Tag Archives: sales

How Not to Be a Social Media Jackal

by on September 18, 2009 in Relationships

Yesterday, Matt Singley (@mattsingley) asked a simple, but rather provocative question via Twitter:

What ensued was an interesting mini-conversation about how to successfully and effectively engage with a competitor’s customers through social media.

The set-up
Let’s say you work for Company Y in Matt’s scenario and have a social media/online monitoring program that watches not only for mentions of your company’s name but your competitors’ names, as well (and if you don’t already have such a program in place, I happen to know a very good agency that can help you).  In the course of your monitoring, you discover that Company X has screwed up and now has some royally discontented customers. What do you do?

Your first instinct may be to jump on this golden opportunity quickly so you can grab some new customers…and I’m going to suggest you squelch this instinct. By being overzealous in your online efforts, you can actually do more harm to your company’s online reputation than good. Don’t be the jackal eagerly waiting to pick off the discontented carcasses of your competitors’ customers.

What should you do, instead?
First, listen, do a little legwork, understand. Find out what happened. In our online world, it’s not that hard to uncover what’s going on when a competitor screws up. Do not – REPEAT, DO NOT – wade into any tweetstream or blogpost until you figure out what’s going on. Failing to grasp an initial understanding of how the customer feels will only make you appear insincere and predatory.

Second, be a human being. Sorry if that seems overly simplistic and obvious, but its astounding how often we forget that long-term sales relationships starts with treating customers like humans with respect. After gaining an understanding of the situation, practice some empathy. Ask yourself, “If I was this individual, would I want someone to start aggressively hawking their wares under my nose right now? Or would I prefer someone to treat me better than I’ve just been treated by Company X?” A little empathy goes a long ways.

What might this look like? Here is a fresh scenario from Twitter:
A customer becomes irritated with a rival’s product or service. Here’s an example from @Dotpage who is calling out @logitech’s slow driver updates:

Let’s say you work for Altec Lansing and uncover a tweet like this. Now maybe no one – including your own company – has drivers ready for Snow Leopard, but here’s a prime opportunity for you to approach a competitor’s disgruntled customer. A course of action might be to research the social media chatter coming from Twitter (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+to%3Alogitech) where you’ll find this issue is significant source of irritation among Logitech’s customers. Then, your first @ reply should be to note the problems faced by the individual – in this case, a lack of updated drivers. Perhaps send a tweet such as “Sorry to hear about the problems you’re having with speaker drivers…it sucks to not be able to hear sounds from your Mac.” Resist the urge to openly sell your product on first tweet. Remember, your aim is to build a long-term relationship not make a quick sale.

Not everyone you send @ replies are going to respond and that’s okay. For those individuals who do reply, here’s the opportunity to guide your competitor’s customer toward your own products and services. Ask what they want from a product, what drives them crazy, what a company can do to improve their experience. You now have a personal, one-to-one conversation with a buyer that can turn them into a raving fan. People become passionate about purchasing from other people, particularly those who genuinely want the best for them. This interaction can be a catalyst for introducing a customer to your own products and services without the need for even making an open sales call.

After you’ve made contact with the individual on Twitter, then follow them. Don’t make following the first course of action – this is the type of behavior that bots employ and again can be seen as an overly aggressive predatory tactic that will turn off the potential prospect.

Third, make sure every single person in your company is working from the same playbook. This is where breaking down silos and cross-functional planning cannot be under-emphasized. If just one person from your company leaps in like a jackal, then there’s a better-than-average chance your company’s image will be tarnished along with that of Company X.

Any thoughts or counterarguments here? What’s worked for you as a disgruntled customer? What’s worked or hasn’t worked for your company in having conversations like these?

Sales Are Driven By Relationships Not Ads

by on April 21, 2009 in Relationships

How do you communicate with your current customers? Do you only send them mail when you’re launching a new product or email them when there’s an upgrade to purchase? Have you taken a good hard look at what you communicate and how often you communicate it? Is it all BUY, BUY, BUY?

If so, that’s a prescription for buyer fatigue. The reality is that sales are driven by relationships not broadcasted advertisements.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Years ago, when I took over as director of membership development for a professional association I encountered similar outreach attitudes. The only time the association sent a message to a member was when their membership was about to expire. For first year members, the communication path was to send an overwhelmingly large welcome packet (or the “hernia kit” as it was jokingly termed) and little else until their membership expiration notice nine months later. As you can imagine, that did nothing to build the kind of engagement necessary to guide that new member toward renewing for a second year. Does this sound familiar?

When I entered, we assessed the plan but we did more that just retool around specific objectives. We knew what we wanted: renewals. What was missing from the prior plan was what our members actually wanted. They wanted value, they wanted a relationship with the association, they wanted to be recognized as more than a walking wallet.

Take a look at how your company is building relationships with your customers. If your only communicating more ways for customers to buy, then you’re likely not cultivating the long-term relationships necessary to generate more sales to your current base. And this is a base that – if they’re wildly engaged and passionately loyal to your company – are going to spur referrals.

