Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Customer 2.0

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...You really need to check out this new book by Josiane Chriqui Feigon called The Smart Sales Manager: The Ultimate Playbook for Building and Running a High-Performance Inside Sales Team, if you want to manage a sales team in the twenty-first century.

Let me get my one criticism of the book out of the way since it’s such a small one: The author should take the word “inside” out of the subtitle because this book is for all sales teams, sales managers, and anyone who wants to sell anything.The book is the first I've read that focuses on the fact that the world of B2B sales has changed and that many of the old tactics used for years are no longer effective.From the book: Today’s busy prospects are independent, self-sufficient, and self-educated. These hard-working multitaskers don’t want to be crowded and held in a sales headlock. They don’t want to be 'sold' to. They have radically different buying habits and expectations. They actually control the buying process, creating their own unique and hidden sales cycle. They buy when they’re ready to buy.

And here again from this great book are more characteristics of today’s customers in case I haven't scared you enough already:

• They travel light, but they still want company. The customers who ask for very little are actually the ones who need the most.
• They are reluctant and cautious about spending, but they have tons of cash stowed away.
• They are busy and have short attention spans, but they take time to self-educate and devour contents when it’s fresh, relevant, and easy to digest.
• They don’t trust vendors, but will trust social networks. Peer approval is vital to them.
• They see phone calls as an annoying interruption, but will accept demos.
• They cancel appointments, but they request conference calls at a moment’s notice.
• They have short fuses and short memories, but, over time, they forget what they were 'mad as hell' about.
• They are not loyal or monogamous, but they are starved for a relationship.
• They crave long-term relationships with business partners they can trust, especially if it’s virtual.
• They lose interest in the beginning of the sales cycle, but they pay attention at the end.
• They are independent buyers who do their own research and don’t need salespeople, but when an intelligent one appears, they are unrestrained with appreciation and eager to share and collaborate.      

So, what do we do with this information? How do we handle these new kinds of buyers? It’s as though they are all anti-anything that worked before they came along, doesn’t it? If you sit back and think about this for a few minutes, it does make sense. What we are being told is that their time is valuable and we are not going to be allowed to waste it. That fact is no different than it’s ever been. Buyers don’t want meaningless phone calls, boring, canned sales pitches, and long PowerPoint presentations more focused on companies and products than they are on what buyers really care about--their company and their needs.

If we offer customers something of value, a service that's interesting and will teach something, solve problems, make life easier, and improve their company, they will listen with both ears.

It all comes down to being creative. Customers want us to understand everything about their companies. They want us to cut to the chase, know what they want, and give it to them.Feigon writes, "These independent customers want the attention of the sales people, all of it.” This means you must train salespeople to be well educated when it comes to customers. They must do their homework and learn as much as they can about a customer they are selling to. Salespeople must use social media to create long-term relationships with customers before they sell them anything at all.

We are now deep into the age of social media and we have everything needed to develop such relationships in advance. In fact, if through social media we can show prospective customers that we can provide them what they need, they may even reach out to us. After all, that's the purpose of offerings like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Most of all, we must teach salespeople to be authentic, to be real, and to make real and valuable offerings to their customers.The days of the Harold Hill, straw-hatted, slap-on-the-back salesperson is over. We are in a new, enlightened age of sales and marketing where real people are selling real products and services to real people in real companies.

I urge you to buy Feigon's book immediately. It's a new world out there and you’d better get into it as fast as you can. It’s only common sense.