My last headline seemed to irk a few people who are having a hard time believing that hand-to-hand selling might die out. Maybe it is not dying as much as mutating into something very different. What started as a specialized skill in arm twisting and influencing, is now going to grow into a new form of technology supported product evangelism. Allow me to back that up with a few proof points…
Over the last decades, salespeople often used the power of personality, or the development of a relationship to build trust and heavily influence what a sales prospect would think of the product. In other words, the better a person was at the art of sales, the less the product they were selling even mattered. Hence the phrase, “he can sell ice to Eskimo’s.” It might be true to say that the harder a product was to sell, or the harder it was to get someone to spend a large chunk of money, the more you needed the human element involved in order to influence the prospect into signing the agreement. For example, I spent about three months of my life at 18 years old selling Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door. Now these are good machines that do the job, and they are also very expensive compared to competing products. We sold them door-to-door and it was commonly known that some of the easiest people to sell were those that would struggle the most to afford them. However, these were the people that were easiest to influence from a human level. In fact, one of the top sales guys targeted people living in trailer homes.
The reason this kind of sale worked was because the salesperson could parachute into the lives of the prospects and whatever came out of the salespersons mouth was hard to verify easily. Today, things have changed. Even a person in a trailer home can go online and in an instant type in a product name and see what others have paid for it, how it stacks up against competitors, etc. The reality of where we are headed is that people are becoming less and less willing to be pushed into to making decisions with the only information coming from the sales person. It is just too darn easy to check the Web to gain more information.
This change in human behavior is going to drive us to a world where we still can promote products and services by influencing, but the influence is going to have to be supporting and evangelizing a products strengths, and those strengths are going to have to be supported by information that can be found online. Not only that, people will also be able to verify pricing ranges because buyers and reviewers will post this information so the salespersons ability to unfairly get in the pocket of a prospect will diminish.
I use the phrase “socially facilitated selling” when I talk about how a company must apply social technologies to create an environment where salespeople can have the best chance of closing sales. I use the phrase “product evangelism” as to what sales people will need to do one-on-one with prospects. Product evangelism is the process of being able to use your industry expertise to prove the real assets and benefits of a product or service. These are concepts that sales forces need to understand, and must move towards if they want to succeed at generating revenue in the decades to come.
They must let go of thinking they can socially engineer prospects into buying things with the power of influence – instead of the truth about the products. Yes, traditional sales techniques are going to die out. They will be replaced by a new model of selling in the same way we will be forced to change the ways schools teach, and the ways banks handle our financial services…