Are Sales People Wired for Social Networking?
Doyle Slayton | Oct 05, 2008 | Comments 22
Are sales people wired for social networking? What a great question! I recently received this email from one of our readers..
Doyle,
I wonder if you have a view on this – I have watched with interest how blogs and online communities for salespeople are developing. I have some concerns because I think sales people have a huge amount to learn from one another yet most blogging – as I track it on Technorati – seems to be about gadgets, tech news and some political stuff. Even the top blogs are only rated in tens of thousands of members. Sales people sharing tips seem to me to be very low BUT you may tell me different. If it is low, what makes it that way? Can it be changed, or are sales people just not wired up or ready to fully embrace the full power of Social Networking?
Regards,
I think this question is best answered by our readers! I’ll provide my own response and share my thoughts on this topic in a follow-up post next week.
What do you think… Are sales people wired for social networking?
Check Out These Related Articles!
Filed Under: Blog • Featured • Fun-n-Stuff • Reader Questions • Sales
I agree but disagree with the article.
Agree: I think many people see blogging and social networking as a function of marketing. Web 2.0 strategies within most companies reside within the marketing or PR department.
Disagree – I use social networking sites to uncover possible leads for future business. One must contribute in order to build trust and engage with possible future clients. I think more sales reps where they have to generate their own needs is realizing the importance of social networking as a result.
Peter and Doyle,
Less than two weeks ago, our director of marketing made a similar statement to our company leaders. His comments were that the overwhelming majority of ideas circulating among the best and brightest people in our company are predominantly operations based, rather than being directly related to increasing sales volume. He pointed out that the vast majority of our company leaders were exceptional salespeople long before they moved up within the ranks of leadership.
It was confusing to him that the best salespeople in the history of our company naturally become fixated on operations once they begin to rise through the ranks. By focusing on operations, they are no doubt delegating their most important roles of sales coaching and training to the far less experienced, and less talented lower level managers.
We’re going through a period of unprecedented growth and success, so it’s not to say that we’re doing things entirely wrong with regard to our management style. However, should we strengthen our core focus on sales and delegate more of our operational tasks, we should see even greater growth than we’re already experiencing.
Operations are easy to understand. They are concrete. They are not abstract. Conversely, sales are complicated and involve personalities, interaction and an understanding of intentions. It is therefore far easier to discuss or present a good operations idea, which often will gain favorable notoriety among the other leaders. Everyone likes saving money, and recognition.
One good sales idea can change the face of a company forever. The greatest operational ideas usually do little more than add a fraction of a percentage to net profit. This is why salespeople don’t discuss sales. They usually don’t have that over the top, earth shattering, evolutionary sales idea that will catch on like a wildfire. Salespeople enjoy recognition, but stick to operations or political talk when they are lacking a truly great, unique sales idea. You can only reinvent the wheel so many times, but when you do everyone notices.
The real challenge is to get people to throw away their insecurities about sounding amateur when brainstorming sales ideas. Setting the tone that “all ideas are good contributions” is probably the best medicine for a company experiencing a small sales ideas funnel.
Making a dramatic impact on a nationally public blog sounds quite challenging. Perhaps you should consider smaller discussion groups with a larger concentration of similar salespersons, and moderate the conversation yourself. I would be willing to bet that you will have extraordinary success, and that you might even come up with that next great idea that changes the face of your company.
It depends on how deep you look. Through some diligent searching, you find that there are small groups, forums and blogs growing in popularity, but the success depends much upon not only the audience but also the person or people behind the blog writing and promoting it. Doyle has done a great job through utilization of social media and his content is golden. If you read through some of his previous posts and comments, I think you will find tremendous sharing of tips, outlooks, and insights.
To address your question a little more directly, sales people are wired to talk, and the good ones listen. Social networking is a good outlet for that, alot of people just don’t know it yet. Some who do, have no idea on how to use it. In sales, I did not immediately see the benefit in social networking, with the sole exception of LinkedIn. Why? I did not see any sharing, just seemed like a lot of ego-based bragging and a lot of people trying to sell me something. If you look deeper (without trying to sell the world) and build a presence, you will find some very informative places where high caliber people share their stories. I suggest LinkedIN to build relationships, Twitter to learn the key players, Facebook is growing in popularity, and find as many forums as you can that deal with sales and sales leaders. There are a ton of them!
It makes sense that the technical community is better wired to using technology that the sales community is. So, I don’t see that we should try to compete with the tech community online, but rather encourage sales people to participate in social networking to sell, learn, and create networks of prospects, fans, and friends. At some point, social networking for salespeople will become the norm, but I think the sales community is still trying to determine how this all shakes out.
Yes! Most salespeople are wired for social networking. What gets in the way is time!
