I am currently working my way through 'The Challenger Sale' a very well known book written by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. They discuss the next evolution of selling and how to take control of the customer conversation based on a study of thousands of sales reps they put forward a theory that, the best sales person is someone who is able to challenge the customer and leads with interesting insights. Which goes against the convention wisdom being that a sales rep who build good relationships and takes a consultative approach. A sales rep who can teach and tailor the message to the customer's specific needs and take control of the conversation when it comes to money will be your top performing sales person.
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Compete on your own strengths and not the weakness of others was the key take-away from my previous blog about a recent buyers experience I had, which lead me to write about bad mouthing competitors.
Playing to your strengths means salespeople will remain credible and earn the trust of the prospect to help them make the best decision to solve their problem. One of the quickest ways to lose this is in how a sales rep handles the discussion around competitors. We all work in a competitive market so it should be no surprise that your prospect has done their due diligence and may raise this as a topic of discussion at some point during the buying process. Regardless of whether you are in sales, marketing or any department how should you talk about your competitors? … in short, with respect. Recently working on a project sourcing a contact call center solution I had the immense pleasure of researching 37 different vendors (no one can deny I am not thorough), this meant I spoke to quite a number of sales reps, sat through quite a number of demo’s and politely excused myself from quite a number of continued negotiations. One call stood out however, the solution looked like a good fit but didn’t end up being cost-effective, eliminating itself (only just) from the shortlist. The sales rep was professionally persistent wishing to better understand my position, at which point I shared my thoughts and mentioned who else I was considering. Then the sales rep said this, “I don’t want to speak badly of our competitors but,...” (uh oh!) and went on to bad mouth the competition that I had short-listed. Great! Getting your employees to share content can be a challenge and there are many different ways you can go about achieving this successfully. Listed here are 4 things you should do as part of your process when looking to engage your employees and enroll them as social advocates for your company.
The idea of engaging your employees is all well and good, but how do you practically go about doing it! Of course, there are lots of different ways to roll out an employee advocacy program. The lengths and depths you are willing to go are dependent upon your key aims, market and company culture, as well as your available budget and the time you have to invest.
Within the employee advocacy industry there are 3 very well known case studies that are typically used as good reference points, they not only provide details around the approach they took, they share the statistical data and detail the 'Return-On-Investment" that companies could have if employees become advocates for your company. These 3 companies are excellent examples of how to properly engage your employees to share your content with significant the results. Whether you have just started up your own business or are trying to assess which social network you should use next, here are some useful statistics which should help you with your research and help make you a more informed decision. For the most part these facts and figures are correct as of October 2017
Your business will determine which social networks you should pay more or less attention to. Ultimately the number of social networks and where you share your content will be dependent upon where your target audience mainly are; Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat etc.
There are over 350+ social media platforms that you can utilise as a business, but you probably wouldn’t be going far wrong if you built a presence on the largest social network; Facebook holds an 18% market share with over 2.02 Billion users. As a company if you able to actively engage members of any social networks effectively, it will have a huge net effect on your brand, website traffic and respectively lead quality. |
AuthorSharing my day-to-day sales and marketing insights, research and findings from working in a fast SaaS startup. Archives
November 2017
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