“There’s always been a debate – do you invest in the idea or the person?” said Tom Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist, at AOL’s TechCrunch show earlier this month. “I feel you invest in the idea because bad people don’t have good ideas,” Perkins said. “That’s a very simple formula. When I used to look at business plans, I would look at the back pages and if the numbers were big, I’d look at the front to see what kind of business it was. Pretty sophisticated.”
I thought of this quote reading an interview yesterday with Daniel Pink, the author of To Sell Is Human,” in The Washington Post. Asked what the hardest sell is, he responded, “It’s harder to sell a really bad idea than a really good idea. I think that’s always been true, but I think it’s become even harder to sell a really bad idea today because you’re so easily exposed.”
He said that we have gone from a world of “information asymmetry”—where the seller always had more information than the buyer—to information parity. So “you have to take the high road: be more honest, more direct, more transparent.” Customers’ ability to “talk back” and “do battle” has changed the landscape, Pink added.
That landscape will be explored further by SIPA at its Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, Dec. 11. Fortunately for attendees, Bobby Edgil, BLR’s director of sales, and Lexie Gross, BVR’s VP of sales, will return to lead what was a very well-received Pre-Conference Workshop last year in Miami titled, Sales Management for Online Publishers. This truly is a workshop. Gross and Edgil are not theorists; they are doers.
They believe that your best practices should be shared among all of your marketers and salespeople. Whether that happens during meetings or other in-house communications doesn’t matter as much as that it just happens. Edgil told how customer service and sales are now side by side at BLR—to “make sure the managers get along and communicate.” It’s not ideal if your customers make a purchase and then hit a roadblock on how to use it. Gross also emphasized the importance of communication vehicles, one being customer surveys which she uses as a tool for product development and referrals. Another being hand-written notes.
In his interview, Pink also talked about the value of good communication. He has three new ABCs to replace what he calls the outdated ones of Always Be Closing. “Attunement: Can you get out of your head and into someone else’s head, see their point of view? Buoyancy: Buoyancy is staying afloat in what one salesperson I interviewed called ‘an ocean of rejection.’ Clarity: being able to curate, distill, make sense of information, and identify problems people didn’t realize they have.”
Pink has strong feelings on who makes the best sales people. He believes that the idea of the extrovert naturally being best “is fundamentally not true. The best people are what researchers call ambiverts. Like ambidextrous, they’re in the middle: a little bit introverted, a little bit extroverted. Research shows that most of us are ambiverts. Some of us are very strong introverts, some of us are very strong extroverts—but very strong extroverts and very strong introverts aren’t good at sales.”
He also advises you to look for people who are confident. But while saying “I am awesome” and “I got this” is better than not doing anything at all, he would like to see more self-interrogative talk from sales people like, “Can I do this?”
“Questions elicit an active response.” Pink said. “In answering your question, you prepare yourself. You go over your game plan. You say, ‘Yeah, I can do this. Last time I did it, but I was a little nervous and talked a bit too fast, so I am going to slow down.’ You are preparing. You are like an athlete at batting practice before the game.”
And you look for good ideas to take a swing at.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline
Luis Hernandez is Vice President of SIPA. Follow him on Twitter at