I see salespeople trying to juggle many hats – sales activities, account management, the dreaded sales reporting activities, forecasting, CRM input, etc. What suffers with all the multi-tasking is the opportunity to network and prospect.
The proactive activities get pushed down on the To Do list and never get done. The best salespeople I have worked with have a lot to share and are usually open to learning -which is why they are the best. What they lack is time to:
1. Figure out how to use social networking effectively.
2. Keep up with the blogs and Twittering.
3. Do the research on which blogs and networks are going to work for them.
Whatever we can to do encourage building and using these communities of people who understand how tough a career in sales can be (and how rewarding)will help supply what a lot of salespeople need – a lifeline. Many sales professionals do not have consistent contact with a sales manager or colleagues.
So, like Doyle, we bloggers need to keep making the opportunities to get the discussions started.
It’s all about time! Most of us are on information overload already. We just don’t take the time to exchange sales tips, etc. I could spend all day just blogging, checking on my network, etc. and not get any of the critical things done that bring success in my business.
Sales requires a certain temperament.
If you look at the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (a working of the MBTI), they suppose 16 termperaments. The combinations are Extravert / Introvert, Sensing / Intuitive, Thinking / Feeling, Judging / Perceiving.
I suspect successful salespersons rely on the attributes in the categories of promoter or performer. The common characteristics are Extroversion, Sensation and Perception. They would be of more benefit than introversion, thinking, and judging. Those of us who take the time to put things down on paper or into blogs may lean more towards introversion and thinking, which would make us crafters and composers.
There is a lot of speculation in what I wrote, since I don’t have in depth experience with Keirsey or the MBTI, and none of this is certain. I’d be delighted to see someone pick up the ball and run with this idea in further comments..
Nancy I agree with you. Right now reading this, I am taking some moments (and energy) away from the real (income producting) job. As a relatively inexperienced Social networker, my efforts are more like wandering around a city without a map, but am putting some priority on it for the sake of the bigger picture.
Having said that, I am all for knowledge and ideas-sharing. I recommend Doug Hall’s “Jumpstart Your Brain” as a masterpiece on harnessing ingenuity (creativity) at work.
Yes, but how much more do we observe and learn when we wander around without a map?
This is a really interesting issue and one that we’ve been spending quite a bit of time researching and trying to get our heads around.
Personally I’m very excited about this direction and I’ve been talking to our customers and prospects about this trying to get it onto their radar. I love researching my prospects and customers and using this information to give myself an edge – I guess that’s come from years and years of competing against much larger foes (like Oracle and SAP) – timely relevant knowledge was our competitive advantage and we’d spend hours looking for facts and building this information into knowledge. What we’re seeing now is the power of this technology to do that for us.
I feel we’re in phase 2 of this revolution. The first phase started when Google really got going. Google started the information overload Tsunami and has now swamped us all. What we’re seeing now with solutions like Avitage, MindTouch (their Dekki for CRM is quite amazing), Mzinga, Brainshark etc is really smart application of Web 2.0 into useful tools for our industry.
Where it then gets exciting is how we can use this new information organisation type services with the next generation of CRM/Sales Automation that we’re now seeing – InvisibleCRM, Landslide, and even SugarCRM (the open source leader).
The question is how quickly will we evolve as sales professionals so that we take advantage of these new generation tools?
I think the comment by Rob Lewis is really important – sales people are wired to talk, the good ones listen. Using these tools is another form of listening (read Groundswell, it talks about this concept a lot).
Interestingly, many of us have raised the time issue which I think is one of the key issues for proponents of this new way to address. But maybe evolution will deal with this?
Gadgets are cool and fun, and salesfolk are usually the early adopters of anything that will save some time. But salespeople (not me, the GOOD ones) are networking machines. social networking is just one more opportunity to get to know more people.
As far as technorati[sic] rankings, don’t worry about it. We are a small segment of the population, so our communities may not rank as high. On the other hand, I think I have picked up as much if not more through social networking on the ‘net than I have through regular sales training.
xoxoxo John On Sales
Here we go again. Several comments (Tanis, Nancy and others) talk about whether we have the time. Even the main article talks about whether we, as sales people, are wired correctly.
WHAT A BUNCH OF CRAP! Don’t you realize by now that IT’S NOT ABOUT US! (This has been my main point since contributing to this blog, but it doesn’t seem to be getting through.
Let me say it again. It’s not about us and what we want, it’s about them, our customers and our prospects. If you talk to them, they will tell you whether they give a damn about blogs and social networking and stuff. If they do, then you should start one. If they don’t then forget about it and market to them the way they want to be marketed and sold to.
Back when I was running product marketing at a major software vendor I would routinely ask this question to our customers. “If you were me, the VP of marketing of this company, where would you spend your marketing dollars?”
People LOVED it. They loved putting themselves in the role of the marketing/sales guy. Trust me… people will tell you.
