By all measures, 2019 will likely be remembered as a very strange year that capped a very strange decade. The Great Economic Recession that kicked off the ‘10s displaced millions of global workers, leading to a tech boom as AI, ML, and RPA rushed in to fill the knowledge worker vacuum. It was a decade that was great to us in tech, and perhaps not so great to finance, legal, and heavy manufacturing.
From a sales perspective, the 20s will be a boon for reps in forward-thinking organizations who are able to innovate faster than their closest competitors while creating value for their customers, partners, and employees. Acquisitions will continue as IPO’s sputter; this means that front line sales reps will need to continuously expand their networks to avoid being labeled as redundant.
We’re in for an amazing ride this decade as technology finally races beyond the pace car of hype. Sales will continue to evolve as early adopters set the bar on customer expectations, forcing laggards to keep up, change, or go out of business. I’ll be writing a series of blogs over the coming months on how front-line sales reps can adapt in the ever-changing environment.
First up: Selling in the Age Where Everyone Is Up in your Business
A few weeks ago my hometown newspaper, The Boston Globe, breathlessly headlined “No trick: Wayfair creeps customers out with new service calls” (Nov 1, 2019). I don’t think it’s headline news at this point that every time we click a mouse or glance at a Facebook ad for more than one second, we are being tracked and that interaction sold. For the most part that data has been sitting on a cloud, being leveraged to serve us up targeted ads. It’s why when we Google “best reusable water bottles” we are subjected to nothing but Hydroflask ads for the next two weeks.
This is Kindergarten Marketing 101. Top of the funnel Google searches at some point lead to revenue. Sure, you could ask the person riding next to you on the subway why they like their Yeti. Additionally, one could also spend a leisurely afternoon at the library pouring through Consumer Reports searching for the Holy Grail among Holy Grails: a well-designed metal flask that keeps water cold and tea hot.
However, that would require actually talking to people or leaving the house. Why do that when Google can get you an answer in 0.74 seconds? We are in an age where we are trading convenience for privacy and by and large, most of us are a-ok with that.
Wayfair took that one step further by pairing their Big Brother tracking software with information they already have in their CRM to identify individual customers who visited their website. Rather than serve them up ads or issuing endless “Did you want to purchase that couch?” spam e-mails, they had reps pick up the phone and call these potential customers in an attempt to close the sale.
Like all Boston Globe articles, the gold in this report was in the comments, which were as harsh as they were unanimous. In perhaps a Globe first, almost every commenter felt the same way: cold calling a prospect based on browsing behavior is Creepy AF.
This was an exercise, no doubt, dreamed up by some executive in marketing with zero B2C sales experience. Wayfair didn’t reveal if having reps cold call was successful, or how much additional revenue was created by this campaign. We are living in an era where front line sales reps have access to enormous amounts of information that they need to qualify a prospect and gauge their buying behavior before an outbound interaction even takes place. However, just because you have the ability to do something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. I honestly feel bad for those reps who were told to make calls and were likely on the receiving end of some very awkward conversations with some very upset prospects.
Customer data that used to cost time and money is now widely available and often for free. Rather than pick up the phone and asking to speak to the person who was in charge of buying office equipment, we ask for a specific person. We also know what that person looks like, roughly how old they are, where they live, where they went to school, and which common connections we have that I could perhaps leverage. They say in the courtroom a lawyer never asks a question that they don’t already know the answer to. Having information about a prospect is useful, but it isn’t a substitute for creating a human connection. However, that connection will not happen if you blurt out that you know they’ve visited your company’s website 12 times in the past 2 days.
This type of in-depth customer information has always been the missing link to what every sales organization is really after: mass personalization at scale. Identifying the right buyer with the right offer at the right time. Imagine knowing with absolute certainty that the only people you called on were pre-qualified executives who were looking specifically at the solution you were selling. We could spend all day every day talking to real buyers instead of wasting cycles with un-qualified prospects who have no need, budget, or authority to engage with you.
Like everything else in life, it’s all fun and games until the government gets involved. Not to be out-regulated by the European Union’s GDPR, California’s roll-out of CCPA next month will be a game changer, impacting how every outbound sales rep across North America prospects. For the time being we’re right back to where most of us never left: being a knowledgeable, polite, non-creepy professional who is there to partner if and when needed. The backlash over how this type of data is collected and monetized is real and if you don’t believe that I’m almost certain that one of Wayfair’s friendly reps can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.