Intuition and Innovation

by on April 14, 2009 in Business

Are you getting caught up trying to sell a process? Perhaps trying to sell a process that is probably easily replicable? Or worse, trying to sell a process that’s proprietary and mired in so much paranoid legalese and bureaucratic crap that the client really doesn’t know what they buying? Josh Kamler at tiny gigantic urges you to stop:

I’d say that intuition and innovation are similar beasts. That innovation doesn’t actually happen without intuition. The sooner you get your your clients to realize that they’ve bought not a process but a rare group of people who have the courage, creativity, humility, and perseverence to begin making a thing without knowing what it will be and who have the intuition to suddenly see it when they’ve stumbled across it, your services become way more valuable and way less common than some guaranteed proprietary process.

Sell what truly makes your service marketable – the unique genius of you and your people. All the other stuff isn’t really that remarkable.

BONUS: Rosa Say also wrote a post called When Made to Stick Will. You’ll find similarly intriguing ideas there.

Is There Room For ‘We’ In Your Elevator?

by on January 5, 2009 in Communication

Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity recently wrote a post referencing some familiar advice for crafting an effective elevator speech. The latest conventional wisdom would have us believe that the best elevator pitch is not about us, but about the other individual. The principal strategy is to set our needs to the side and focus exclusively on the needs of the potential customer, member, or client. After all, the reason we’re in business to service them, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. Arnie writes that this strategy misses a greater point:

Business relationships are as much about valuing and evincing our selves as they are about reaching and helping others. Both aspects (self and other) need to be expressed and honored to foster lasting connections for business success and satisfaction.

There seems to be this tacit understanding that relationships in business are different from those elsewhere in life. Perhaps it’s okay to screw over a vendor in your business, but it’s clearly not acceptable to do the same to a friend. Or maybe it’s fine to do everything to make a member happy but necessary to put conditions on making our spouses equally happy. It’s as if we are two individuals merely sharing the same skin, which might explain why we’re so damned unhappy at times.

Like Arnie, I believe there’s a different way…one that accepts that our core values define our relationships regardless if they are business or personal. There is no need for this artificial schism. What if, instead of making the elevator pitch primarily (or solely) about the other person or even selfishly about ourselves, we use the AND proposition and make it about us. The pitch then becomes one for a mutually respectful relationship where the needs of both sides have equal importance.

Not realistic? Think a customer or member is too self-interested, focused too much on what they gain? Maybe, but then, that’s the message they’ve been trained well to absorb. This is an invitation to propose a new type of relationship, one that addresses the client’s needs, but also honors our own goals, dreams, and possibilities. There’s no way to do any of this when the relationship becomes imbalanced and the customer’s needs are always put first. Actually, that’s not a relationship…it’s servitude.

And we have a choice.

From Bailey WorkPlay, first published March 8, 2006

Step Away From The Trade Booth

by on January 3, 2009 in Relationships

Here’s a little fact about me: I don’t like trade shows. From the visitor side, they make me uncomfortable. I’m always afraid to make eye contact with an exhibitor for fear that I’m going to get the full-on sales blitz. And usually it’s for a service or product that I really don’t need. Ever try to get away from these guys or gals (yes, the sales blitz technique is equal opportunity in its usage)? Nothing less than having a heart attack will allow you to elude their grasp.

From the exhibitor side, I’m not a big fan of them, either. There’s a certain quality of salesmanship that I find hard to grasp…there’s also a certain quality of will that doesn’t seem entirely authentic for me. And I guess it all comes down to my preference for depth. Can you develop a deep connection with a potential member, customer, or client in the span of 5-7 minutes (that’s the average amount of time you get to speak to one person at a trade booth)? Probably not, which is why so much leg work is required after the show to seal the deal. The practice of trade show exhibiting assumes that you already KNOW the needs and desires of your customers – it’s just a matter of talking to them until they fully know it.

Of course, there are alternatives. It starts by doing this: take all the <em>assumptions</em> you have about your customers – what they want, how they want it, what they expect from your products and services – and get rid of them. Write them down and burn them in your wastebasket. Give them the ceremonial flush down the toilet. The important point is to realize you may not know anything real about the folks with which you want to connect.

Now, take all the money that you would spend on your trade booth and put it toward the conference registration (you might even find this is less expensive). Don’t exhibit; instead, be a student. Go to the sessions and honestly listen to what the presenters have to say, attend the workshops and openly participate in the dialogues. In between, strike up real conversations with fellow attendees and figure out what’s going on in their lives and their work. Of course, be prepared with some brochures and swap business cards. But remember, the point isn’t to deluge the other person with info about your product or service (if that’s what you’re really after, be truthful about it and just get yourself a trade booth). The point is to immerse yourself in the rich world of your customer. What you give up in terms of having a long list of prospects (many of which may never be interested in you anyway), you gain in having a deep understanding of the individuals who comprise your market and how you can make their lives better. Trust me, they’ll love you for it.

From Bailey WorkPlay, first published November 7, 2005 (with minor edits)