The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

We're bringing back a popular feature -- our weekly wrap-up along with the best posts we've read around from around the web this week. Today is pi day (get it, 3.14?) and we're celebrating by eating pi(e) -- how will you celebrate?

This Week at The Center for Sales Strategy

Below are some key pieces of wisdom found within this week's blog posts:

• From The Remediation Myth: Why You Can't fix Weaknesses:
  "We can get ten times better in an area of natural talent, but only ten percent better when we try to improve in area not supported by natural talent."

This is the tenth and final in our series of blog articles related to the findings of our 2013 survey of media sales managers and salespeople. The complete report is available for download here. Some of the major findings simply confirmed what we—and most of you—knew already. But others were unlikely to have been on anyone’s list of guesses as to which challenges, from lists offered in separate questionnaires given to sales managers and salespeople, would have finished near the top once the numbers were crunched.

(By the way, we did not conjure up those potential challenges in a dark room, but rather they were the fruit of 65 lengthy, open-end interviews conducted by our professional staff prior to fielding the questionnaires.)

In this series, we’ve reported specifically on the top four finishers for sellers and their managers. Making the salespeople’s list at #4 was It’s difficult to nail down a clear assignment from the prospect. Would you have guessed that? It’s equivalent to sellers crying out, “Help! I’m not too good at the most important part of my job!”

Think about a typical sales engagement. You’re trying to win the same business that your key competitor is hoping to get their hands on. You spend a massive amount of time and energy trying to prove why your product, service, or company deserves the business over your competitor. In other words, you’re trying to prove you’re better.

Then, when it comes down to the transaction, you learn the prospect is considering both options, and you are tempted—by either the prospect or your own paranoia—to drop your price. 

The other day I was talking to an old friend of mine whose experience is in traditional media. The integration of digital marketing into an overall marketing plan does not come naturally to him. He explained to me that he knew it was important to stay relevant to his customers, but he just didn’t quite understand the potential impact of what he was missing.

I wrote him the next day and shared the following five digital marketing trends to give him insight into the various audiences he is missing out on.

1. Social Media Is Booming With Boomers

The fastest growing demographic on Facebook and Google+ is 45-54; on Twitter it’s 55-64. With business users and the older demographic adopting social media, the marketing opportunities are greater and so are the costs of ignoring social. After all, baby boomers control 70% of the disposable income in the U.S.

It drives me nuts when I see a social media site that’s little more than a Facebook version of a company’s website. Social marketing must be social before it can effectively serve as marketing. Your social presence should inspire topics that are conversation-worthy and related to customers’ needs and the business you are in. It should offer ideas worth talking about (from your customers’ point of view). 

What I Have Learned as a CEO About Engaging Prospects

I have spent nearly all of my adult life as a top-producing salesperson, sales manager, or consultant. For years, I have taught many organizations how to find and engage prospects, and they do very well. But there is one undeniable truth that changes outcomes more than any other when it comes to new business development: having prospects who already know a thing or two about your company.

A prospect who already knows something about your company and how you do business, a prospect who already has genuine interest in buying from you, is much more profitable than the one where you work to create a need for your product. Many of us have seen the now-classic movie, Glengarry Glen Ross where the good leads were allegedly locked in the safe and created much angst among the pressured salespeople.

Advertisers have always been obsessed with measuring the results of campaigns they buy (and, as media veterans reading this know, most have shown a proclivity to pin too much credit or blame on the medium and not nearly enough on the message). For salespeople, the challenge has been manageable in the past because everyone—advertiser and salesperson alike—knew the data was skimpy and shaky.

It’s still shaky at times, but it’s no longer skimpy! Online marketing campaigns of all types automatically generate a sea of data, enough to drown all but the most intrepid analyst. Visits, views, clicks, downloads, form-fills, re-visits, shopping cart additions, shopping cart desertions, everything is tracked, databased, calculated, and reported. The easy availability of online-campaign metrics has raised the bar for all media. More and more, advertisers expect the legacy media to be as accountable as the digital media—to prove their performance—even if they can’t duplicate the density of data. The Great Recession, arriving just as digital-campaign metrics became universally available, made lots of advertisers more cautious and more demanding. With advertisers now accustomed to swimming in this data, the tepid recovery hasn’t tempered their expectations of accountability.

Selling Ads is Increasingly Difficult

It is amazing how often I’ll hear sellers talk about those prospects (and even clients) that absolutely drive them crazy. I’m not just talking about those really demanding customers who expect the impossible or those who expect you to constantly deliver world-class champagne on a cheap-beer budget. I’m referring to those situations where there’s some kind of a personality conflict, or you’re dealing with a person who consistently makes you wonder if you still want to do this kind of work.

If it’s not really worth it, why do you continue to put yourself through it?

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville. My presentation covered the need for sales organizations to rethink the way they generate leads for their salespeople. The painful truth is that most B2B sales organizations rely almost entirely on their salespeople to drum up new business opportunities. As a result, salespeople are spending more and more time trying to find that rare qualified prospect and less time doing what they do best: finding needs and selling solutions.

Google me by my former last name (Kim Willoughby) or search me on YouTube and a former Olympic volleyball player arrested for assault is a top search result. There's also an attorney who seems to have a great reputation in Denver, but let's be honest, you'll remember the Olympic Bully first.