Sales 2.0

Relationships will be critical in the AI age

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Sales is not getting any easier. Buyers have become even better at screening out salespeople.

When the Internet arrived, buyers’ need to speak to a salesperson to get basic information was eliminated. Buyers could go online and get all the information they needed.

About a decade ago, certain subject matter experts came up with a solution to this problem. The solution was do more. If buyers were not inviting salespeople in, the best response was to ask to be invited in more often. Many salespeople becoming mass email marketers.

Buyers adapted to this onslaught of email with improved “defenses”. Email metrics have dropped dramatically over the last ten years. The most important metric, actual responses and people wanting to talk to you, is now super low for most cold emails.

Today we are in the age of generative AI. This new technology allows us to create content at a huge scale. Some people see this as a new way for salespeople to generate even more outbound email (and social media messages). I predict buyers will react with their own AI defenses to this fresh tsunami of unwanted outreach. What should you do then if you want to sell your stuff in the age of AI?

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Cover the bases…or you’re out!

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In my last two posts (this one and this one) I described a framework for progressing larger sales opportunities that I have had a lot of success with. It is a process described in Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman’s book “Strategic Selling” (now called New Strategic Selling.) In this framework there are four types of people involved in a sale.

  1. The economic buyer
  2. The users
  3. The gatekeepers
  4. The coach

I described these four types of people and gave you some tips on how to find the fourth type of person a “coach”. The “coach” is the one type of person you don’t get for “free”. Having a coach is one of the most important factors in winning bigger deals.

Knowing how to sell to a “buying committee” like this is becoming more important as getting in the door gets harder and every opportunity more critical.

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No coach can mean no deal

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Getting in the door is getting harder and harder, so making the most of every time you do get through the door is becoming more and more important.

Over the years, I have seen many salespeople and business owners taking big risks with important deals by talking to only one person in the prospect company. A common outcome of this kind of “single threading” is “radio silence” after a proposal is submitted—no returned calls or emails, and ultimately no deal.

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Making the most of every opportunity

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Getting in the door is getting harder and harder, so making the most of every time you do get through the door is becoming more and more important.

Over the years, I have seen many salespeople and business owners taking big risks with important deals by talking to only one person in the prospect company. A common outcome of this kind of “single threading” is “radio silence” after a proposal is submitted—no returned calls or emails, and ultimately no deal.

[Read more…]

Getting in the door in an AI world

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The #1 challenge for most salespeople, and small business owners, is getting enough meetings with prospects for their product or service.

Getting through the door to have conversations that may lead to business opportunities seems to be getting harder every day. Today’s big disruptor, AI, may potentially make this situation even worse (hard to believe as the situation seems so tough already!)

For many companies selling a high-end product or service, a meeting is a prerequisite to a sale. A lack of meetings means a lack of sales opportunities, which means a lack of sales and revenue.

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An “uncool” way to get sales meetings

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In this post I am going to talk about an “uncool” way to get sales meetings…ground mail.

Getting meetings with potential prospects is frequently rated as the top challenge for most salespeople and business owners. If you don’t get enough meeting with prospects, then your sales will inevitably be weak–not enough coming in the top of your sales funnel always means not enough coming out the bottom.

When faced with the challenge of getting more sales meetings, some salespeople assume all you can do is send dozens more cold emails or (if they’re the rarer type that likes to call) make several more cold calls.

Although these methods do work, there’s an increasing need to use “multimedia prospecting”, approaching people over multiple channels until you hit upon a method that works for that prospect.

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