“The first thing that you need to do is that you need to brush your teeth and get rid of your commission breath. ” – April Palmer in today’s Tip 740
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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 April Palmer who is a Fractional CRO for StartUps at Pivot and she sent me this super fun bio: April’s not really good at anything in particular but is better than the average mermaid at a lot of things. She uses her multipotentiality to help entrepreneurs ameliorate their revenue growth processes. Studying failure’s her jam and she runs a weekly LinkedIn live called 15MinuteFuckUps where professional flubs are celebrated, and somehow I managed not to flub any of that. Here she is:
April Palmer: You ever walked into work, sat down at your desk, and the first thing that happens as the you are blindsided by a pitch slap. And no I’m not talking about what happened that time, that you knew your leftover fish in the office microwave. Candidly, you got what was coming to you. What I’m talking about is when you open your email, your voicemail, or your LinkedIn, and you are met with a message that says, “Hello, fill in blank here. Can you please direct me to the decision-maker to buy this solution to a problem that I don’t even know that you have? Thanks, slimy salesperson.” Well, we’ve all had those and they’re really annoying, but let’s be honest. Look in the mirror you’ve sent them to.
I have, in fact, recently I’ve sent people, emails, apologizing for being a pitch slapper. Now we’ve been told in the sales world that that is the way to do it. Just send out as many emails as possible. Use your auto-fill. Thousands of emails will result in at least a hundred responses, which will result in 20 meetings, which will result in one close. And so if you want to meet your goals, you need to send out 40,000 emails a year. Well, I’m here to tell you that that is not the way to get customers that will be with you for life, and also refer you to other people. The best way to do that is to build authentic connections. After all the old adage people buy from people they like is actually true.
So how do you do this? Well, my opinion is that LinkedIn is the best place for this. So when you sign in to LinkedIn, in the morning, the first thing that you need to do is that you need to brush your teeth and get rid of your commission breath. Don’t sign into LinkedIn, looking for business, sign in to LinkedIn, looking to build a network filled with people who can either connect you with people who want to buy your product, or who will look at you as a trusted person. They like best in order to make you a vendor for them.
Now, how do you do that? There are a couple of ways. The first is that once you identify the people who would be your potential buyers, you don’t send an email telling them what you do. You don’t send a connection request asking if they want to buy from you. First thing you do is spend a couple of days looking at what they’re posting and what they’re liking on and interacting with them. Like the posts that they like, comments on it say, “Oh, this is amazing. This is really insightful. I never thought of this.” Ask questions or if they post an article about an achievement that they’ve had or something else that they find interesting, not only should you like it, but also make a comment that feels like something that you would say in real life.
So don’t just hit like and say, “Congratulations.” if you scroll through all of the comments, you’re going to be in the, you know, lumped in with all of the other people who want to sell to them and do that. So come up with a comment that’s like, “Wow, this is incredible. Your team must have worked for a really long time to achieve this.” Or “I didn’t even think that this was possible. How did your team get from the idea to the actual solution and implement?” This is something that you would do in a real conversation and you can do this on LinkedIn.
Second, make sure that you’re connecting them with other people who might be a great resource for them. It’s super easy. Just tag them in one of their posts and say, “Hey, I saw that you posted on this the other day too. Maybe there’s some symmetry between your goals.”
And third, if you come up with an article that is flowing through your news aggregator, that might be of interest to them, DM it to them and say, “Hey, I know that you posted about this the other day, thought that you might find this interesting.” Notice none of those are asking for a sales call. None of them are asking them to buy from you, but you have to make deposits in order to make withdrawals. In this case, you are building up social currency that you can then call on later on to have an actual sales conversation or discovery conversation with them. So that’s my LinkedIn tips for not being a pitch slapper and for getting rid of commission breath. Good luck!
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with April on LinkedIn and to sign up to share your professional failure on 15MinuteFuckups (which is spelled out, by the way, I’m just trying to keep the show clean so you can listen to it around the kiddos), just click over to DailySales.Tips/740.
Once you’ve done that be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!