I had an early morning dream today. I was demonstrating a conventional outbound sales call to my team. There was an unknown prospect with whom we dabbled across challenges of objection handling, assessing the need, probing a possible solution and a closure with a meeting.
Indeed it was a dream. Rarely do we have such sales calls these days.
Technology, Changing marketing landscape, Evolved consumer, misuse of mobile phone as a pester power are some of reasons ascribed to the death of a sales call.
However what pushed me to write this blog post is to reminisce about the changing definition of sales and the way digital inbound sales is bringing a demise of many soft skills which we picked up while dabbling in in-person/telephonic sales calls.
Cut to today’s consumers. They hate to be sold. however everyone likes to buy.
Part reason for this is that we have been exposed to incessant telesales and messaging on mobile which has put us averse to any proactive pitch or sales conversation, we are done with it.
So how do we buy – We search.
We seek what we want and in the process a help is welcome, but we do not like someone selling anything without me asking for it. And this is where the conventional sales process lost out, cause it often ignored the part of aiding the search process. Old school sales would “invest” enough time on assessing a customers needs and curate a pitch which was sort of aiding the search process.
Good old days when mobile was not so permeated into personal lives people used to listen to the sales calls cause the person on other line would do enough homework on prospecting the customer. Assess his needs, his search queries, in an offline mode but mapping his/her marketing exposure, media spends, competition set and then make a compelling proposition about why the offer we make is a compelling one.
The joy of doing all the heavy lifting of customer research to pre empt his/her “search” needs and to place a solution which serves his her needs is what the old school sales calls were all about.
Besides it also taught a very important lesson in articulation and communication skills – body language, voice modulation, tonality, dressing up for the meet, mannerism, all these are but soft skills which made a complete professional. I do believe that there was a story in every sales pitch and these calls used to be so much of a learning ground on how to be good at convincing sales pitch.
Unfortunately the digital sales , inbound sales has made the soft skills redundant. The exposure to a client on a in person sales call or even a telephonic conversation are forgotten art. It is now replaced with precision targeted search ads, better prompts, more media amplification but somewhere are we not missing the honing of soft skills needed to excel in any marketing/sales front.
There is a reason why I dreamt of it – It was but a dream.