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Web Coaches for Direct Sales Mavens?
About a month ago I was reading Seth Godin’s blog about a shortage of digital coaches. I couldn’t help but laugh at the image of corporate executives trying to deal with social web ware from a traditional sales and marketing perspective. I thought back to conversations with executives asking, “will this internet ordering ever catch on?” Direct sales leaders have even less interest. Their mantra chant is some personal variation of face-to-face-is-the-only-way. I even discovered a phrase for my thoughts (also courtesy of Godin): Meatball Sundae. I have no disagreement with Godin’s lament for the lack of digital teachers. I even applaud it. I just didn’t see it happening.
Then I had a phone conversation with someone I coached about six months ago. She thanked me for working through Citizen Marketers with her and talked about the redesign of her website as a result. Like most people in direct sales, she was using her website as a forum for her personal story of product effectiveness and income potential. As a result
of the coaching, she redesigned the site to showcase customer stories and link to snippets from them about effectiveness and livelihood. The best part is what it meant to her business. “When I can get someone to go from a convention showcase to my website, I have an eighty percent chance of getting a sale or involving them in the business. It’s a huge shift.”
Her changed attitude had little to do with knowledge of the technology. What changed was her attitude about the role of the web. Before, she would have had a sundae. Now, she has a unified basis for communication.
Encouraging Dialogue
Much of what sit out on the web is really what we can call “push out communication.” I write; you read. We often don’t see much reaction to it. If marketers could figure out how to evaluate it correctly, we would probably have much more of this stuff because we could put a dollar sign on it.I’ve been very interested in the efforts at “reciprocal” communication. We dialogue; we are changed by the interaction and create a memory. The blog explosion is indicative of the interest in this. Posts become bait for comments and search engines and then we do what we can to encourage a dialogue. If we post more, we get found more and get to claim our just rewards. Brilliant!
The Harvard Business School Press has taken a different idea. They are called discussions. Brilliant! By the way, they are all great reads. One I especially enjoy is Marshall Goldsmith’s Ask the Coach. His posts are answers to questions rather than comments to provoke a reply. If you read carefully, you see that he also makes contact with the questioners outside of the blog posts. Now that is truly BRILLIANT!
Customer Centered Listening
We were coaching a group last week and the core knowledge that we were talking about was customer centered listening. You might call it active listening, reflective listening, or heart centered listening, but the core of all of those is precisely where we were trying to focus. The essential lesson is a simple one: the business relationship you build with 
your customers depends on you listening to them as people, and not as the purchasers you want them to be. While we all know and engage in the behaviors, we seldom put it together in a list. As a group, we discussed seven concepts.
- Be physically available. Hold yourself nonverbally open and attentive. Don’t forget to nod and smile.
- Be mentally open. Engage in minimal interruptions while staying focused on the conversation.
- Use door openers like “You sound excited! I love your enthusiasm. What’s going on?”
- Be verbally extending. Ask for more details.
- When you hear a metaphor being used, keep it going. “I am so tired of just being another player on the team.” “I understand. You want to be the captain.”
- Be verbally summarizing. Paraphrase.
- Be verbally shaping. Reframe the conversation. (Think about the 50% glass—is it half empty or half full?)
“I tried weight control pills before. It didn’t work.”
“Are you saying the supplements weren’t right for you?”
“Yeah. They may work for some people but I think my G.I. system is more sensitive.”
“So the supplements worked, you just needed better direction on which ones.”
“I guess you could say that.”This is not complex. We do this stuff all of the time when we are in conversational mode. The difference is that we seldom do this when we are in a selling mode. We know the answers even before we hear what our customer says, and that leads us to misunderstand what is being said.Once the group seemed to have a good sense of these seven items, we pushed the envelope a little. How can you engage in customer centered listening on the telephone? Interestingly, the list of behaviors didn’t change very much, but the lack of nonverbal clues require a more intense focus. Telephone calls in a car fly right out of our memory because we are focused on driving not conversing. Without a set of eyes to look into, our attention wanders. Probably the most common activity is email scanning or internet surfing. I was surprised to discover there is a word for this, snurfing, which means surfing the internet while talking on the phone. There are worse offenses like washing dishes or visiting the bathroom, but they are less common. In all of these situations, we still pretend to be engaged, but our presence is really not there. We give more of a more “uh-huh” response so our customer knows we haven’t hung up when we should have a “tell me more” response. We can’t do the latter because we lost the train of thought when our attention wandered.The group came up with some interesting solutions. The key is to make your nonverbal communication match what you do in a face-to-face conversation.
- Find a quiet room. One young mother took the phone to the bathroom because her children won’t interrupt her there. Just don’t use the facility.
- Shut your computer off.
- Put a mirror by your phone and write on it “Smile Nod”.
