“You need to ditch the pitch.” – Barb Giamanco in today’s Tip 48.
How do you personalize and create a message that matters for your decision makers?
Join the conversation below and you’ll find the instructions on how to be interviewed in Barb’s Women in Sales podcast.
Barb’s LinkedIn
Barb’s Twitter
Barb Giamanco Website
Conversations with Women in Sales
Women in Sales Hub
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips Podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today we’re celebrating International Women’s Day and hopefully you’ve been enjoying the amazing women in sales we’ve been featuring all week long highlighting Barb Giamanco and the work she’s done today was an absolute no brainer. And I’ll tell you why. Barb heads up Social Centered Selling and is the founder of the Women in Sales Hub Online Community. Her mission is to ignite sales transformation and her book, The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, was the first book written about social selling and the need for sellers to adapt to a modern buyer who expects more. An outspoken advocate for women in sales, Barb created and hosts the Conversations with Women in Sales podcast, the only one of its kind dedicated to becoming the best resource in the world for female sales professionals. In a word, she’s pretty dang amazing, but I’ll let you hear that for yourself:
Barb Giamanco: All right, let’s get to the sales tip. Message really matters and if you want to know why prospects ignore you, well, I’m going to tell you. This is one area I believe that if sellers focus more attention on getting this right, you would have a lot more success reaching your targeted prospects because you know what? That’s the number one complaint I hear from salespeople actually, is that they struggle to get their targeted prospects to respond to them and there is a reason for that. Your message matters today more than it ever has. The struggle doesn’t have to be real. It’s not how you are trying to engage your prospects, whether it’s email, the phone, LinkedIn mail could be your newsletter. It’s what you say in your message. If you insist on doing what you’ve always done, the struggle is gonna feel like a very painful reality for you. What you need to understand is that thousands upon thousands of emails are flooding inboxes of people that you and other salespeople are approaching every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year. It happens the same with phone calls and why is that happening? Like we, your sales leader has a KPI that says you need to make x number of phone calls and send x number of emails. So that’s what you do. You make the calls, you send the emails, often sacrificing quality at the expense of quantity to hit that goal. I talked to hundreds of decision makers in companies all over the world and they all tell me the same thing. They receive hundreds and hundreds of emails and phone calls from strangers with something to sell. Seriously, is there anyone, nobody picks up the phone or responds to any of the voicemails or emails, but they might if and they say they would if you make the message about them. So, personalization at scale is something that’s talked a lot about. Personalization is not saying something nice and then rolling into the same old sales pitch. Here are a few of my personalization tips: for each industry that you serve, determine one to three main challenges that industry is facing. For each company inside that industry that you are targeting, look to see what one to three trends you see on the horizon are that targeted decision makers maybe don’t know about or should know about or do know about and don’t know what to do next. For each decision making role, you’re looking for insights that you can lead with to demonstrate in that first interaction that you know a little bit about the buyer and their business and that you are the rep who can really bring some value to the table. You need to ditch the pitch. Buyers are interested in talking to sellers who can help solve business problems they can’t solve on their own. Initially, they don’t care about the product features or have time for your product demo. They need to know that you can bring some business value to the table. That’s the kind of approach that leads the buyer to say yes to a meeting with you.
I’m Barb Giamanco and you can find me hosting the Conversations with Women in Sales podcasts, other links to connect with me, you can find in the show notes. Thanks again for listening.
Scott Ingram: How do you personalize and create a message that matters for your decision makers? Join the conversation at DailySales.Tips/48, that’s also where you’ll find links to connect with Barb on Linkedin, which you should do right now, as well as links to the Women in Sales Hub and her Women in Sales Podcast. Then if you are a woman in sales who would like to be interviewed on that podcast, there are instructions for making that happen as well. Then come back tomorrow as we close out our special women in sales week. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.