Small Biz Watch: From salesman to movie producer
Is a sales call pointless? That's the obvious contention of Marc Miller, coauthor of the book Selling Is Dead. Miller, who is head of a sales and marketing consultancy called Sogistics, says sales techniques need to change in the Internet age. For a small business, merely visiting and pitching your wares to a potential customer isn't enough, especially since anyone can find out about your products or services on the Web. Instead, salespeople must help customers become more productive and innovative and show how their goods might play a role in that. "Salespeople have to find new types of problems they've never before solved, and they have to help their customers attain objectives that may only loosely be part of their traditional value propositions," Miller writes me in an E-mail. A couple of examples of how to do that:
- A small distributor brings a group of people from several companies it already works with to meet with execs from the distributor's major customers. The purpose: to brainstorm on ways to use technology to increase their businesses.
- A midsize commercial printer coordinates full-day events with major customers during which the printer brings in marketing specialists from other firms to work with their executives.
As Miller explains: "Salespeople will have to be like movie producers. Just as a movie producer pulls together all of the unique casts and crews for each movie, salespeople pull together select groups of alliance partners who possess the necessary intellectual capital for each client situation . . . The end result is that customers will think you're remarkable, and they will pass the story along to others." Is Selling Is Dead worth a look? Business guru Seth Godin thinks so. On his popular blog, Godin writes, "There are very few books that actually think about what it means to sell something. Marc Miller delivers one."