- Take notes on the conversation and only the conversation.
- Set a timer so you don’t drag on and get bored. I know it sounds too simple, but it works. When we focus, we engage and the timer gives us an urgency to stay focused and get done.
The next question was harder and it belongs in its own post. Here’s the question so you can work on your own answer: How do we extend customer centered listening to a blog, webpage or website?
Radiohead Lets You Pick Your Price
I am really puzzled and excited by all of the buzz that has developed around Radiohead’s announcement that consumer’s could set their own price for the download version of their newest CD set. I’m not a numbers maven when it comes to marketing, but it makes psychological sense when you think about concerts, CD sets, and publicity.
Seth Godin, while not talking specifically about Radiohead, made a recent entry to his blog about the importance of “a price” instead of “no price” and noted that companies might want to think about the promotional value of their offers. As he says, “If you make something with low marginal cost like a CD, consider offering a second one (same title) for a nickel or a dollar. Why? Because if a customer buys a second as a gift, they’ve just helped you spread the word…” Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, makes a similar point because the marginal cost of a download is close to nothing.
My best guess is that Radioheads motives are “pure.” They are trying to do a good deed for their customers. And the shine of that action will prove meaningful for them. I would always remember, however, that the cost to them is negligible and the buzz is priceless.
This is a great lesson for entrepreneurs and sales leaders. Be smart about what you give away. It has to be meaningful, but that doesn’t mean it has to be costly.
Electronics and Democracy
One of the newsletters I read religiously comes from the Institute for Global Ethics. A recent commentary reminded me of how natural electronic communication has become and how impossible secrets are. We don’t recognize these facets of our lives because they have become ordinary truths. It’s only when they are extraordinary, do these gems shine. You should read the commentary called, “Let Freedom Ring” and then think about the ordinary parts of your business and your life that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Without belaboring the obvious, the democratization of the web has had an enormous impact on marketing and sales. Communication from everywhere to everywhere for virtually everyone has become commonplace (at least in the U.S.).
What is not so obvious is that this influence has become so pervasive that we don’t notice it anymore. It has become a part of the scenery of our life. It’s like living in a city. You don’t notice all of the street lights because they have become a part of the landscape. We feel awkward during a power failure because the street lights aren’t on. The “natural darkness” appears completely unnatural. The internet has become a way of life. The absence of email seems unnatural. If we have a question about anything, we Google or Ask or Yahoo or Wikipedia it. We can find the popularity, problems, fans, and unhappy consumers before we ever invest our time or money in anything.
Now imagine trying to control the flow of information. It’s impossible. For anything other than a temporary silence, it can’t be done. Control has become unnatural because what you want to know is out there somewhere. The lesson from all of this is that we shouldn’t try to control what we can’t. If our business has to be transparent, then it should. The business of sales is much easier if we are open and visible.
Permission Networking
We usually think about networking as a WIIFM 
(what’s in it for me) activity. And it really is. Even when we socially network, we are looking to feed our socio-emotional needs. I loved this blog from 800-CEO-Read. I must admit I had a tendency to rush through the start of it with the thought in my head that I been there, done, that, nothing really new, blah, blah, blah. Then my lightbulb came on and I went back and read through the article again. This is all about networking for the other guy. The entry is about the essential elements of putting yourself in the positive, open and sharing frame of mind to get out there and press the flesh.
I love the perspective. I always talk about sales and marketing as being permission based activities. We ask for the other person’s time and attention and we go from there. Networking should be treated from within that framework.
While we may be able to do that in a personal world, can we do it virtually? Can we network to the benefit of the other person? Of course. If your product doesn’t work, tell them where they can find it. Let them review your products–good or bad. Make it fun, like networking is supposed to be. You gotta love the possibilities of a open palm virtual world.
Can I Ever Get It Right?
I was reminded during my recent move about how difficult it is to share communication space. The crew that did the moving was Hispanic and most spoke only broken English. Meanwhile, I have never been accused of being fluent in any non-English language. I thought we were communicating quite well until we got to the case of the vacuum cleaner. I had pulled it aside to do some clean-up after the house was empty. As George was making the last sweep around to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything, he noticed the vacuum cleaner. I looked at him and said, “Just leave it. I need to use it and will bring it myself.” He smiled, nodded as if he understood, and then picked it up to put it on the truck. We sorted out the problem, but I came to realize that I took his smiles and nods as understanding and agreement. In reality, he didn’t understand what I was saying and was doing what he usually did in such situations. I eventually got to keep my vacuum, but my frustration at my inability to converse nearly peaked. My realization is that the same is true for virtually all communication. We read the signs that occur during our conversations and interpret them according to our context. When we make a genuine effort to interpret them from the other party’s perspective, we get closer to getting it right. My conundrum was a typical language culture problem. Tammy Erickson recently wrote about a similar communication error that occurs across the age gap between generations. My problem was nothing new, but it points to one of those fundamental human errors. We judge what we hear by ourselves and not by our communication partners. Here is a suggestion: find five tried and true customers that you think you have a good relationship and give them a call. Ask them, listen, and then thank them for giving you their opinion. Don’t argue, don’t justify, and don’t be displeased. You called them; you asked them; learn from them. The next day, call five customers who you just gained. Ask them the same thing. Work hard at understanding your customers, and eventually you will get it right.
