Why the title?
The world has changed. Dramatically!
Many of the things that made me a lot of money when I was a salesman pounding the streets with NCR are no longer true. Make no mistake, I don't think sales or selling are redundant.
But I do believe that we are all going to find new ways to do business to engage successfully with our customers.
The internet has changed everything and in this blog I hope we can share ideas and best practice about how to use the internet to sell better, manage better and use technology in new and inventive ways. So this is about how we sell in the 21st century which is already very different to the way it was done in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In those days the job of the salesman was to identify customers who could benefit from his product or service, approach them, understand more about their business, show them how he could improve that business and then obtain a commitment to go ahead.
He did this from a basis of knowledge about his product, his industry, his competitors and business in general. And customers wanted to hear from him because he knew more about the problem and the solution than he did. Today, information is available at the click of a mouse.
Want to know how to stop friction in a bearing - there are 1.7m entries on Google. And HPC Coatings of Chandler, Arizona have done brilliantly to get to number five, the first commercial entry (at the time of blogging) below the academic entries and free patent listings. So what hope does a small player have? And what if you need bookkeeping services in say, Kendal (which happens to be a charming, but very tiny town on lake Windermere, Cumbria, in the North West of England? ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX T H OU S A ND entries. Wow! Imagine calling say Andy at The Rainbow Tavern and trying to sell him bookkeeping services. And even if you did, guess what he will do right after you have spoken to him?
So if you sell something, anything; you need to get sharper about it and pronto. Selling C21 is going to be very different and in this blog we will be exploring how we refocus the old skills into new and profitable ways of generating new business
Many of the things that made me a lot of money when I was a salesman pounding the streets with NCR are no longer true. Make no mistake, I don't think sales or selling are redundant.
But I do believe that we are all going to find new ways to do business to engage successfully with our customers.
The internet has changed everything and in this blog I hope we can share ideas and best practice about how to use the internet to sell better, manage better and use technology in new and inventive ways. So this is about how we sell in the 21st century which is already very different to the way it was done in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In those days the job of the salesman was to identify customers who could benefit from his product or service, approach them, understand more about their business, show them how he could improve that business and then obtain a commitment to go ahead.
He did this from a basis of knowledge about his product, his industry, his competitors and business in general. And customers wanted to hear from him because he knew more about the problem and the solution than he did. Today, information is available at the click of a mouse.
Want to know how to stop friction in a bearing - there are 1.7m entries on Google. And HPC Coatings of Chandler, Arizona have done brilliantly to get to number five, the first commercial entry (at the time of blogging) below the academic entries and free patent listings. So what hope does a small player have? And what if you need bookkeeping services in say, Kendal (which happens to be a charming, but very tiny town on lake Windermere, Cumbria, in the North West of England? ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SIX T H OU S A ND entries. Wow! Imagine calling say Andy at The Rainbow Tavern and trying to sell him bookkeeping services. And even if you did, guess what he will do right after you have spoken to him?
So if you sell something, anything; you need to get sharper about it and pronto. Selling C21 is going to be very different and in this blog we will be exploring how we refocus the old skills into new and profitable ways of generating new business
posted by Perry Burns @ 11/01/2007 02:41:00 PM
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