Lots of interesting comments from my last blog on the Rolling Stones. Everything from “You’re showing your age”, to “How can you put the Stones ahead of the Beatles…Bruce…Zeppelin…Hendrix…Black Eyed Peas...and so on?” Since I wanted to get everyone thinking about how to keep themselves and their sales personas young, it looks like from all of the emails that I received that I hit a cord. Sometime this fall, I’ll follow up with my favorite/most successful individual artist. Someone who, like the Stones, is highly successful, always on the edge and keeps reinventing themselves...but is much younger.
I was talking with a beach buddy of mine the other day about this reinventing thing. An accomplished marketing guy, an entrepreneur who began his own successful market research firm after working with the big boys in NYC and a deep-thinking kind of guy, he and I got into a discussion about today's rapidly changing world of marketing today. Bottom line of that heady discussion as I conducted field research on a fantastic and cloudless beach day was that clearly, the world of marketing is at the forefront of reinvention, innovation and pretty much rethinking all of the rules. Is marketing dead like last week’s Harvard Business Review suggests? Absolutely not, since, as salesguys we always are in desperate need of fresh leads, we need a brand behind us, and quite frankly we’re totally helpless without the right kind of sales tools-all the primary responsibilities of Marketing.
As a result, the conclusion of my field research on the beach last week ended in my takeaway that marketing is more vibrant and even more enlivened today than it has been since the early days of TV, focus groups and consumer polls, largely due to the fact that everything is in flux and most of the old rules have been trashed.
This, of course, got me to thinking for the rest of last week about equally vibrant changes in the new world of Sales. Maybe not as visible as marketing’s use of online apps and Twitter feeds, but the world of Sales has been going through a dynamic shift. If Sales 1.0 was relationship selling, which truly is largely dead today, then the still unfolding world of Sales 2.0 is about Solution Selling, Process Management, highly integrated CRM, metrics, equations and mobile technology. So, in the spirit of reinventing and rethinking, the question is what’s next? As a firm, we’re deeply rooted in the strategies, tactics and techy tools of Sales 2.0. We not only drink that Kool-Aid, we stir it up, and in many cases, create entirely new flavors. We love drawing double helixed sales funnels and taking out our calculators to figure out the waterfall math, but what if there were to be a giant next step not in the evolution of sales, but in the total reinventing of sales? BTW, Gartner projects that by 2020, 85% of all B2B transactions will occur without talking to a human. What's that going to look like for you 8 years from now?
If I were a true trusted advisor, and my predominant skills set were my overall business management experience, my financial acumen and my ability to facilitate process, people and products between my company and the senior management of my customers, then I would discover business opportunities that were mutually important to both of us at a time before there was an actual need.
I need to get back to the beach this afternoon, do some more field research and think through this some more because once Labor Day comes, I’m back at it at full speed with overbooked schedules and 18 hour days. In the meantime, maybe you can give me your own thoughts on any of the following:
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