Hi, my name is Carey and I’m a salesman. A recovering salesman. And thanks to social media you can recover, too.
Don’t get me wrong, I love sales. It’s even addicting. But I love making a decent living more than sales, which has put me on the road to recovery.
It won’t be easy to give up the familiar sales rush that comes from enthusing across the bows of busy, preoccupied strangers about opinions and hopes that I hope will move them to action. Unfortunately, prospects knew the game as well as I.
My most important opinion: I deserve to get paid for sharing my employer’s opinions of his service or product. My fondest hope: a prospect will give me money before I can finish my pitch. That way I won’t have to ask him or her for the sale.
Most people don’t have the money or interest to purchase; so there was rarely a snowball’s chance in hell of making a sale. And that’s even before my carefully rehearsed pitch had a chance to kill any interest in me or what I’m offering.
We all know great sales professionals who are making money. For example, my friend and advisor Frank Hurtte of River Heights Consulting does his homework, carefully chooses the best prospects, qualifies them, and presents compelling reasons to buy during his carefully orchestrated campaigns.
Times change, of course; and technology will help ease the pain of recovering salesmen. Because online opinions are often bundled with solid information, we can use them together and “sell” even some knee-jerk opinion to somebody–with a stray fact or two as evidence. And when we pass on a favorite blogger’s opinion, we have their gazilllion followers as proof that it has merit.
So take heart. recover and prosper! In the social media age, we have nothing to lose but . . . the nothing on those commission checks.
How can legions of recovering salesmen make a decent living? Stay tuned. But remember: You’ll only be getting one man’s opinion.
Carey,
First, thanks for the kind words.
Now the problem with sales:
We all have picture of a Wiley Loman kind of guy (generic gender neutral term) out there doing their level best to force fit their product into every customer imaginable. I tried that way back in my younger days. I can still hear myself.
Knock, knock, hi… I am Frank from Encyclopedia ….. Do you want to buy some books?
Fortunately sometime back in the Reagan Administration, it finally dawned on me:
It’s a whole lot easier to sell things if your customer needs them. And, with a little thinking, research and analysis, a salesperson can decipher the prospect with the greatest appetite for your product. I didn’t know what to call it, but I saw it worked.
Later in life, I discovered the 80-20 process. 80 percent of your results come 20 percent of your efforts. I started looking into exactly which customers were associated with that magic 20 percent. If I focused my efforts on learning even more about these 20-percenters, my sales went up – with a minimum of effort.
Is this magic? Nope, it’s science. Those who have heard me speak know I am not a motivational sort of guy. Sometimes science is “demotivating”, but it works.
My motto is research, target, sell – research, target, sell. It’s the golden triangle where Marketing, Sales and Management come together.
Great insights as always, Frank! Thanks for the comment,