The old ways of marketing don’t work anymore…
When you think about marketing or sales do you ever reflect on how you personally react when you receive other people’s marketing or sales materials?
I was recently told a story about a sales director berating his team for their limited success from cold calling. In the middle of the meeting he received a call from an unknown number.
Answering it, he realised it was a cold sales call.
He irritably said he was busy and they should not call again before abruptly finishing the call. He then went back to his meeting…
About cold calling.
But it’s not just cold calling.
How do you feel about spam emails, adverts that interrupt your viewing of a web page, promos in your private social media feed, automated phone systems that hinder you speaking to anyone, gated ‘free’ web content that isn’t free, chatbots which don’t understand you, hidden pricing so you’re forced to talk to a sales rep?
I could go on.
The use of cold calling, spam sales emails, interruptive advertising etc usually comes from short term thinking. The desire to get sales quickly.
The problem is they just don’t work anymore (if they ever truly did).
If you reflect on how you respond in these situations…
How often do you actually buy from a cold email you get – or from a cold call?
If you’ve used any of these things to market your business, have they honestly increased your sales pipeline?
Longer term thinking is the thing that actually works.
Your future sales will come, in the main, from people you have some kind of relationship with.
Relationships take time to build.
So you need to start now, initiating genuine conversations that will build these connections.
In the modern business, it should not just be the sales team doing this.
Do this at scale by empowering your wider team to help… any external facing team members who can connect and build authentic relationships with customers.
What buyers want is to see your experts on social media, actively helping them be successful.
They want to find expert content where they hang out online.
They want pricing that is public and free content that is genuinely free to access so they can contact you on their terms.
Not everyone one wants to hear this but you need to think of this as a LONG game.
Start this now so in the future when you need a short term sales lift you will have a community of fans open to your outreach, because they know and trust you.
Our 30 Day Social Club course is specifically designed for employees… it teaches them how to build relationships and support potential customers on social media. There is a self-serve version and live group cohorts, depending on your needs – see more details.
