Sales Competencies – Are They Changing?

We established 21 Core Competencies for Selling about a decade ago.  They’re still important but they might be evolving.  A salesperson’s ability to use the internet may now be just as important as his ability to prospect, develop a relationship, qualify and close business.  Yesterday  I was speaking with Michael Benidt, author of  the Hidden Business Treasures Blog.  Michael believes that most of us don’t really know how to use the internet to search for what we need.  He thinks that most of us associate finding prospects on the internet with affiliate marketing and AdWords. He’s right.  Most salespeople don’t have a clue about how to take advantage of the internet and we need to get better at it.  As it becomes more difficult to pick up a phone and get a prospect to answer our cold calls, we need to get better at getting prospects to find us.

On Thursday, I met with Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan of Hubspot.com.  They also author the Business 2.0 Blog.  They are developing tools to combine three previously unrelated activities on a web site.  Today, when somebody completes an online form to request more information, you get a lead consisting of contact information.  When somebody posts a comment to your blog you get an almost anonymous comment.  And when someone surfs your site they show up your site’s overall statistics.  Hubspot’s new tools will actually merge those three events so that when visitors submit a form, you’ll also know about any comments they left on your blog as well as the specific pages they viewed while they were on your site.

Your salespeople definitely need to become more internet savvy.  There are dozens of strategies for finding prospects and learning more about your prospects.  Internet competence should be competency number 22.  Why not leave me a comment and let me know how your salespeople are taking advantage of this technology?

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