The Great Social Media Experiment

Partly inspired by Sean McPheat’s book ‘eselling^®’ and partly by my ‘Diary of a Sales Manager’ column on Modernselling.com (all one article of it), I decided to put my money where my mouth is and start the Great Social Media Experiment at the very end of October 2011.

The idea was to use LinkedIn and Twitter to identify prospective customers and to engage them in a non-sales way so that, if and when, they are looking for something I can supply, they are already aware of me.

The Power of How and Why

Have you ever read something that made you say “oh, that’s so obvious now that it’s been stated.  Why couldn’t I see that for myself?”

I recently had just that experience reading Putting Challenger Selling to Work – One on Brian McIver’s blog.

To put Brian’s post in context, if you work in sales and you dabble in social media (you must do, or why else are you here?) you will know that there has been a huge amount of buzz about The Challenger Sale by Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson.  The book (not yet read) is based on surveys of over 6,000 sales reps across geographies and industries.

Price v's Value

I’ve been intrigued by a recent discussion I’ve been following on the Sales Playbook! group on LinkedIn.  (It’s a closed group, so you need to be a member in order to see the full discussion.)  For those of you who are members, the title is “Doesn’t price matter a little bit?”  For the rest of you, this is the scenario:

“I totally understand that it's not about being the lowest price and you get what you pay for and all that. I think it is also true that there is a point where cost outweighs the value or quality.

Case in point, I just got a quote back and found out that my price was literally 5 times more than my competition. I don't know how I am going to justify the additional costs.

Thoughts anybody?”

Business and Twitter

Read an interesting article today on “How Twitter will ruin your Customer Service” but it left me feeling that the author was shooting at the wrong target.  Indeed, this was the gist of at least one of the comments made on the article.

I have participated in a number of similar on-line discussions which ask why PowerPoint is so bad.

Neither Twitter nor PowerPoint is intrinsically bad.  They are tools and, like all tools, they will perform best in the hands of someone who knows how to use them.

This is Your Life

This is the Holstee Manifesto, which I encountered in a distant colleague’s blog for the first time today.  (If you’re interested, here is the blog: http://bsix12.com/  It’s much better than mine!)

OK, so the Holstee Manifesto is not revolutionary nor is it profound.  However in my humble opinion it does encapsulate what life should be about.  So many of us (myself included) spend precious time doing things we don’t want to do, seeing people we don’t want to see and generally letting life, in the grander sense, pass us by.

Of course, for all its apparent simplicity, the manifesto may not be that easy to follow!  For me, the real toughie is “If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV.”  I wouldn’t like to begin to count the hours I’ve wasted watching meaningless drivel because it’s the path of least resistance.

It’s also very easy to say “if you don’t like your job, quit” but not so easy to do if you have a mortgage to pay and you want to eat once in a while!  I’m trivialising for comic effect, of course.  The seed of the idea is the important one.

I guess the whole of the manifesto could be summed up as ‘carpe diem’ but it is stated so much more eloquently and elegantly in these 18 (or so) phrases.

What’s your toughie?  What’s your favourite and why?

If Music be the Food of Life...

Yes, yes, I know.  Apologies to Mr W. Shakespeare for stealing his lines and then misquoting them.

Mrs F and I are the proud owners of a Squeezebox radio which some very good friends bought us for Christmas a couple of years ago.  It pretty much does what it says on the tin “A compact all-in-one network music player—that lets you rock the house with digital music.”

I’ve been listening to it at home today.  I started off listening to Radio Paradise, which is just the best radio station, internet or otherwise, I’ve ever come across.  Reader, get yourself over there and listen!  Your ears will love you forever.

Is Selling about 'manipulating' customers?

I’ve recently been following, and occasionally participating in, the discussion “Is selling about ‘manipulating’ customers?” on the ModernSelling.com LinkedIn discussion group.

There is a fascinating range of opinions centred on the concept of manipulation and whether or not what happens during a sale should be termed manipulation, influence, managing the situation or something else.  I thoroughly recommend reading the piece (it’s an open group so you should have no problem if you’re already on LI) for the very learned and thoughtful approach of the contributors.

It got me thinking along two divergent lines – firstly why selling has such a bad reputation and secondly about life in general and all of the transactions that occur on a day-to-day basis.