You can lead a Horse to Water…
Article by Cale Helmer (Business Development Trainer - OnPath). Connect with him on LinkedIn.
As the old saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. The same adage can be applied when trying to teach a Representative how to sell in a Business to Business environment. You can hire a person to sell in a B2B market, but…well….you’ve got the gist.
Representatives that fall under the umbrella of ‘Generation Y’ are coming into the workforce with a much different perspective on how business works. With this new view in place, it can be challenging to educate younger staffers on the tried and true methods many companies use daily to acquire new business and maintain exiting B2B relationships such as lead nurturing, or deduplication. In our case, that’s a good thing!
In training these Representatives, OnPath Business Solutions has had to take a step back and reassess our existing approach when it comes to b2b marketing. Although standard methods of instruction (PowerPoint, Instructor Lead Lectures) are all still being used when teaching larger batches of Representatives, Peer to Peer coaching and training along with interactive curriculum sharing (Podcasting, blogging, viral video, etc.) are some of the newer methods that we’ve begun to introduce in our classes. These ‘social’ training approaches speak to the Gen Y agents on a level that is unachievable through standard lecture methods. It’s not just a matter of changing the delivery method though. We’ve also had to change the message.
More and more these days, Representatives are rejecting or at the very least, questioning the traditional ideologies of “Slam Dunk Selling”; a method that focuses most of its efforts on hyping the product, as opposed to connecting with the Buyer and identifying the benefits the product could provide them. ‘Gen Y’ Reps are all about social connectivity, social interaction and social consciousness. They use YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to keep peers within arm’s reach at all times. They Flash Mob, Blog, Geocache and form clans in MMORPGs (if you’re not familiar with these terms, then you’re proving the point of this post!) as ways of keeping that social umbilical cord in place.
All things being equal, you cannot only use traditional methods to teach this generation of Representatives how to manage B2B sales. These tech-savvy social butterflies embrace the technology they already use every day to connect with and market to their target audience. Not the baby-boomers and not the Gen X’s. These new B2B Reps bring their social networks into the workplace. They seek to reach their audiences in 140 characters or less. They share their unfiltered thoughts and unabashed feelings in the form of AVI or MPEG uploads. They are brutally honest in their assessment of a product or service. They follow the simple mantra that all sales are fundamentally made up of 3 core principles:
They learn to root everything back to the “People” element of the interaction. ‘How will it make a Buyer feel?’ ‘Will the product let me connect to the Buyer on a personal level?’ ‘Will my personal opinion sway the decision of the Buyer?’
While traditionalist in the field of B2B sales may take a pejorative view when looking at these Representatives, OnPath embraces these future leaders of the marketplace. We seek to learn from them when it comes to navigating the social media playground while at the same time giving them the ‘wisdom of the ancients’ when it comes to providing them with the fundamental skills needed to generate sales appointments in a Business to Business environment.
Article by Cale Helmer (Business Development Trainer - OnPath). Connect with him on LinkedIn.