Friday, November 19, 2010

Thought of the Day

So I am a fan of Hugh MacLead, who wrote the HughTrain Manifesto in 2005. It was revised recently. (See here or download the PDF from ChangeThis).

Here are a couple of concepts he writes about:

The primary job of any salesperson is not to communicate benefit, but to communicate conviction. (para-phrased)

"Your job is no longer about selling. Your job is about firing off as many synapses in your customer’s brain as possible."

Now when I do sales training, I touch on those topics. Sales is emotional; it is the transfer of enthusiasm from the salesperson to the prospect that makes the sale. There is also a need for conviction from the salesperson that what he is selling will in fact help the prospect.

Then there is the part about asking good open-ended questions. When I talk about a Net-Head or sales training for Hosted PBX or Cloud apps, it is about the questions. There has to be an understanding of the prospect's business and how it interacts with data, voice and Internet, so that the best possible solution can be designed. This is about firing some new synapses.

A final point I like is this:

"Social Media is not about reaching a mass audience. Social Media is not about creating yet another sales channel. Social Media is about allowing the Smarter Conversation to happen." (read more about the topic here.)

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