We cannot ignore that our customers, prospects, business partners, employees – well, pretty much everyone – are now

using social media to some degree, but creating a simple catchall term – “social media” might be deceiving. The general goal for businesses embracing social media is to be part of the new sharing culture where information is passed from person to person with an implicit blessing and a “hey, look at this” command.

But people rarely share information that is dull or attempts to sell, such as, say, the product brochures that insurers have used to communicate with prospects for many years. We need to rethink. The key challenge is to be “interesting.” That’s what gets shared, but this is a huge can of worms – what a twenty-one-year-old finds interesting will be totally different from what a fifty-four-year-old finds interesting, and that can be further splintered by geography, common bonds, employment, family dynamics – well, you get the point. Being interesting is really hard – and not something that insurers have had to do in the past. The message has always been simple – you need insurance, visit our agent and buy what he or she tells you to.

Right now, hundreds of consumers are looking for the product or service you provide in your area.

These same people are having a hard time choosing because what they are finding online are:
• Confusing marketing messages
• Similar marketing messages
• Catchy tag lines

They really do not know who to trust or who to do business with until something stands out where they want to take action. If they can’t find you, your business is on life support.

Let’s agree that, on average, there are hundreds of people who visit your website because your marketing message worked. You stood out and they clicked to your website. But when they interact with your employees, they get conflicting results to your marketing promises, such as no real response, auto responders or recorded messages and emails that don’t answer their questions. If this continues, you people are burying your business.

So here we are with all of this new technology, but have we lost the ability to really connect?

The Internet is a great thing for all of us. It allows us to have information at our fingertips, accomplish more things quicker than ever and communicate with others wherever we are.

But too many companies hide behind technology or have mixed messages across it, which then causes technology to create confusion.

There is a lot of literature written about the fear of failure.  I contend there is just as much fear around succeeding.  When you succeed, you raise the bar for current and future success. You are leaving the comfort zone of mediocrity and higher expectations. 

Are you a salesperson that is fearful of success and as a result, not doing what you know you need to do to win business?  

Here are three sabotaging behaviors I have observed after working with thousands of salespeople: 

#1.  No plan. No sale.  This salesperson walks into the office on Monday morning, fires up their computer and starts working on organizing their week.  Too late---your competitor has already contacted your 25 best prospects by the time you have organized your to-do and target prospect list. 

I have preached the power of calendar blocking for years and heads nod up and down in agreement with this powerful time management principle.  And yet, when I ask the same group of salespeople to open up their calendars to share their proactive business plan for the week, there is more white space on the calendar than anything else.  Calendar blocking sounded like a good idea and it also sounds like work. 

Excuses abound for lack of planning.  I don’t have time to plan.  Hmmm….but you do have time to waste????  Research shows that one minute of planning saves 10 minutes of wasted time.  Do the math and see how much more you can accomplish in a week.   

Every week, in order to stay fresh as a sales training expert, I read a bunch of sales training related articles. Here are four of my favorites from this past week. I include a short comment about each article and would love to hear what you think about them as well!

Avoiding Fear by Indulging in Our Fear of Fear by Seth Godin

Sales Training Article Description: Every day, we make a thousand little compromises, avoid opportunities, actions and people—all so that we can stay away from the emotion of fear. Note that I didn’t say, “So we can stay away from what we fear.” No, that’s…

My Comment: I love everything Godin, but this is especially relevant to sales people. By deciding to not make that call or not ask for that introduction because it makes us uncomfortable, we are costing ourselves a lot over the long run. Get over your fear.