It’s darn tough to get through to anyone these days. People have become really good at ignoring what we want to tell them.
I hear this all the time from all kinds of businesspeople and salespeople. Emails don’t work. Calls don’t work. Social media doesn’t work. Nothing works!
But I had an experience this week that reminded me that communication does work when it’s something people want, it’s a little different, and it’s from someone they know.
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I am working on a new sales project and I am sharing what is happening, hoping that it may help you in your selling.
I’ve gotten to the point in this project where I need to start building a list of prospects. I need some quick wins in this project, so I’m looking for ways to leverage companies my client has spoken to before. To find these types of companies I’ve been fishing around in my client’s CRM.
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As we’ve introduced more ways to communicate, we (and more importantly our customers) have spread our communication over many channels, leaving less concentration on any one channel.
When we only had a desk telephone, you could reach more people on it, as that was the primary channel for communication. Your prospects picked up the phone when it rang, as it might be their customer or family on the other end.
Then we got cell phones. Now you could give your cell number to just the important people and not let others know your secret cell number. Once you’ve given the important people your cell number, you don’t have to pay as much attention to your desk phone.
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“The money is in the list” is an old direct marketing adage going way back to the development of the envelope. Despite all the digital changes in in sales and marketing, if you’re running a business and trying to use outbound to grow it, the money is still in the list.
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I recently had a conversation with a business owner about how to improve their CRM data. It’s a conversation I’ve had many times over the years.
It’s not that this business needs more data in its CRM or is missing an important prospect list. The CRM in question has plenty of contacts and accounts–think nearly a hundred thousand contacts. It’s that with this huge list of potential customers, the business is not actually easily able to sell. There is too much data and not enough useful information.
If you find yourself with a CRM that is full of data but not easy for you to use to make actual sales and nurture relationships, consider some of the following ways to organize it. Think of this like Marie Kondo for your CRM.
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We may be entering a “new, new era” of selling—an era that takes us back to good old-fashioned relationship selling.
Up to this point many of the tools available to sales teams have encouraged volume-based sales techniques, like mass emailing and cold calling. But as more and more salespeople use these tools, buyers have become inundated with low value communication. Inevitably connection rates and conversion rates have dropped quickly.
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