Sometimes I wish I could pick David Meerman Scott’s brain on a daily basis because every time I speak with him he comes out with some outstanding pearls of wisdom. These simple yet extremely powerful insights have influenced my thinking on more than one occasion in the past. Some years back he was one of the first to talk about salespeople needing to brand themselves on LinkedIn and other social networks so they communicated their value to prospects and customers because at the time most were using LinkedIn as an online resume. He had spotted a shift in buyer behavior whereby prospects were now researching the salesperson as much as the company they represented – today this has become conventional wisdom but when David told me about this at the time, it was far from it.
Well this week I had another opportunity to interview David and yes he did it again! About half-way through our 20 minute interview he mentioned two major problems that may be negatively impacting sales in an organization.
#1 OLD HABITS [icon name=”suitcase” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]
There are top performing salespeople who often get promoted in sales management positions – nothing unusual there. But consider for a moment if they were promoted into the position say 10 years ago – the very sales strategies and approaches that they successfully used as a salesperson way back then are not likely to be as effective today given the major shifts in buyer behavior that we have seen over the past number of years. So unless the sales manager has moved with the times (and many have) there is the potential that there are some out there pushing out-dated sales strategies onto their sales teams. Think about the negative impact that could be having – not only could it mean your sales teams are not evolving and moving forward it could mean they are actually going backwards and your organization is becoming increasingly less-aligned with your customers.
#2 OLD TECHNOLOGY [icon name=”anchor” class=”” unprefixed_class=””]
Customer Relationship Management and Sales Force Automation is not a new concept. These have been around for a long time and some of today’s biggest and best-known vendors have also been around for a long time – indeed some of the biggest started in the last century – albeit near the end [icon name=”smile-o” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] – but the point is that these systems were built with the selling approaches and concepts of the day in mind. So today many of these systems still reinforce and support what are outdated and outmoded sales approaches. So inadvertently you could be hampering your salespeople from selling in a more buyer-aligned and contemporary fashion by your choice of sales technology.
Something to chew on, don’t you think?
Here is the clip of David providing me with these fantastic insights (the full interview with all its other nuggets will be published next month).
https://youtu.be/OENKrmZj4z0
I sincerely suggest you get to know David’s work if you are not already familiar with him: www.davidmeermanscott.com
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