How to Take Control of the Sales Process

Do your buyers know more than you do?

This question can make many sales professionals uncomfortable, because the answer is often yes. In his book, The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business, author and speaker David Meerman Scott says that many companies are failing to acknowledge this reality.

Before the Internet, it was difficult for buyers to shop around. To find out about features, benefits, pricing, and competitive offerings, they had to turn to salespeople. Today, however, information is everywhere, and buyers are using their knowledge to bypass salespeople. Yet, as Scott points out, sales organizations are still putting their faith in cold calling and rigid scripts that attempt to push buyers down a linear path to the sale.

“Remarkably, nearly all companies are still operating in a world as if the salesperson is the king of the information kingdom,” Scott writes. “Companies insist on driving all online interactions to a salesperson.”

So what can you do to take control of your sales career and become a welcome resource for buyers? Scott provides a number of solutions in his book. Here are just two of his recommendations.

1) Make friends with marketing.

Salespeople have traditionally relied on the marketing department to generate sales leads. Sales managers complain that the leads generated by marketing are no good. Marketing responds that salespeople simply aren’t following up properly or can’t close.

“Having been in the middle of these discussions at several companies, I’ve heard them time and time again,” Scott writes. “At many [business-to-business] companies the relationship was downright adversarial. Often, the tension extended all the way up to senior management.”

Scott advises sales and marketing teams to stop thinking of leads as handoffs. “Savvy marketing and sales professionals understand that sales and marketing must work together to move prospects through the sales cycle. The good news is that Web content not only can motivate buyers during a lengthy sales cycle but may even shorten it.”

2) Establish yourself as an expert online.

The word “social” still spooks many sales professionals. They fear learning new skills or that social activity will take up all their time. Scott says this doesn’t have to be the case – and what you have to gain is far greater than you think.

“Sometimes people tell me they fear being overwhelmed,” Scott writes. “But here’s the good news: You can adapt to the new rules gradually. I don’t expect you to stop doing what you’ve been doing for a decade and do only new things. No, rather you can implement these ideas in bits and pieces! You can focus on Twitter first, perhaps, and then turn to creating videos and posting them to YouTube.”

Scott says incorporating social media into your life is just like an exercise routine. Establish habits, set small goals, and switch up your routine to keep from burning out or getting bored. This is exactly how he went from zero Twitter followers in 2008 to more than 100,000 today.

“The secret to building a following on social networks is that there is no secret,” Scott writes. “You must participate. To reach 100,000 followers, you need to do 10,000 things to improve your personal brand, and each of the small things you do, on average, needs to gain you 10 new followers.”

Once you find your audience, Scott says you’ll have created “an enormously important asset that will help you in your career and in your business.”