The biggest problem most salespeople (and founders that sell) face these days is getting meetings with prospective customers. Metrics for getting meetings have gone way down across the board, whether you use email, a phone call, or a LinkedIn InMail.
There are just too many messages inundating buyers. Buyers know that most of the messages are spam (or close enough), ranging from poorly targeted outreach by salespeople to outright phishing attempts. As a result, buyers want to hit “delete” as quickly as possible.
Many companies (and experts) are tackling this problem by “playing the numbers game”. If only 1 in 100 emails get through now, and that used to be 1 in 10, then we must send 10 times as many emails. This brute force approach has been the answer for more than a decade now, and so conversion numbers keep dropping.
Backwards Selling
Charles Green, of Trusted Advisor Associates, an acknowledged leader in the trust and selling space recently wrote an insightful LinkedIn post entitled “backwards selling”. In this post, he argues that we have the sales process all wrong. Instead of the traditional approach of defining our target market and then trying every way we know to get through to those people (the vast majority of whom do not know or trust us), we should instead speak to the people we know best and find out what they need.
Charles tells the story of his friend who is an expert in sending mass email (and even as an expert gets a 1 in 1,000 email to meeting conversion rate.) When his friend sent emails to his friends instead of strangers, his meeting conversion rate changed from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 6!
I’ve wondered about this approach myself. The biggest missing piece in sales today is trust. What’s not optimal about this “backwards selling” process is how well your connections fit what you sell. If you’ve been deliberate about building your relationships over a long period of time, then you may have many potential clients in your “Rolodex” and “backwards selling” may work like a charm! Unfortunately, I find most people don’t have connections like this. Most of their best relationships are people that do not align well with what they sell.
Sideways Selling
I’m going to test a hybrid approach, somewhere between traditional targeting and “backwards selling”. For lack of a better term, I will call this “sideways selling” (also because I really like the Sideways movie from 2004 with Paul Giamatti).
In this approach, I plan to define my target market more loosely than modern sales theory suggests, for example my target market might be “healthcare” vs. “medical devices firm in Illinois between $10m and $50m in revenue with a recent investment of over $20 million”).
This lack of focus would be considered too sloppy by most modern sales professionals, but the upshot of today’s recommended tight buyer persona is a lot of difficulty finding relationships that can get you a meeting. Using a looser focus like this, gives you a much greater chance of finding a trusted connection (or common affinity–like going to the same college) that will get you an initial meeting.
There will be plenty of work to do to tune this market definition into something that is efficient, maybe “healthcare” is too board, and a tighter definition will be more successful. Turning the dial on target market definition is where the “rubber hits the road” here.
It’s my guess that leaving room for relationships in my selling may be a big multiplier for success. I don’t think my sales will go “backwards” or “sideways”.
Summary
- Mass outreach results continue to drop. Doing more (and more) of the same is a “road to nowhere.” (I like Talking Heads too!)
- Charles Green (a long-time expert in trust and sales) argues for a new way of selling that starts with relationships not a target market.
- I plan to test a hybrid approach, which uses a “loose” target market definition, allowing room to leverage my relationships wherever possible.