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13 Sep 2010
This is the fourth in a series of articles on how thought leadership underpins the new sales approach.Type ‘sales mistakes’ into Google and it will spit out close to seven million articles. Everyone, it seems, has advice on how to avoid the many and various sales traps that await the unwary sales person.
There is a way to avoid these, have your company develop a strong thought leadership point of view. Below I touch on some of the more popular sales pitfalls and identify how thought leadership can overcome these:
1. Not understanding your prospect – is the death knell of the sale, however, used properly, thought leadership can take you well beyond a superficial understanding of the challenges and issues your prospects face and provide you with deep, evidence-based insights into these and other aspects of their business/sector they will find very useful.
2. Not offering real value – A thought leadership campaign, one that really does aim to provide your customers and prospects with valuable information, overcomes this very easily. In the process it positions you as the ‘go to’ expert in your field. Ultimately prospects seek you out for your knowledge into their issues. There’s no better way to fill your pipeline with qualified leads.
3. Not providing them with enough information – if your sales team is only relying on product or service information they’re going to face an uphill battle. On the other hand your thought leadership strategy should generate focused, customer-centric content to help you avoid introducing product or service talk too early in your client conversations. Providing them with insights into an area of their business or sector positions you as a trusted advisor in that area. Only once you have chatted about these issues do you need to provide the solutions-based product and sales material.
4. Talking too much about your product or service – we all know that feeling, the more you push your company, your product or your service the more you see your prospect’s eyes glaze over. Why? Because it’s not about them it’s all about you.
Good thought leadership content, on the other hand, will arm you with insights about their sector or an issue/challenge in their business that can become a game changer for them and for you. The conversation is all about them and how you can help solve their issues.
Many experienced sales people do this as a matter of course but there aren’t many that do it as part of a larger company-led thought leadership campaign.
5. Not asking the right questions – we all know good selling is about getting them talking. Here’s the great thing about good thought leadership material – if it has been properly researched and if it touches the lives of your prospects you will have wealth of discussion points and areas around which to ask questions. Not only will this display your deep knowledge of their sector but you will learn a whole lot more about the company which will help further for relationship building as well as identifying potential weak spots to assist you closing the sale.
6. Not building a relationship before trying to ‘sell them’ – you can easily kill the sale by rushing the ‘sell’ before you have built trust. Fortunately, if you have developed great thought leadership content and you shared it readily, you would have established yourself as an expert in your field. This investment in establishing trust through thought leadership will help underpin all sales into the future.
7. Not maintaining the relationship – how many times are customers left to their own devices post the sale? The great thing about good thought leadership content is it is regularly updated therefore enabling you to keep in touch with your current and past customers with stuff they find useful. When they are ready to buy again you are their first port of call and they are psychologically vested in your brand already.
While I know there are many more deadly sins for sales people, I wanted to focus on what I believe are some of the key ones. Ones where a strong, customer-centric thought leadership campaign can make a massive difference to a company’s sales approach and the relationship it has with its customers and its prospects.
Elsewhere in this blog you will find articles offering advice on how to arrive at a thought leadership position as well as how to take your thought leadership proposition to market.
If you have witnessed the power of using thought leadership as your sales driver, please let us know how it worked/is working.
3 Responses to “Avoiding sales’ seven deadly sins – thought leadership”
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Craig, you could make a similar case regarding many other types of communication. Most notably, anything involving social media — if you jump too quickly to asking for referrals, or if you only talk about yourself, or if your social conversation is excessively banal, you’re losing the war.
Good stuff, mon ami.
Sean
@commammo
Sean, you’re right, yet despite this, a lot of marketing, advertising, PR campaigns still focus heavily on the product or the service.
Doesn’t the fact that The Economist which actually has a thought leadership sales team said in an editorial this week
“All consulting firms seek to provide what they annoyingly call “thought leadership”
mean that this concept is already obsolete?