Sales and Marketing – “It’s Time to Ask Yourself What You Believe”
30 August 2011 — Steve Watts
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It’s been nearly three months since the Sales Insider’s last blog post.
I’ve been heavily involved with the new InsideSales.com Certified Administrator project, and various Dreamforce 2011-related projects, so other than an occasional tweet, and interacting with clients, time for our online presence has been in short supply.
However, a few weeks ago in a company meeting, we watched this presentation on TED.com. And I was absolutely compelled to write a post on its contents.
It’s 18 minutes long. The ideas presented within it are simple and easy to comprehend.
And I cannot stop thinking about it.
Real revolutions–the ones that definitively change the way we work and live–rarely start in executive board rooms. They almost never start from profit-analysis reports, pipeline review meetings, training agendas, or marketing demographic outlines.
A revolution isn’t about creating a “brand,” or “engagement,” or “measurable metrics” (though in many cases those come later).
It’s not about who has the best “spin,” the best PR, or the best prime-time network ad slot.
It’s about an idea.
An idea, and people that believe in them so strongly that the idea becomes reality.
Revolutions don’t happen by accident. They come because the time, the place, and the circumstance demand it, and the people in the center of it can’t bear the thought that things might remain the same . . .
A few months back, I mentioned that we had started on the process of doing a project for a local Utah non-profit, the Center for Women and Children in Crisis (see their Web site here).
And last week, we put the “rubber to the road” and actually did it.
We feel extremely blessed to have had the opportunity to participate in this project. InsideSales.com CEO Dave Elkington and I have made a specific commitment to finding opportunities like this, and giving back to the community, particularly to at-need and at-risk groups.
If any of you have knowledge of other opportunities like this one, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Call in to the company, and ask to talk to me directly about a charitable work opportunity.
Everything looked the same as other times I had gone, but Wow, the food had changed! I had been there several times over the years, but today things were VERY different. The food was decent before, but now it was out of this world.
The power of automation, as most of us have discovered, is a two-edged sword. When set up properly, automation is leverage for the work you already do, multiplying results. When set up incorrectly, it multiplies your mistakes in the same way and occasionally causes you to “auger in.”
So in the interest of honesty, we screwed up pretty bad yesterday.
One of our good, solid marketing vendors sent out an email in the morning of January 6 according to plan . . . except it wasn’t the right content. In fact, it was inviting our friends to join us at Dreamforce ’10 on December 6th, a month after it happened. And though it would be easy to point fingers and blame the vendor, ultimately the fault is ours. It’s our job to make sure we have the right content in place, that it’s clearly marked, and that it’s in the right format—not our vendor’s.
But there are a couple of things our little faux pas reminded me of as well.
One, I can’t help seeing the irony of sending an out-of-date email for salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event that touts our PowerDialer app’s Top 10 position on the Salesforce AppExchange . . […]
“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.” -Marshall McLuhan
New Year’s Eve, 2010, will mark 30-year anniversary of the passing away of someone you’ve probably never heard of, a scholar by the name of Marshall McLuhan.
Many academics consider McLuhan, a Canadian who taught the majority of his life at the University of Toronto, to be one of the foremost pioneers in the study of media and communications, and the effects of media technologies on the social and cultural makeup of society.
The concept of “the global village”—an always-on, totally connected society, linked by electricity and wires to move information—was first posited by Marshall McLuhan in 1961, 30+ years before the public Internet and World Wide Web would make his vision a reality . . . .
Sitting at our booth at Dreamforce, I’m always amazed at the energy these big conferences bring. It’s a testament to me of the power of human creativity, how we as people are at our best, our most noble, when we are in the act of creation—from steel and silicon to words and ideas.
We are a race of builders. We weren’t meant to sit around and wait for society to create itself. We make it ourselves, in our images.
I don’t know why I’m bringing this up at this very moment, sitting in this rock-hard plastic chair, the noise of a crowd echoing—but it’s the truth. Building something, sustaining something is the point of who and what we are.
I guess I bring this up because marketing, particularly direct marketing, too often settles for something less. We talk about tapping in to customer needs, organizing our efforts around creating real customer value, but end up simply selling the “thing,” not what makes the thing valuable.
Over the next four days, I’m interested to see who’s going to be giving out real, valuable information and insight, and who’s going to be giving out thinly-veiled promotional pitches.
I’ll be the first to admit that on a literal, unbiased, hard-statistical mathematical-formula basis, sales is a numbers game.
((X number of calls x Y contact rate = Z prospects) x (A closing rate) = B # of closes)) x C dollar value per close = D Total $Dollars.
Here’s the problem: the very sentiment of turning a process that involves people–with our flaws and foibles, our dreams and despairs, our challenges and opportunities, our cultures and world-views–into an algebraic equation reeks of the “old guard” sales mentality that so desperately needs to die.
Break down the phrase itself: you’re turning “people” into “numbers,” and treating one of Western society’s most sacred individual rights–the ability to pursue our own happiness and satisfaction in a career of our choosing–as a “game.”
Treating sales like a “game” is inherently self-oriented. It completely removes the other humans from the process.
There are obviously great sales people in every industry, but too often “Sales is a numbers game” is used as either a mental crutch to simply get through another batch of prospecting calls, or a self-delusion when pipeline is low. Hitting numbers without engaging in the real process of making a difference in […]
If your definition of success is high levels of sales and revenue, then you are naturally bound—even held hostage occasionally–by your customers’ demands.
When success is defined largely by monetary gain, you don’t get to create your fans (read: customers), they create you, and the second you forget this fact, you’ve lost.
We hear of artists complaining that no one is buying their product, that the financial rewards of creating “art” aren’t enough, but the attitude of “I’m the artist, I produce what I want!” runs directly counter to the nature of business. If it’s not selling, it’s because people see zero value in what’s being sold. Produce something people want, and they’ll buy it.
If someone wants to be an “artist” and not “sell out to the masses,” whether they realized it or not, they already subconsciously decided that being critically acclaimed as a “visionary” was more important than sales.
And the principle for businesses is exactly the same.
Before any plan gets executed, before you open the doors for the very first time, before you ever “flip the switch” and send your business […]
Every semester for two years while teaching college composition, I used an excerpt from the movie script for Jerry Maguire to emphasize the key point of writer ethos.
Classically defined, ethos is the persona, or appearance, of a writer or orator to their audience—the words they chose, the emotional voice and tone, the sense of authority the speaker projects.
Parts of the film haven’t aged well since the mid-’90s, but there’s an essential essence that still resonates, a part of the human experience that it manages to capture. The movie at its heart wasn’t a story about sports, or even love; it was a story about a human being coming to realize the power of humility, self-actualization, and integrity.
The metaphor for the entire film becomes Jerry’s journey to Kinkos at 3:00 AM to make a hundred copies of a mission statement he had just written because he knew, KNEW that it was that damn important, and that he’d never be able to look himself in the mirror again if he didn’t do something about it.
The story rings true because we recognize something about the character in ourselves; the person who sees that the real path to success lies in everything that they aren’t.
And for some reason, even in the midst of the Digital Age Sales 2.0 world, we still haven’t gotten the message . . . .
