Not news to anybody, but I recently became so fed up with Comcast’s service (It truly is unbelievable how bad it is) I switched to another provider.
Comcast is the classic antithesis of David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Sales & Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business. It appears to me Comcast is still defending the sales & service status quo and they are paying the price. Because I recently read Scott’s book, I could not help but think about my recent, blood-pressure raising, Comcast experience.
For those of you that regularly read my blog you know I disdain the status quo and I am always looking for ways to shake up the status quo in industrial marketing. Many industrial marketers love to defend the status quo, much like Comcast.
Well…maybe not that bad.
When meeting with my customers I often get questions such as, “How in the heck can I keep up with all the changes in the web?”; “It seems like Google changes their algorithm daily. How can I keep up my PageRank?” Or…”How can I, confidently, adjust my marketing strategy to combat all the disruption?”
Currently your biggest enemy for success in industrial marketing is your attitude towards your own status quo.
Early in the Introduction, David Meerman Scott states, “Creating a Facebook page or jumping onto Twitter won’t transform your business. Changing your mind-set to one of understanding buyers and publishing content will,” says Scott in his new book.
As you, I certainly understand how difficult it is to change your attitude about your particularly station in life…and business.
However, for the industrial marketer, it is now critical.
Reading David Meerman Scott’s book can provide the shock treatment…and information that it will take to stay competitive in your industrial market and change you entire attitude towards marketing your industrial business.
Once “shocked” into action, Scott provides many actionable tasks that can help the industrial marketer get unstuck.
Rather than a complete review of the Scott’s book, I thought I would simply provide some of my favorite quotes that relate directly to the industrial market’s status quo.
Chapter One: The Old Sales Model: “Dialing for Dollars”: “We hated cold calling…”dialing for dollars.” But the technique was necessary because in the years prior to the World Wide Web there were few ways a potential client might learn about our company.”
“Unfortunately, many organizations are still operating as if it is 1986, and they continue to focus massive investments on interrupting people with an army of salespeople making cold calls.”
Chapter Two: The New Rules of Sales & Service: “Authentic storytelling sets the tone. People want authenticity, not spin.”…”Content is the link between companies and customers. Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great content.”…”The buyer is now in charge of the sales process, and wants to buy on his or her own personal timetable.”…”Even if you have the simplest company and respond effectively to emails, you’re ahead of 90 percent of your competition.”
Chapter Four: Close the Gap between Sales and Marketing: “Closing the gap between marketing and sales means the marketing staff needs to be the buyer expert, not just the product expert.”
Chapter Six: The Ideal: Agile Sales: “I find it fascinating that many sales directors I’ve met go online regularly to purchase expensive products without talking to a salesperson—a set of golf clubs, for instance—but tell me their market is different and insist the salespeople they manage use the cold-calling, hard-sell approach to sales that they learned in the 1980s.”…”It’s amazing that vice presidents of sales go to the mailroom and systematically throw all the junk mail into the recycle bin without reading it and a moment later march down the hall and insist that the marketing department create a direct mail campaign.” (I actually witnessed this very event a few weeks ago.)
Chapter Six: Big Data Plus Real-Time Technology Drive Sales: “In the emerging real-time business environment, where public discourse is no longer dictated by the mass media, size is no longer a decisive advantage. Speed and agility win.”
Chapter Six: Social Selling & Your Customer Relationship Management: “A salesperson’s personal brand plus their network equals their professional net worth.”
Chapter Ten: Hiring for Social Success: “The old model of a successful salesperson was somebody who was very diligent at dialing for dollars. That person had to be tenacious and able to tolerate many people saying “no” (some with rudeness). With the new approaches of consultative selling, agile sales, and real-time engagement, sales managers need to look for a new set of skills when hiring salespeople.”
Deliver you own blow to the status quo. Get Scott’s book now and begin your own journey.
Changing the status quo is difficult. A good place to start is A Beginner’s Guide to Industrial Content Marketing. DOWNLOAD NOW
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