Why Change Selling Blog

Selling in the post COVID era

This article will be of interest to salespeople conducting remote calls, sales leaders, sales enablement leaders and leaders of technical pre-sales teams who want to improve outcomes from every remote selling meeting.

Do you attend B2B technology tradeshows? If you do, please answer the following questions to put you in the trade-show mind-set.

• Do you love tradeshows or hate them, or do you see them as a necessary evil?
• How good were the leads you got from your last tradeshow?
• Is the tradeshow on the wane, or is still a viable marketing investment?
• What's your tradeshow strategy as a vendor...are you like HubSpot and shun them, or do you select the best ones and invest in them?
• Do you just talk to the visitor or you do a quick demo and hand out a brochure?
• Do you have a 3-5 slide PowerPoint presentation with just the elements of your story?
• How do you sort out the visitors who just want a stamp so they can enter the draw for the iPad from a potential prospect?

I attended a trade-show recently and used a visual confection to tell my story. (The confection below is an excerpt of the Advanced Marketing Concepts Whiteboard story - a visual confection).  According to Edward Tufte, Visual Confections are “ structures that consist of a multiplicity of image events that illustrate an argument, organize information, show and enforce visual comparisons; they should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional…with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the viewer”

You have 20 seconds to hook the visitor, 3 minutes to engage, tell your story, qualify and get permission to follow-up

Visitors come thick and fast during the breaks and at lunch and drinks sessions. You have a 20 seconds to hook the visitor and between 2-4 minutes to discover their top issues, tell your story, qualify their interest and get permission for follow-up.

Over the Christmas holidays I took my daughter to the London Museum of Natural History, and among other exhibits, spent a good deal of time in the Charles Darwin Exhibit. Darwin has been in the news a lot lately as it’s his 200th anniversary and there are all sorts of metaphors and lessons being drawn from Darwin’s works.

I was struck by the exhibit and his genius and thought about my industry, the technology industry, and how this closed system has recently undergone violent upheaval. I asked a partner of ours, Barry Trailer co-owner of CSO Insights, (CSO Insights is a research firm that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of today's sales and marketing organizations), what his thoughts were on surviving in the current market, and they were insightful

Barry suggested, “Most companies will simply jettison people in a knee-jerk reaction to reduce cost, but this is not adapting to the new environment. The companies with formal sales process that mirrors the customer buying process, those who adapt their sales process when conditions change, are favored to be preserved while companies with informal or tribal sales process will find it very difficult and may go the way of the Dodo".

I'm delighted to introduce you to business partner Adam Zais, VP Business Development at professional video hosting and analytics company Wistia, who related this story in a recent conversation and I asked him to write it down.

Actually Adam wrote this one down and quite a few more in a collection of sales stories and what we can learn from them....and we plan to publish them in a book next year.