Broken Window Sales Theory
As I’ve caught up on my reading this summer, I become fascinated by the Broken Window theory of crime prevention. The theory starts from a premise that crime increases or decreases 
as a result of the perception of disorder. If a broken window is left unrepaired, then the people who see it will start to assume that no one cares and the sense of disorder spreads. This theory is supposed to explain the rise and fall of New York City crime in the 80’s and 90’s. When New York’s finest got around to cleaning up subway cars and cracking down on petty crime, then the viral spread of anarchy was halted and reversed.
Malcolm Gladwell credits the visibility of the authorities’ actions as a causal part of the tipping point towards law and order. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book, Freakonomics, think that the theory is overrated. They each have good arguments, and I am not wading into the middle of those giants. The Broken Window theory did get me thinking, though, about a similar theory for sales.
Start with the idea that every little detail matters. Every aspect of your sales efforts is a windowpane into your image.
- If your window is customer service, then prompt callbacks are important. Getting the order right is important. Sending somebody to a competitor to find a different product is important because you CARE.
- If your window is sealed with knowledge, then where are your energy leaks? Can your customers feel the wind and wonder about your veracity?
- Is your website an open window to see into your house? Is it inviting for everyone in your customer niche or just for the ones who take the trouble to look hard enough to find you?
The metaphor can be stretched too far, and my sincere hope is that it hasn’t reached that point. Pick your window of opportunity and give your customers and unblemished view of what you have to offer.
Start with the Customer
Direct sellers often have trouble finding unique and yet accurate ways to describe their products. Since I work across companies, I get to hear representatives from lots of companies describe their products and their opportunities. What lots of them don’t realize is that they sound just like their competitors.
If you don’t believe me, conduct a little experiment. Write down the words and phrases you use to describe your products. Now go to three competitors’ websites and check them out. Any bets as to how many of your “key” descriptors are being used by them? Let’s try a double or nothing bet. Write down the important things you have to say when trying to get someone to join you in your business. Yep, you will find them in use by others as well.
I once tried to have a discussion with a friend about this. Her unflappable answer was, “But I’m being honest. ________ is just trying to sell you something.” She couldn’t see that if I was to have the conversation with her competitor, the competitor would be telling me the same thing. Neither one of these people is lying, they have just been caught by a marketer’s folly. You want to find bigger, better, and universal superlatives that will make your product more appealing that somebody else’s. This is folly. There is always a better word. I think there is a way around this trap.
Start from a different place and you will end up at a different destination. Start with your potential customers, not your products. Your words, on your blog or website or marketing materials, are often the start of a virtual relationship. What are your customers looking to find? What are their problems? Their needs? What is the core of your expertise they need to believe? Start by building a relationship, and the rest will follow without all of the hyperbole.
Virtual Communities
I came to one of those gob smacked insights this last weekend about virtual business when I started reflecting on my own situation.
- I live in the Dallas, Texas area.
- I am writing a book with Lyn Christian, who lives in Salt Lake City.
- Our publisher, Gilles Dana of Gildan Media, lives in New York (www.gildanmedia.com).
- Our editor, Diane Strack, lives in New York.
- Our copywriter, Julie Waldman of Text Dimensions (www.textdimensions.com) lives in
Israel.
These thoughts were just coming to fruition when Dana and I had the opportunity to spend some time with Nicki Keohohou this past week. Nicki is one of the co-founders of the Direct Selling Women’s Alliance (www.mydswa.org). The entire organization is virtual. There is no headquarters. They all work from home.
Come to think of it, direct sellers don’t work from a headquarters. They work from home and associate with a company and the people in it’s headquarters. That sound’s pretty virtual to me.
The point of all of this is that we don’t have to be face-to-face with people to develop a business relationship with them. We are certainly capable of developing the same type of relationship even when we don’t see them very often (perhaps never). A relationship is more of a state of mind that a physical presence. We may find it easier to operate in one particular setting over another, but the setting is not a necessary condition for the relationship.
Neil, Greetings from Bangalore! Thank you for your kind comments. I am glad that you like my posts! For more info, please visit www.MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com. I give all of my material away to anyone who would like to use it. Life is good. Marshall
Comment by Marshall Goldsmith — January 23, 2008 @ 8:23 pm