Author: Dave J.

More good stuff from Mike Smock about salespeople. He breaks them into three distinct styles:

• Entertainers tend to be outgoing, gregarious, friendly folks who are likable sorts and fun to be around.
• Collaborators tend to be nurturing, creative folks who dislike conflict, look for common ground and strive for win-win relationships.
• Competitors like to win. Selling is a conflict for them with a winner and loser.

Obviously, there is some cross-over. But, I think the big problem is when a salesperson tries to be something he isn’t. Or is in an organization or sells a product line that demands one style over the other.

When I deal with salespeople calling on me, I try to be very non-committal and pretend to be just a good listener (which I am). Positive answers are easy to give out…platitudes really. The salesman plays along real well because he wants a positive first meeting. We talk about ‘future needs’ so that we don’t have to commit to becoming advesaries in negotiations.

Wait! Isn’t that what a salesperson really wants, negotiation? Moving toward a deal?

(There are salespeople who do the opposite, who jump into negotiating without establishing my need or interest. But that’s the subject of another post someday.)

John Jantsch shows us why getting your prospect to say no allows you to get to the next question…why. Here his list of objections (usually not verbalized by the prospect):

1. I don’t have enough information
2. I don’t trust you
3. I want proof
4. I don’t trust myself
5. I don’t see the value

Most likely it is number 2 or 5. Of course, “I don’t see the value” means “I don’t see the value to me” or, more succinctly: “I don’t care”. John says it is now a puzzle for the salesperson to figure out which one it is and take it from there.

Marketing Eye: What sales tools can you give your salespeople to overcome each of these possible objections?

Read more: Duct Tape Marketing Blog – What Part of NO Don’t You Get?

MTV never killed radio, and the Internet won’t kill salespeople, or so says Mike Smock (vSente blog) in this oddly-titled post: Mark Babej, Nobel Prize Winners and the Coming Extinction of Salesmen.

Mike’s post picks apart this article by Mark Babej in Fortune Magazine that said:

“1. Salesmen in the before Internet (B.I.) world existed only because they held all the cards when it came to information.

2. That consumers in the A.I. (after Internet) world now hold all the cards driving salesmen into extinction.”

And while statement 2 can be true in some circumstances, Mike says the Internet has also boosted the power of the salesperson:

“In other words the signal to noise ratio is much greater today with the Internet than it was without. The need for a trusted, educated, experienced source of information is greater than ever. And the ability for consumers to really become educated consumers is more and more difficult due to the daunting number of alternatives and the complexity of the decisions. Smart sales folks will understand this and learn to use the Internet to make themselves indispensable. For better or worse, the Internet has tilted the playing field in favor of the salesman. Are salesmen going extinct? Quite the contrary.”

In case you missed the gem in that paragraph, let me repeat: “Smart sales folks will understand this and learn to use the Internet to make themselves indispensable.” To that extent, the Fortune article does provide good advice for being a salesperson AI:

1. Respect your customer.
2. Defy comparison.
3. Offer the best proposition to the right target.
4. Deliver what you promise.

Marketing Eye tip: Make your website a tool that your sales team can use to their advantage. One savvy salesperson said to me “we’ve got all the information our website when you need it”, hoping his company would be the one I turn to when I am ready to move forward. Be the marketing person whose website can back-up such a promise.

At the height of ‘the bubble’, the communications business was focused on the problem of ‘the last mile’. The last mile represented the challenge of bringing broadband internet to the masses. It was going from the poles and network to the individual consumers (or businesses) that was expensive and fraught with difficulties.

We B2B marketers face a similar challenge: We can bring the product to market, create a campaign to generate interest and explain the value, but we need to get the individual buyers. That’s why we have salespeople. But, boy, do we have a Last Mile problem!

These salespeople have only one chance to do it right, in most cases. And being on the receiving end of the pitch, I’m constantly amazed by how salespeople blow it. Top crimes, IMHO:

• Wishy-washy voice mails
• Not asking the right questions
• Barking up the wrong tree
• Not following up
• Pretending the Internet doesn’t exist

While we aren’t sales managers (or most of us aren’t), in we B2B marketers tend to be close enough to the sales process to influence (or adapt) to improve their efforts. Thus, I am launching a Marketing Eye for the Sales Guy Series.

I’ll be posting short rants on bad sales technique as well as links to articles and resources that I think a marketing manager will find valuable regarding sales. I’m not trying to solve the problem, just raise awareness and letting you figure out how to fix that bad “comb-over” of a sales pitch.

(BTW, if you haven’t watched Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, you need to. At least the first five minutes when they raid the straight guy’s pad.)

