital communications. They hear ‘social,’ and they think it's watercooler chitchat and nothing more.”

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Fortunately, today we no longer have to rely on the cold call, because buyers are looking for what we have to offer. And they know what they want.

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The Salesperson Expert versus the Web-Educated Buyer

To illustrate the point about how salespeople used to hold the power position when they were keepers of information, think about the process of buying a car in 1995. You'd be exposed to television and magazine ads. Perhaps you'd purchase a buyers' guide such as Consumer Reports. You could ask friends and coworkers for advice. But to get detailed information on models, options, and pricing required a dreaded visit to the dealership to talk to the salesperson, who was smugly aware he had all the information power.

Today, how do you buy a car? Do you blindly go to visit the dealership to ask the salesperson? Or do you spend hours on the web learning as much as you can and only visit the dealer when you are ready to buy and already know everything you need to get a good deal?

Remarkably, nearly all companies are still operating in a world as if the salesperson is the king of the information kingdom. Companies insist on driving all online interactions to a salesperson.

One manifestation of this behavior is the insistence by most companies that buyers supply personal details—particularly an email address—before they can get information such as a white paper. When I question marketers about this practice, they tell me that they need sales leads and that salespeople follow up on the information requests.

The idea that you shouldn't give information for free predates the web. Requiring an email registration is simply applying what we did in the past to the new realities. This is far less effective than making information freely available to be downloaded and shared. And it risks losing potential customers who are wary of providing their email address out of fear that it will be recycled and sold to data brokers and spammers.

Are you managing your sales and marketing process using 1995 calculus? Do you assume that salespeople are the fonts of all knowledge and all information flows through them? If so, I think you are less successful than you could be.

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Your salespeople should assume that they are the last place a buyer goes, not the first. They must assume that very little of their knowledge is proprietary. They need to facilitate the sale, not control the information.

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Think back to buying a car. How do you want the dealer's staff to interact with you when you walk in? Do you want a confrontational relationship where they feel they have the information power? Or do you want the dealer to assume you have already done your research and are ready to close a deal?

It's not just telephone sales and in-store persuasion where companies need to refocus. Consider sales dysfunction at its worst: the business-to-business (B2B) trade show demonstration.

For some markets, the trade show demo is very important. While I was in high school and during the summers of my college years, I worked in a cheese shop. Once a year, I went ...