No Scrubs
I recently heard a terrible remake of the classic 90’s tune from TLC. I am looking at you Weezer. But this is not an essay about good…
I recently heard a terrible remake of the classic 90’s tune from TLC. I am looking at you Weezer. But this is not an essay about good songs and awful covers.
So no, I don’t want your number
No, I don’t want to give you mine and
No, I don’t want to meet you nowhere
No, I don’t want none of your time
No Scrubs by TLC
In sales parlance, we are the scrubs. If you think about it, the song is a perfect fit. How often are we the ones “hangin out the passenger side”, hollering at our prospects to gain their attention? It is harder than ever to get the attention of prospects, and our only response has been to shout louder and more often.
One of the biggest nightmares for sales reps (and especially SDR’s) is getting publicly shamed on social media. You often see LinkedIn posts of offended recipients sharing screenshots of correspondence with sales reps. I do not condone the practice of public shaming but it is clearly sending a signal from frustrated recipients that enough is enough.
A few weeks ago, we had our own incident of social shaming on the sales team. It is not worth divulging more, other than to say a prospect took to Twitter with a post that quickly went viral. It was a cringeworthy moment but hopefully also a learning moment.
We are losing the battle of attention. A few prospects fight back, but most are simply tuning out the noise. We are approaching them but our game is kinda weak. In the song it’s all about the looks and money, but in sales the thing we are lacking is trust.
My friend Kyle Porter recent posted about something Marc Benioff said. The best ideas do not necessarily win anymore. Companies that win are those that value and espouse trust beyond all else. We have passed the age when all we care about is the shiny object. We want to make sure the shiny object does not blow up in our face.
We need to therefore change the approach to prospecting we have taken thus far. The things that may have worked a few years ago will not suffice today. We need to stop focusing on attention, and instead we need to build trust.
So how exactly are we going to build trust with people that do not want to listen to us? We need to provide something worthwhile and compelling that is about them. We need to change the negative, adversarial dynamic of buyer / seller and turn it into the more trusted dynamic so that prospects feel safe in responding to your outreach.
What does it take to move away from the buyer / seller mode of sales? Here are four key concepts to lay down the framework for more successful prospecting:
Bring a fresh perspective — No one is interested in your product pitch or your customer list or anything else about your company initially. But that is what constitutes most initial sales calls. What piques the interest of prospects are ideas and insights that address a big need. So bring the insight, present a novel idea, offer a concept that is provocative. This is what wakens us from our crocodile brain. But then stop there and avoid the temptation to talk about your company or product, that is the surest way to immediately destroy trust. There will be a time to dive into product and company later.
Eliminate all templates — The easiest way to create suspicion is to use templates, whether they are call scripts or email templates. People can figure out pretty quickly when they are just a record in an automated sequence. Yes, this might slow you down, but then again are you optimizing for unsubscribes and angry responses or for quality conversations?
Be factually accurate — In our excitement with connecting with prospects, we can be too exuberant and oversell our solutions. Of course we are passionate and have pride in what we are selling, but we need to temper that passion with an appropriate measure of truth and humility. The best way to gauge this is to review your messages and talking points and consider what would happen if someone published that to the Internet. If you are not fully comfortable with the claims you are stating, it is best to edit your content. Remember that what you say digitally lives on forever.
Stop selling — This seems counter-intuitive, but when you present the novel idea, you need to give space for the ideas to percolate in the minds of the recipient. Go into listening mode and spend time understanding their perspective with a few well-crafted and open questions. Our role is ultimately about changing mindsets to see new possibilities, so let the insights and ideas you present work their way and do the selling for you. Unless your prospect internalizes and accepts your idea, there is no amount to slick talking or selling techniques that is going to change the outcome.
If you want a more comprehensive framework to help guide your prospecting, I wrote about the state of prospecting and an approach to outbound prospecting. It is an extensive breakdown on a modern strategies and tactics to reaching prospects in a more repeatable manner. But no approach will succeed if the foundation is not built on trust, that should be your starting point. Trust is the real currency of sales.
If you found this essay personally helpful, I encourage you to sign up for the weekly Enterprise Sales Forum Newsletter where I share my thoughts on the state of B2B sales, practical tips for improving your sales acumen, and upcoming sales talks across the global Enterprise Sales Forum community.