Peady’s Selling Engagement sponsored by IRD Prospector
Welcome to this week’s post on sales and selling success.
These days most media salespeople find their conversations with customers inevitably turn to social and/or digital – particularly when dealing with smaller businesses. Unfortunately, many of those same salespeople don’t have the skills or knowledge to lead the discussions or provide any level of useful advice.
Explaining website best practice, using Google Analytics, reviewing AdWords or Facebook strategies are relatively easy subjects to master and can provide the basis of invaluable feedback from customers (and prospective customers) and potential business opportunities.
Real world situation
Over the past month I have personally witnessed a local sales team go from minimal to above average digital / social media knowledge and dramatically improve their business conversations and engagement levels. And I don’t use the word dramatically without good reason – they have uncovered in excess of 100 new business opportunities in that time!
Consider this difference. Face to face “discovery” meetings running 50-60 minutes because the business owner or senior manager is so involved in the conversation and the media salesperson is asking important and previously “unasked” questions in the digital space. Business men or women granting the salesperson access to their Google Analytics so they can put together a recommendation or asking the salesperson to come back with a proposal.
That sales team is truly disrupting their local market.
Which brings me to Facebook. Many SME’s are still reeling from Mark Zuckerberg’s “meaningful interactions” announcement earlier this year and the subsequent change to Facebook’s algorithms limiting organic business posts – up until that point those connections provided important grass roots contact and interactions.
Apart from that announcement the Facebook news feed algorithm is constantly evolving to provide a better experience, but with 1.98 billion monthly active users it continues to be critical for businesses to have a presence on the platform.
As a salesperson you need to be on top of these and other changes so you can provide a meaningful response to the objection “I’m putting my money into Facebook”. For example, did you know that organic reach for the average Facebook page has dropped to around 4% with experts now predicting a fall to 2%?
Be prepared
As I mentioned earlier “many salespeople don’t have the skills or knowledge to lead digital discussions” but it’s not hard to do. There are plenty of courses and mostly they are free, particularly those from Facebook and Google. Its worth investigating.
Until next week good selling!
About the author
Stephen Pead is a media industry veteran of 30 years with significant experience in direct sales, sales management and general management. He is based in Sydney and specialises in helping SME’s market their businesses more effectively and providing training for salespeople and sales managers.
He can be contacted at [email protected]