My first post here was four years ago. Amazing on several different points. Probably most amazing is how I’ve followed my original vision:

My first post. Lets list the current issues on my plate that I want to discuss in the future. Basically, I have several “directory listing services” to pick (or not). They are:

Thomas Register
Kompass
GlobalSpec
Industrial QuickSearch

Throw those on top of Trade advertising, website design/maintenance, and internal issues to make an interesting blog for like-minded people.

For a walk down memory lane here is my archive page from May 2002. Some sample posts:

• We came to the conclusion that sites with comparison tools attempt to make our product a commodity (not desirable).
• Marketing “Mystery Meat”
• This is a hysterical “Daily Sucker” from Web Sites that Suck!
• Directory day
• Friday’s cool links
• Despite my questioning bingo-deck’s future, I made another insertion order for one.

The one thing I do have to say is that I have written this blog as personal, a place to deposit my thoughts and reactions to doing my job that no one I normally talk to really understands or cares about. Not to pontificate, not to impress, but to just express myself in writing.

A very gracious thank you for all my readers. You have all been great listeners.

Maybe its not news or maybe you already heard, but Microsoft has killed Frontpage. Admit it, we all have used Frontpage. I actually found it to be quite powerful for what I was doing. Of course, I was smart enough to avoid using their Themes system (which is how it earned the reputation of generating ugly websites).

I’ve since moved on to Dreamweaver, but what is Microsoft going to do next? In the interest of knowing what’s going on (whether or not I’ll ever take a close look at these programs), here is the answer from PixelMill (a template site):

“SharePoint Designer 2007 and Expression Web Designer are both solid replacements to FrontPage. SharePoint Designer has been positioned as the enterprise solution to be used with Microsoft’s SharePoint solution, and Expression Web Designer has been positioned as the new ‘designer’s’ tool.”

Read more: PixelMill – April 2006 Newsletter

When I went for my MBA, I picked the school by the amount of finance classes that were required…GVSU won with just two needed. I was able to concentrate on the marketing and business classes I wanted. And I felt vindicated when the accounting professor said that marketing ‘is where its at’.

But maybe I shouldn’t be so fast to dismiss finance in marketing, especially when the Marketing Headhunter says so in his post: Why Financial Literacy?

“Increasingly, great marketers are excellent intra-preneurs who can marshal internal and external resources to get the funding they need for their expeditionary marketing projects. That means being savvy enough to speak the language of the risk-averse finance guys in your company. Naturally, the better you can communicate with your internal stakeholders, the higher the likelihood your project has of getting a green light.”

Harry Joiner links to a great finance site with spreadsheets and short articles on different finance terms and methodologies. Its like finding my Finance 524 crib-notes.

That said, there should have also been a MBA class in politics and motivation. (I’m getting my online training on politics at Big Picture Small Office, and motivation at Motivation on the Run.

Survey results can be interesting reading, but a lot of surveys aren’t that actionable. After all, knowing most people think Jessica Simpson is a bimbo doesn’t really help me any. Business trend surveys can be the same way, and the following is no exception. Those who sell to us marketers may find more value in the survey.

Industrial Marketing – SVM E-Business Trends in Manufacturing Report: “Download the 2006 E-Business Trends in Manufacturing Report – the results of a survey of over 220 marketing executives at U.S. manufacturing firms.”

So I started looking for the negative sides of some of the survey questions to help understand my competition and contemporaries. Here are three insights:

Graph 4-1 asked about effectiveness of marketing vehicles in the future. The bottom of the chart was weighted down by trade shows, direct mail, directories, and magazines (see below, dark blue is % saying less effective). I’d suspect that trade publications have a way to go to win the hearts of marketing managers again!

Graph 5-2 showed only 19% of marketers who felt they could attribute 20% or more of their business to their website (even indirectly). Either the website isn’t on their radar or they must rely on outbound marketing.

Graph 7-2 listed ‘barriers to e-business success’, which was a laundry list of political, organizational, or strategic problems. I think these barriers, if they haven’t been overcome already, as so instilled in their organizations that they will be perpetual barriers to success online (it sucks to be you!).

Post a comment if you find something else juicy in this report.

Last February 22nd, I posted I know what Google’s going to do next! Well, I was right. Google Calendar is live.

Here’s a review from StreetLessons.com
Or the analysis at Search Engine Watch
Or you can try it yourself. (And that’s exactly what I’m going to do next!)

(BTW, that one post continues to be the most active on my blog.)

Got this email this morning from Reed Business Information’s direct mail list operation DM2:

“By matching your house file to DM2-DecisionMaker’s powerful database of over 13.5 million direct response sourced business professionals, we can provide demographics such as: buying authority, job function, industry, title and more.

DM2-DecisionMaker can then offer new prospects qualified by these same characteristics! “

Very cool use of a database. And by focusing on characteristics, they can continue to distinguish themselves from new competition Jigsaw.