So, let’s get off this self-serving bandwagon and begin to market and sell to our prospects and customers the way they want it!
Best regards,
Bob
Isn’t it also about discovering what the customer needs as well as talking about what the customer wants?
I thought the thrust of the entry was whether we should blog to encourage each other and exchange information and techniques. In this case we are our own customers. Or customers of those providing the social networking.
And then you did contribute in just the way requested by providing a personal story and the results.
Based on the histrionics and your text, I would put you in that Performer category in the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
BTW – I googled Bob Hatcher and came up with a number of entries on social networking sites of course. Are any of them you? And if not, don’t you ever have the need to attract new customers, new employees, new vendors, or your next employer?
Harlan
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against online communities or blogs at all. I was simply trying to convey that it’s not a cookie-cutter world out there. If you’re prospecting I am sure there are types of businesses you can be in where these things work.
I was responding to all the comments talking about how much time we might have to put in.
Sites like LinkedIn are invaluable. But, I don’t do that for prospecting. I do that for networking, to keep in touch with people. To me, there is a huge difference.
BTW, my MBTI is INTJ
You’re an INTJ? So am I. And I am not in professional sales and marketing. I just find myself in the job market regularly and having to ‘sell’ my project plans when I’m working.
This all goes to show you can’t judge a person by a small writing sample. I do think of marketing as the strategic part of sales. I should have used that as a clue in your case. And the judging part was staring me in the face.
If we can get everyone here to admit their MBTI we might get a start to answering the initial question.
Everyone else – If you don’t know yours, go to http://www.keirsey.com/sorter/register.aspx . The test takes about 5 minutes. Come on you extroverts, take charge of this thread once again.
Great answers! I look at this like riding a bicycle. The back wheel represents the operational/technology aspect of our business. The front wheel represents relationships. We find companies have gotten so caught up in technology, production efficiencies, etc; and the back wheel is pushing the front wheel at great speeds. Therefore, we need to get the front wheel in balance. I also find that companies just don’t understand how the important role relationships play in and within our businesses. Relationships allow technology and production to screw up, and our relationship allows us to continue doing business with that customer. Relationships allow management to get a “feel” for our external and internal business. Relationships keep Mama happy at home, therefore allowing us to do what we do. If you think an unhappy spouse doesn’t affect your business, you are mistaken. It also affects the bottom line. I am so passionate about this subject I even wrote a book about it. It’s called “Plug Into People” and you can find it at http://www.tatepublishing.com, amazon.com, or any online bookstore.
And don’t let the front wheel fly off the bike.
Bicycle control comes from observing the environment (external parties, economy, wheel feedback, etc.). The speed you can achieve depends on the slope and the surface. And this implies that an optimal speed is not necessarily the top speed. You may burn out before climbing the hill or crash on the way down. The party who says you can sell as much as you produce is probably wrong. The party who says you shut down the plant does not really get you anywhere either. A detour (producing alternate products or retooling) may get you to the goal faster than waiting for the road to clear.
The whole social networking issue is, in my mind, simply in its infancy stage and we are just developing the potential it has. The comfort level of asking, and commenting about, software, etc. is a comfort zone. Once the process is refined the questions and issues will be more focused on critical issues – unless the competition is listening. Sales people are paranoid – which keeps us on edge.
Good luck,
Rich
Blogs are the opinions of the author, sometimes informed, sometimes not. There is still a need to have face to face interaction. One needs to know the moral and ethical standards of the people they listen to. Remember Hitler, and his ability to influence the masses. Blogging may offer information, but it is true social interaction that will lead to lasting relationships in business and in life. You don’t pay to go to Yale or Harvard for the quality of the education as much as you go to build life long relationships. We need to get the computer out from between people actually interacting and knowing the character of one another. My largest sales in my 31 years of selling still come face to face from customers that I have worked with through thick and thin. I have become their trusted advisor. You need to spend more time with people to sell more.
I think business networking is great. I’m a social butterfly and I know it, however once in a while I have to go back into my cocoon and regroup or work on something other than networking. I make alot of sales through networking and referrals and I also make many referrals because of my networking. I’ve taught on networking at my current job and believe there is a skill to networking and it must be purposeful.
Many times I’ll attend an evening function only to see the same people sipping the same alcoholic drinks while I’m looking for the few new people and keeping my right mind by not drinking and using the time to actually make good contacts with whom I can follow up the next day.
Oh, I don’t spend money on networking either. BNI and such are great, however, there are plenty of other means that aren’t so expensive. I like keeping my money!
Lisa
You may want to check out http://www.salescircles.org. I heard they just launched a beta
Lisa
Hi. What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.
I am from Italy and also now’m speaking English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Cheap airline tickets! Save up to with discount bargain airfares.”
Thanks for the help
, Flinn.