Business and Management consulting: Activation vs. Solicitation
By: William Jackson
Submitted: 2010-10-25 00:48:15 | Word Count: 494
The days of old school selling are over, I am declaring traditional sales dead! No more cold calls!
Technology and social media are catalysts to this movement away from sales and into activation. People do not want o be solicited or convinced, cajoled or bugged. They do want control, information, and timing. They want a clean efficient transaction that leaves them feeling like they made a relevant, credible purchase that delivers value to their needs and wants.
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How do you move your organization away from the industrialized, assembly line, cold calling, inefficient sales model to a high touch, informative efficient and profitable activation model? This is not an easy process. It’s about crossing a bridge, it’s a cultural shift and it starts with the thinking I have diagrammed below.
People are ready to do most of the work, in the sales process, especially on larger purchases, on their own using a combination of online resources and offline relationships to prepare themselves for their final decision to buy or not. There are a number of issues and circumstances at play and I have tried to capture and simplify them into the following:
Customer’s decision continuum & Company’s understanding of customer’s purchasing ability
The two work in concert and inform each other; in essence this is the foundation for a conversation that the two parties are having which may lead to a transaction. This is a natural occurring phenomenon and is always in the background, it exists most times only in each parties head as an unspoken phenomenon. Both parties become overwhelmed and get consumed in their own intentions and so no real dialogue takes place and this is what gives rise to the old model.
People make decisions emotionally and the decision is based on 3 fundamentals – the relevance to their situation, the credibility of the offer, and the value it brings to their life at the time. Think of buying a minivan.
The activator is trying to assess the customer’s willingness and capacity to purchase, think minivan. (Old school sales says you are trying to manoeuvre the prospect into place of making a decision to buy your product – avoid the temptation)
Now leave the car lot and go online – here is where most of the action takes place. Activators realize this and are tackling the internet, websites, blogs and becoming resources on LinkedIn Facebook and Twitter where they engage in conversation and help people move through their process.
Business Instincts Group has decades of valuable consulting experience, but it wasn’t until we packaged our processes into the practice of Clarity Management that we knew we were on to something unique, measurable and breathtakingly effective.
When clients started reporting to us that their business evaluations had gone from $4 million to $16 million, in 16 short months, during the worst recession in a generation, we started to recognize that we were on to something very special. That was the moment we started focusing on getting even better at what we do.
Author Resource:- Business Instincts Group is a conscious business consulting organization that gets energized by doing the impossible together, existing to ensure executional clarity so that seasoned entrepreneurs achieve their big goals.
