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Sales are dead. What to do next?

For some time now, you may have noticed that in business, in the world, something has become different. Yes, someone has not noticed this yet, but many are already in the know, although not all were able to precisely state it. And
here's what has changed: sales are dead.

I am not writing another article about 37 of the surest ways to increase sales from the crisis with a guaranteed result and a refund . This time completely serious, and I really mean that:

Sales are dead
.
.
, .

For you reading this text, there is one saving straw: this is the so-called "Longrid", and you have good reason to close your eyes to this text.

True, from now on you are unlikely to turn a blind eye to this thought. Now most likely she will haunt you everywhere, appearing here and there day after day. And that’s why this happens.

The first one. Electronic lead generation survives a short century of its meaningfulness. Try to find a businessman who is completely satisfied with the performance of his contextual advertising. Find a B2B entrepreneur who has a steady stream of leads; targeting on social networks. The big and clever legend of the Great Digital Happiness of the Businessman is relentlessly a thing of the past, and the hopes for a cloudless CPA are “PROSRANI”.

The second one.Cheap CRMs did not increase conversion. When I worked as a salesperson in an IT company, CRM systems were the privilege of only successful and advanced companies. It was so comfortable. Then, according to the law of that same market hand, guys appeared who saw the market as making elitist affordable. Then came the guys who smelled the delicious smell of baking cake and made CRM systems cheap. And finally, the most greedy, technologically advanced, came to make CRM systems free. Bottom line: in Russia there are more than 50 different CRMs, and sales of 90% of 2,000,000 (two million!) Russian legal entities were conducted at the cave level and are being conducted, and the service was terrible and remained.
Unfortunately, making great knowledge available does not always help to overcome ignorance.

The third.Sales training has stopped working as before. Sales trainers are forced to invent some absurdly tricky tricks in order to assemble a hall for a free master class from which someone can be signed up for a training. The blindness of training consumers to training advertising has finally taken shape. To assemble a training for 200 people, sometimes the base of several trainers is not enough. Today, among the trainers (not many people have the courage to speak openly about this), there is no unity on one simple and urgent question: how to sell sales training? Want to check the veracity of my statement? Ask your friend or neighbor who is most likely not at all able to sell what he thinks about sales training.

The abusive response of your interlocutor, hinting at the futility of the training, be this interlocutor a plumber or an entrepreneur, will confirm this idea: the consumer has not learned how to sell and considers the sales training useless.

Fourth. Sales technology does not interest business owners. Everything here is similar to the story with CRM. The more accessible the sales technology, the more degraded the owners and business leaders. Available on the Internet - so we can do it ourselves, we can do it ourselves - so someday we’ll do it. An absurdity, but a fact: sometimes even customers of SPO-projects get tools that can bring them millions and tens of millions - and simply do not use them. When asked by experts about the reasons, one can often hear "Well, somehow it happened."
Remember how in a joke? Bought a car, bought a license, but didn’t buy a drive.

Fifth. The marketing strategy is dead. Am I really thickened? Maybe our company will be able to go into a quiet haven of reinforced concrete competitive advantages? Wait, who said that first? This phrase: the strategy is dead. Seth Godin And who owns the thesis: today, not strategies, but management models are competing? And who was the first to say: when a good business idea comes to us in the morning, we are afraid that the Chinese have already torn it by noon? A 10-year marketing strategy is becoming an increasingly controversial concept, if only because only five percent of companies have at least some clearly defined marketing strategy.

Why did it happen?


Everything has a reason. I will share my subjective opinion: we have entered a phase of convulsions of capitalism. When in 2015 I wrote the article “That Monday, when capitalism ended”, I couldn’t even think that in a couple of years this particular article would attract about 20% of organic traffic to our website. Fact. More and more people feel it today.

Today in the world there are two simultaneous processes:

  1. capitalism has entered a phase of convulsions, and
  2. life is knocking our feet out of us all.

The convulsions of capitalism are a Tesla car for 12 million rubles. This is a marketing budget of 50 million rubles per year for the promotion of selfie sticks in Moscow and the region. This dish is in a non-elite, chain restaurant for 1,500 rubles. This is the "Wishlist" of investors to earn a billion rubles in two years, otherwise it is not interesting. This is the “Wishlist” of startups to fit into a startup for a salary of 250 thousand a month, otherwise it sucks. These are bloggers on YouTube who consider the price of 1.5 million rubles for an advertising post to be normal. This is a taxi startup, gobbled up several tens of billions of dollars, or already the fifth or eighth year is unprofitable and at the same time considered a cool company.

All these things, which when viewed from the outside are pure madness, in a sticky, astringent discussion with the “professionals of this field” become something like a “deliberate marketing strategy”, “an exclusive price differentiator”, a “chip” or simply “You are generally who is to judge this. "

In any system that is in crisis, there are mechanisms (not always realized by its participants) that help reboot the system and clear itself of errors. Therefore, today, in many areas, we are observing that life is knocking the ground out from under our feet. This is not because we are guilty of something or we are not good enough. It’s just that our system has come into crisis and must change.

The era of uncertainty is like weightlessness, the laws you are used to do not work, substances and even your body have different properties, everything feels somehow strange, one thing is good that sooner or later it will definitely end.

What to do next?


Is this post a “receipt” from the founder of Russia's first SPO agency that his company's services are useless? I would not be an entrepreneur if I wanted this for my business.
On the contrary, this is an important signal to everyone who can hear it, to those who may become clients of our company for the next 20 years.

Sales are dead
.

We almost forgot about it, implementing dynamic call tracking, business analytics, sip telephony, integrated marketing campaigns and A / B testing.
But many people still believe that this is the most important.

The important thing without which your business is not worth a penny and may not even survive this year.

What exactly does the word “love” mean, many will ask me (or themselves). This is an extremely deep concept. Think it over.

A person can be driven into a bunch of unnecessary junk using his seven sins: gluttony, greed, laziness, anger, pride, lust and envy. Remember: fast food, insurance, delivery, security services, luxury watches and cars, expensive clothing and fitness, and any "luxury".

It is with sales of all these things and much more that we observe the problems that are described in this essay. It is for all this and a similar situation that the “sale is dead” situation sets in, even if this death has not reached all this yet (and it may still not reach many worthy brands and companies for a long time).

What can we sell through our love for the client?


The answer is simple: we can sell to the client almost everything that brings real, unintended benefits to this person or organization.

What is customer love?

  • This is clear knowledge for whom you work - and not attempts to sell everything to everyone, if only you would buy it;
  • sincere desire to help - and not spitting and sorting out whether the client suits us;
  • attention to individual needs - and not the work of "briefing";
  • communication, as the client understands - and not as written in the script;
  • the ability to adapt your product - rather than jamming unnecessary options;
  • the ability to forgive the client’s doubts - and not curse him;
  • attention after the customer paid - not a binge on joys and “fly on” ...

And much, much more.

These concepts, forming Love for the client, will help companies to form a new flow of customers and money that will regulate itself.

It will be very difficult to integrate these concepts into the current reality for a large number, if not most modern companies.
No one promised it would be easy.

Posted by: Andrey Mayboroda

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