Double Article Friday and the Death of All Selling Forever

You get more bang for your buck on Fridays!  Especially this Friday when you get my powerful rant below, as well as two bonus articles!

The Selling Power Blog has my new article on why consultative selling is so difficult.  Head over there for a great read!

And over at Top Sales World, my article on the premature announcement that SPIN Selling is dead is one of the top 10 articles for last week.

There is no doubt that selling has changed – a lot – but the marketers who most benefit from telling you that it has changed to the point where you should not sell anymore are simply trying to get you to buy their stuff!

Don’t get me wrong – they ALL have great tools, applications, insights, data and uses.  But you need to buy those services on their own merit because you need them or they would add to your sales force’s effectiveness.  THEY DO NOT TODAY, NOR WILL THEY TOMORROW, BE USED INSTEAD OF SELLING!

There is a very significant movement, by everyone selling something for inside sales and inbound marketing, to get everyone else on this overhyped, death of selling, band wagon.  I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again.  For very transactional sales, very quick sales, very inexpensive sales, or the lowest price on the planet sales, inbound, outbound, overbound, double bound, inside, not outside, two-sided and both-sided, inside and inbound will surely replace traditional salespeople.  But it stops there folks.  Everyone else needs salespeople, and while selling has surely changed, that doesn’t mean that you should take their myopic advice and stop selling!

You don’t stop selling.  Repeat it three times. You don’t stop selling.  You don’t stop selling.  You don’t stop selling. You don’t replace salespeople with marketing.  You don’t make salespeople passive.  You don’t stop asking questions. You don’t stop qualifying and closing.  If the methods of these inside sales experts are so good, why are their win rates so low and their sales cycles so long?  Why is their turnover so high?

Good questions.

I’ve seen the underbelly of their sales forces and you don’t want to trade what you have now for what they have now.  Adopt some of their technology, sure, but don’t blow up the farm.  You still need the harvest to eat.

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