Sales 2.0 – The Answer to our Prayers or a Costly Distraction?

Every day I read, hear and get asked about the various modern methods for salespeople to meet, engage and get in front of prospects.  Every day, the emphasis moves a little further toward the Sales 2.0 approach to getting found – LinkedIn, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, E-blasts, and Youtube.  As a result, the emphasis moves further away from traditional prospecting. It was just two years ago that everyone was writing – trumpeting – that Cold Calling was dead, that Selling was dead.

Let’s take a look at this phenomenon from another perspective.  Sales 2.0 is simply a high-tech, 21st Century version of the low-tech, 20th Century method for approaching, engaging and getting in front of prospects.  You know what I’m referring to:

• Networking events
• Leads groups
• Inner circles
• Social circles
• Religious groups
• Country Clubs
• Friends

Salespeople did it all with handshakes and telephones and it did for salespeople in the 20th Century what Sales 2.0 does for salespeople in the 21st Century – only slower and less superficially.  The bigger difference is that 20th Century Salespeople understood that those groups were supplements – albeit important ones – to the primary activity of prospecting.  For some reason, 21st Century salespeople think that prospecting is the supplement to Sales 2.0.  Well I have news for you…

Hear Ye, Hear Ye.

You can’t control the number of quality opportunities that come your way from Sales 2.0 activities.  I’m not suggesting that salespeople abandon Sales 2.0.  Far from it.  I’ve posted 630+ articles on this Blog and they generate more leads than you could imagine.  However, they aren’t all to our target market, they are often to the wrong person in the organization, very often of questionable quality, and in some cases, it would be difficult to even call them leads.  Despite that,  it is still a more effective method for generating leads than many alternatives.  The very important point is that we don’t know what the quantity and quality of the leads will be on any given week so leads can only supplement traditional methods of attracting new business. They cannot replace them.

So Blog away my friends.  Connect to everyone you can.  Upload your videos.  Just do it at night because during the day – you have to prospect the old fashioned way.