Engage to Increase Sales
July 6th, 2011 | 
Author: In Star Trek Next Generation, Captain Picard constantly issued the following order to the helmsman
“Engage!”
If people buy from people they know and trust, logic then tells us we must engage with people. Maybe that is why there is so much dislike of automated customer service messages to automated cold calling telephone programs. For the human touch to engage is totally lost within these tactics. So far in our history of marketing and selling, people do not buy from robots.
Relationship selling is all about the ability to engage to increase sales. How you attract attention and build the relationship speaks to your level of engagement and therefore is all about your marketing success.
With the social media explosion, some think just by Tweeting on Twitter, posting a Like on Facebook or updating their LinkedIn status they are engaging with prospects or potential customers. Sadly, this is not engagement. To engage requires you to make a direct message and ask for a time to talk.
Sales research suggests that 90% of all sales are made between the fourth and 12th contacts. Now a contact is where one individuals actually speaks with another be it a telephone call or a face to face meeting. Tweets, broadcast email messages, are not contacts because simply you do not know if your message was actually received. What you do know is there is a possibility of your message being received as an impression, but that is all you know.
By hiding behind social media or any other marketing strategy and not touching people suggest you may be of the mind set that people bite. For the most part people don’t bite and even if they are not social, they will not bite you. You will not need to seek medical treatment or rabies shots.
Now how you engage, well the answer to that question is “That depends.” For you as a salesperson are a unique individuals with your own decision making style, talents as well as temperament and this makes relationship selling equally as hard to define. How you choose to engage to increase sales, well that is up to you.
More From CoachLee
- Time To Identify Your Competitors To Increase Sales
- Just Slow Down to Increase Sales
- 3 + 5 = 10 To Increase Sales
CoachLee Recommends
- How to increase sales and keep your sales force happy (paulsalesman)
- 8 Steps to great online marketing (paulsalesman)
Posted in 
Tags: 6 Responses to “Engage to Increase Sales”
Leave a Reply
Social media is a great first step for building relationships. You’re right though, it needs to be taken further than that to actually count as true engagement. Posting on social media is also a mass message, but in order for it to be more meaningful the message needs to be personalized.
Social media is just like any traditional marketing vehicle such as a billboard or paid advertisement. There is one advantage of having immediate engagement through likes, retweets or comments just like you did on this sales blog. The personalization as you call it happens in the initial message by knowing your target audience and thereafter through other contacts. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts. Leanne Hoagland-Smith, author of Be the Red jacket
For small businesses this personal contact can be a great tool. It’s a great way to gain clients, getting to know them and letting them get to know you. It’s also a great way to get more referrals.
Jen you are so right. Sales 2.0 or whatever social media is called is not an excuse not to engage with people. It is truly amazing what happens when you pick up the phone and touch someone.
Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to leave your thoughts.
Do you have any suggestions how businesses can increase engagement along with SEO impact?
Leanne Hoagland-Smith
Social Media Serendipity Marketing is Over!
It’s time for business to get to grips with social media and not rely on serendipity. Digital natives don’t like overt marketing in their social spaces. Banner ads have a click through rate of 0.05%. So why spend money on advertising in social networks?
It’s time to start using the term ‘social commerce’ and treat this as a business in the same way you would approach any marketing function.
For example, marketers seem to have forgotten about market segmentation and yet segmentation is the cornerstone of all marketing strategies.
After going to marketing college and learning about this fundamental practice and then going onto work and then spending thousands on research projects to define their markets by demographics, psychographics, sociographics, synchrographics, ethnographics and so on, marketers regress back to spray and pray advertising on social media networks.
So what’s the answer? So called social media (not commerce) gurus will say social media marketing is all about engagement and conversations. Well it is and it isn’t.
It’s not practical, nor cost effective to have conversations with all your consumers. You have to pick a place on the engagement continuum (http://paul-fennemore.blogspot.com/p/about-viapoint.html) where is it practical and cost effective to engage. But who do have conversations with? Well go back to segmentation.
Apply traditional segmentation strategies where you can. Social media is rich with segmentation data. For example, psychographics involves analysing and relating to consumers by Activities, Interests and Opinions (AIO).
Using surveillance tools it’s possible to build up a constellation chart of consumers who are expressing an AIO that is relevant to your brand. Then you can start engaging and conversing with these users and incite them to act as your eInfluencers, brand mavens and community evangelists. You can then start, if you insist, promoting your brand in the areas where they and their fans and followers are ‘hanging out’. But don’t use banner ads you will lose them.
We are running a formal research project into market segmentation strategies in the context of social commerce with Henley Business School. If you would like to benefit from this grounded and objective study, find out more here http://paul-fennemore.blogspot.com/p/home.html.
Paul – I found your response more like an article than a discussion and an attempt to sell your services. I will leave it and allow people to make their own judgements. However, in the future, consider responding from a more personal perspective.
People buy from people they know and trust.
And your site has no page rank according to Alexa which suggests you are using this site to increase your SEO rankings.
Leanne Hoagland-Smith