“Stop promoting yourself and start promoting your customers.” – Chris McNeill in today’s Tip 1281
Do you always promote yourself?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Chris McNeill. Chris is a long-time contributor to the Sales Success Community and serves as a Director of Sales at Infinite Convergence Solutions. Here he is:
Chris McNeill: Hey everyone. Chris McNeill with another Daily Sales Tip. I’ll probably keep doing this until you tell me to stop. Anyway, here is today’s tip don’t promote yourself. Promote your prospects and customers. If you’re in sales, you’re probably in a bit of a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn these days. I love it because it’s a great source of data and insights. Sometimes I hate it because my feed is just full of nothing but sales-related content. Some of it’s helpful, but most of it is just recycled sales advice from some new influencer that thinks they need a side hustle. That’s not to say there isn’t some great content and people on the platform, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.
I want to talk about promoting your customers. What does that mean? Deliver real value. Help them solve their challenges and think in innovative ways. Help your customers excel at their job and just make them a superstar. It’s a pretty simple concept, but the execution can be challenging sometimes, especially at the end of the quarter. I try to boil it all down to putting my customer and his or her needs.
First, I’m not here to make a sale. I’m here to help folks understand if my solution is the best way for their business to address the challenges they’re investing in solving right now. At some point, if I don’t think that’s the case, I need to raise that flag proactively. If I help my customer by not wasting their time or the time of anyone else in their organization, then I’m doing a good job, even if I lose a sale.
If it turns out that I do have the best solution. Then I need to help my point of contact navigate their internal organization for approvals. Typically from three or four different departments plus leadership. None of whom have benefited from being on the multiple conversations I’ve already had with my point of contact and may not even know who my organization is or what problem we’re trying to solve.
So that means I need to help my point of contact be a rock star when describing our solution to folks around the water cooler in the office. I also need to show up to every meeting with my ducks in a row so that my point of contact looks great in front of his or her colleagues.
Finally, I absolutely must ensure that our solution delivers on the commitments that I’ve made along the way, so that my point of contact looks like a star for bringing us into the organization. By putting my customers first, I’m helping them score points with their teams. I’m actively trying to get them promoted because generally, they’ll take me with them.
So that’s today’s tip. Stop promoting yourself and start promoting your customers. I don’t have a side hustle, but you can find me on LinkedIn. Please do. And drop me a note saying you heard this tip. Thanks, everybody.
Scott Ingram: Of course, we’ve got a link to Chris’ LinkedIn profile for you at DailySales.Tips/1281. Go click over there and then be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!