Our world of selling is closed off from other areas of business
that continue to adopt and embrace new, efficient ideas. I was
reminded of this recently while re-reading Seth Godin's
"Permission Marketing." Here's a book that was intended for
business owners and marketing executives, yet it provides a
much-needed dose of common sense that would be of great benefit
to sales organizations, especially sales managers, who continue
to cling to very old, and, in their minds, very right, ideas.
Unfortunately, our brave new world has made these old ideas very
wrong.
Seth Godin talks about Interruption Marketing versus Permission
Marketing. Interruption Marketing is traditional advertising that
interrupts your day in an attempt to get your attention and sell
you something. In other words, it is the marketing equivalent of
Cold Calling. Permission Marketing is systematically getting
prospects to give you permission to present to them. In other
words, it is marketing's equivalent of what I teach salespeople
to do. In the book, Seth uses the metaphor of someone trying to
get married to describe the flaw in Interruption Marketing, or
Cold Calling. The bachelor goes into a singles bar and asks every
woman in the place to marry him. When they all say no, he blames
his clothes, buys a new suit, and tries again at another bar,
only to fail again and again, just like a cold caller.
Are you getting the point he tries to make in that story? Think
about it. A salesperson spends weeks cold calling with dismal
results. The salesperson goes to the sales manager for advice on
what to do differently to start getting results. A conversation
ensues about what the salesperson is doing. A lot of old ideas
begin to surface. Ideas such as "Initial Benefit Statement,"
"Elevator Speech," and other concepts that once upon a time were
the right answers, but have since become very wrong answers.
Working on these things is the equivalent of the man in the story
blaming his failure on the suit, changing into a new suit, then
going to a different singles bar to do it all over again.
With the business world in its present state, I really don't see
how salespeople can afford to keep fooling away their time on old
ideas that were once right but are now fatally wrong. It is this
very feature of capitalism that is causing salespeople, managers
and organizations to fail in record numbers. Capitalism is
essentially "creative destruction." In other words, capitalism is
a perpetual cycle of destroying old, less-efficient businesses
and ideas and replacing them with new, more efficient ones.
People and companies are clinging to old, obsolete ideas and are
being dragged down to failure by them. Yet they still won't let
go. I think the reason they can't let go is simply because it
wasn't all that long ago that they really did have the right
answers. It reminds me of a story I once heard about Albert
Einstein when he was a professor. One of his student assistants
who was preparing for an incoming class said, "Professor
Einstein, what test are we giving them?" To which Einstein
replied, "The same test we gave them last week." Bewildered, the
student assistant replied, "But Professor Einstein, we already
gave that test." Einstein simply said, "Yes, but the answers are
different this week."
The bottom line is that the answers are different. The rules have
changed. Time is running out for those who do not adapt to the
new rules. As Napoleon Hill put it so well, "Whenever a nation,
a business institution, or an individual ceases to change and
settles into a rut of routine habits, some mysterious power
enters and smashes the setup, breaks up the old habits, and
lays the foundation for new and better habits."
If you're not achieving the sales success you desire, perhaps it
is time for you to lay the foundation for new and better habits.
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