Business to Business as a Small Business
Business to Business as a Small Business
Business to Business as a Small Business
It's Not Next Tuesday, It's Not After Your Grandma Visits...
It's now. Get it done. Let your competition email the prospect two days late. Let your competition be the ones taking the brunt of a bad economy.
As I transition from the day to day recruiting, I told my Managing Director, Alison Ringo that managing is first and foremost about producing faster, better and smarter than anybody in the industry.
You could be the Michael Jordan of management, but at the end of the day, if your team is not finishing deals, it doesn't matter. Our firm calls it "a sense of urgency." If deals begin to linger, they don't get done.
Many vendors come to my office and do an entire song and dance only to have me call them five days after the service was to hear a shocked, sometimes defensive response because I candidly asked where the results were.
With these types of business professionals, the product or service comes snail mail from Montreal. Though, interestingly enough, the invoice happens to connect within seconds.
Who can blame them? It's status quo to walk into an office, give an entire presentation, receive a contract and / or check, then disappear for 4 days. The answer is nobody can blame them, but many could begin to look elsewhere.
Though, maybe they're busy with other clients?
Then this should be stated or they shouldn't be meeting with me. Companies implode this way. Honest, intelligent sales and business professionals set expectations and try to adhere to a rigid timeline.
When a vendor sets client expectations, they have a much better handle on the situation. This is where real estate sales professionals fall short. Instead of showing the potential buyers homes in their price range, they put the buyer in charge.
Once the buyer is in charge, they lose all loyalty to that broker and see whether they can "have it their way."
The sense of urgency is also heightened by the fact that the internet has made nearly every product or service a commodity. The competition on U.S. soil is broad enough, but now many product and service based companies are competing on price thousands of miles away while competing with personalized attention right here.
For many companies, it has become a war that must be fought on both fronts. While U.S. soldiers may lose their lives, the stake isn't that big, but the slow, somewhat lazy business development associate can watch his or her child's tuition savings go bust all while they are Tweeting useless information to people who read useless information.
Sales doesn't have to be as hard as people perceive it to be. If you were to tell a sales professional 30 years ago that he could close deals simply by typing a sentence or two, he would probably be turned off by the lack of communication, but heavily intrigued by the ease it takes.
I'm sure they wouldn't mind a Tweet every now and again and a liquid lunch to go with the iPhone.
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