Most business couldn’t function nowadays without some form of technology. Think about how much more efficient we are with communicating using email (you might disagree with this J). Do you really want to walk down the hall to someone’s office, or pick up the phone every time you need to reach out to someone?
What about manufacturing? What if our modern day conveniences were handmade? We’d be spending a lot more for our car, our clothes, you name it. Technology – and automation – have helped us to get more done faster and at less cost.
So why hasn’t this revolution taken place in selling? We are now in an age where it is possible to create a marketing system that generates qualified leads for you, day in, day out, without you spending a majority of your day cold calling.
Peter Drucker once said “the purpose of marketing is to make sales superfluous”. Agree or not, he has a point. If your marketing department is firing on all cylinders, then you’d be handed quality leads whenever you needed them. This is Drucker’s point. Good marketing effectively generates the demand for your product and eliminates you doing much selling at all.
Sure selling is required to move the prospect to ultimately take action. No argument there. But the sales person should not be tasked with the responsibility to find quality leads. This is marketing’s job. Unfortunately, most marketing departments don’t deliver.
Most small to mid-sized companies have marketing departments staffed with a very competent person cranking out four-color brochures, business cards and designing a trade show booth for the show that’s just around the corner. Seldom are marketing departments squarely focused on the ultimate goal which is to identify and qualify leads for the sales team.
So many marketing departments loose site of this fact. They’re only job is delivering qualified leads that generate profitable sales for the company. There are many reasons for this but the reasons don’t matter. The fact is that leads should be flowing and they’re not. So what’s a salesperson to do?
The top sales people understand the gap between marketing and sales and choose to ignore it by taking the steps necessary to generate their own leads. Luckily today this is much easier than even five years ago.
First, every prospect you’ll encounter has first done some measure of web searching trying to solve their pain. It’s just so easy to do. Even for local consumer focused companies such as dentists and auto-parts stores, statistics show over 80% of people start with a web search.
Secondly, it’s much easier for the average person to get in the game. With the hundreds of social networking sites out there – YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Squidoo, Weebly, Viddler, StumbleUpon to name a handful – anyone can jump on and start making their mark on the web at no cost.
This is big because you now become searchable. You’re now on your way to being found on the web . . By participating in some of these online communications, you can now get found, often for little or no cost depending on your content – which is the real currency of the web. So the Internet has changed the dynamics of generating leads and moved that process closer to the sales person rather than the marketing department. The sales pro now has the opportunity to create “lead generation system” using the tools of the web, and moving you closer to Drucker’s premise.
