What Are the Biggest Mistakes Sales Professionals Make While Trying to Reach New Customers?

At the beginning of this month, I had the chance to speak with Shawn Casemore about his recently published book entitled The Unstoppable Sales Machine: How to Connect, Convert, and Close New Customers. His book addresses the shifts sales professionals and their organizations must make for introducing modern sales strategies. It provides insights and proven strategies for business owners, sales executives, leaders, and professionals -- anyone who desires to create a rapid and sustained increase in their sales without investing significant time or money. 

During our conversation, I asked Shawn: “What are the biggest mistakes sales professionals currently make while trying to reach new customers?” Here is his complete answer:

There is only one mistake sales professionals make while trying to reach new customers or clients – they give up.

A recent Gartner Study has outlined what sales professionals have noticed for years. Buyers spend less time connecting with sales and more time researching their ideal solution.

This continuing shift results in many buyers not engaging with sales until they believe they have a need. This results in one of three possible scenarios for sales -- They must contend with buyers who:

• Engage before they begin researching, with no intention of buying.
• Engage while researching and never circle back to confirm their decision.
• Do not engage as their need isn’t yet clear or urgent.

Unfortunately, experiencing any of these three scenarios can result in sales giving up on the pursuit and conversion of their prospect.

Instead, sales professionals must be more strategic about pursuing new buyers to build trust and curiosity. The first three steps to take in accomplishing this are:

1. Too many sales professionals find a new lead and pursue them aggressively, only to taper off their efforts within the first two weeks after no response. Instead, sales should slowly build outreach, increasing your buyer’s attention and creating the perception that you have something interesting to share.
2. Studies have repeatedly found it takes between 8 to 20 touchpoints to get buyers’ attention. As a result, outreach strategies must consist of at least 20 touchpoints if there is ever an opportunity to connect with the buyer.
3. Many of the sales teams I work with use one primary form of communication - email. Buyers are overwhelmed with emails today, and increasingly complex spam filters are removing more unwanted emails from their inboxes. Instead, sales professionals should use various methods to reach buyers, including direct mail, telephone, video, and social media. 

The only thing to give up when pursuing buyers is old methods of prospecting that are no longer relevant.

What do you think of Shawn’s perspective? Have you or your company experienced these scenarios with potential customers? If so, have you incorporated any of Shawn’s solutions? What other solutions have you tried?

The Tools of Startup Organizations -- How Do They Benefit Performers, Artists, Entertainers, and Creatives?

In June, Paula Landry published a unique book entitled Applying Entrepreneurship to the Arts: How Artists, Creatives, and Performers Can Use Startup Principles to Build Careers and Generate Income. This practical book puts successful startup tools in the hands of creators: performers, artists, entertainers, creatives, and media makers seeking to launch like a business and generate more income.

When I recently spoke with Paula, I asked her: “Why are the tools of startup organizations important to performers, artists, entertainers, and creatives?” Here is her complete answer:

The tools of startup organizations are important to performers, artists, entertainers, and creatives who often battle feelings of overwhelm and self-doubt in addition to limited resources. Like all entrepreneurs, creative people must stay lean, move quickly, and keep DOING while learning. This avoids analysis paralysis and generates results. Creative people who want to generate more income and success now have a path to entrepreneurship specifically adapted to their unique skillset.   

Entrepreneurship for artists is a process of discovery that includes: 

• Planning – defining a goal.

• Time to build and test – figuring out what works for you. 

• The process of creating with constraints – to stay fast, focused, and frugal. 

• Bravery to share with awareness – customer feedback helps you improve.  

• Committing to generating results with your launch – gathering data to learn from. 

• Time allocated to manage your venture and analyze results – to understand your customers and improve your offering!  

Applying Entrepreneurship to the Arts: How Artists, Creatives, and Performers Can Use Start-up Principles to Build Careers and Generate Income translates startup processes – ideation, testing, marketing, prototyping, as well as legal and financial management – shaped into a creative approach. This work is not exclusive to artistic talents; it’s inclusive, building upon the artistic skillsets. Why are there so many new, Lean tech companies that startup, launch and generate revenue quickly? The path and workflow have been clearly defined, articulated, and demonstrated. Creative ventures are similar to startups and it’s possible to utilize those tools, now adapted for the creative community.  

If you’d like to learn more about the startup concepts and frameworks in Applying Entrepreneurship to the Arts, visit StartupTools4Artists.com and buy the book today. 

What do you think of Paula's ideas? As a creative, do you think startup tools used by organizations are applicable to you and your business?

Can Lean and Agile Techniques Be Applied to Sales?

In April, I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Jeavons shortly before the publication of his new book, Agile Sales: Delivering Customer Journeys of Value and Delight. Brad's book is the first to address incorporating enterprise excellence (Agile/Lean) into sales. Organizational excellence journeys have not included sales teams up until now. Brad's book provides a proven step-by-step approach for integrating Agile/Lean practices into sales to amplify customer experience and sales-team performance. The book contains many case examples from companies achieving amazing results from integrating agile into their sales teams.

During our conversation, I asked Brad what results have been achieved by applying Agile/Lean techniques for sales. Here is his response:

The best example I have seen is a retailer rocketing from 0% sales growth year on year to a growth of 70% year on year. I have seen sales teams in a highly commoditized market elevate their approach and bring value back into their dealings with customers. They went from 2% growth year on year to over 15% year on year with a 10% elevation in gross margin. The results are amazing and speak for themselves. My book Agile Sales provides good detail to help an organization bring agile into their sales team and optimize their results.

In addition, I followed up with: Why does Agile/Lean work well in sales teams similarly to operational teams? 

Agile and Lean philosophies share many common beliefs, tools and techniques. They both help people to collaborate, innovate, and amplify performance. The role that people are working in does not matter; people are people in operations as they are in sales. The Agile and Lean approaches to excellence are proven to help in sales as much as operations. Agile lends itself to sales as it evolved through major global technology organizations adopting more office-based practices. I made this connection several years ago after initially learning and applying Lean practices. I moved into an executive role within the organization I was working and started to work with my sales leaders and team members to apply Agile/Lean techniques. The results we saw were amazing. I genuinely believe that Agile can help a sales team optimize their results.

Throughout the book, I give this evidence -- analyzing many successful organizations that have applied Agile/Lean techniques to their sales teams and customer engagement approaches. I describe how all levels of an organisation can sustain their energy and effort on their key customers, how they can focus on what is most important and establish a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and ultimately, performance.  Agile Sales provides many practical examples of how agile concepts have amplified customer experience and sales team performance. I have worked to make it easy for the reader to take the learnings and apply them to their organization.

The current environment requires us to think differently and pivot for future success. Agile Sales is a must-read for anyone directly involved in or leading sales teams. It provides ideas to help sales teams get back in the game, deliver greater value and delight and amplify performance and results.

Sales improvements will help organizations survive and thrive for the future, which may prove more vital than purely operational improvements.

What do you think of Brad's perspective? Have your sales teams applied any Agile or Lean techniques? What have the results been?