Some will resonate with readers more than others and so I guess this one should really resonate with me whilst the community around my business is growing, and it does, as it covers the one biggest game-changing lesson I ever learnt about sales.
Having been in the world of work since 1986, I actually consider it a huge honour to have witnessed the biggest technological change ever seen. In my line of work, which started as trainee Sales Rep, my tools of the trade were amazingly simple. I had a desk, a chair and landline telephone. OK not too radical compared to today, though I do like those stand-up desks I now see about. I also had an A4 lined pad, a pen and some postcard sized lined cards to write and keep information of my prospective customers on, or a database if you prefer.
My information came from two sources effectively. Firstly, I was posted, twice a month, some sales leads from an outsourced lead generation company. Yes, I said posted, but not on line, I mean in a big brown A4 envelope that invariably was ripped by the time it got to me due to overloading. Secondly, the good old Yellow Pages, thicker than any encyclopaedia you could possibly find, and I let my fingers do the walking. Who remembers that catchy marketing phrase from the 1980’s?
Then me, my desk, chair, telephone, pad, cards and pen would make calls, day after day and by the sheer law of probability I got some success. It was a great place to start, akin to making tea and sweeping up as a would-be hairdresser or a pot washer for a budding chef, you had to be around the place to see how it works and how it interacts with customers. It taught me a lot and being the inquisitive type I was always looking for ways to make the process, and subsequently me, the most effective it could be.
So, as we start another chapter in history, has life really changed that much? We still use a phone, albeit they now don’t have to be located in the most boring beige office with a view of a toilet block on some hideous industrial estate. We still use a pen, well I do and the amount of people who ask to borrow mine suggest most people do. Our fingers do more walking than ever before, but now the Yellow Pages is no more and is now called Yell and our digits race rapidly over the buttons of a keyboard to gather information that an infinite number of encyclopaedias could not even begin to match.
Yes, of course life has changed, for the better or not I will let you decide, but the principles remain the same, and ultimately that is all about human contact. Face-to-face, email, text, social media or even video calls now available at a touch of button, it has made it easier and faster to connect, but what we want to achieve from that, in business terms, is still the same sale.
The principles of selling are still very much the same, just the process changes, but the process of today allows us so much more opportunity and so many more low cost, or even no cost, ways to sell. This means creativity is through the roof and it has become harder to get heard above the noise. But one thing remains true and it’s this (more than ever)…
Sales has NEVER been about selling something to someone, it has ALWAYS been about making yourself the person the customer thinks about FIRST when the customer wants to buy something. When I realised this, back when I was a 17-year-old trainee, my whole ethos changed from trying to win a sale on the spot to just making sure I was remembered more than anyone else. Game Changing (but incredibly hard in todays modern tech world).
