Soft selling. Hard selling … and everything in between.

Yes, another article about sales. It feels like much of what we need to know about this topic has been said in one way or another. So why are we not all superstar salespeople who never worry about their next commission cheque? Part of the problem is that the graphic arts market is a tough one; another part is the constant need to refresh your mind regarding important skills that perhaps don’t come naturally. We hope this article is a nice refresher that will help you get 2014 off to the right start. We’re going to achieve this by thinking about soft selling as well as marketing. More often than not we find that there is not enough synergy between sales and marketing. We will discuss some ideas on how to bridge this disconnect.
Firstly, what is soft selling? It is an approach to selling that is described to be friendlier, relaxed, less pressured, and more subtle. Studies have shown that soft selling is less likely to irritate a customer than its stronger and more direct counterpart, hard selling. Whether or not you are in sales, you come into contact with both of these on a daily basis as a consumer. In reality this division isn’t so black and white; rather there is a spectrum of assertiveness that becomes apparent in each situation. A common, everyday example: you walk into a clothing store and the sales person says 1) You look to be a size 5 (in your head you think I wish!), we are having a denim sale. Can I grab you a pair of jeans to try on? 2) Can I help you with anything? 3) Hi, feel free to let me know if you need help. This of course is a list in descending order in terms of pressure.
Some key features of good soft selling:
Be passionate about the product. It is very difficult to use this tactic if you don’t believe in what you’re selling. The entire concept is based around finding the best fitting solution for your customer for a win-win outcome. If you know that a better solution exists, the exhaustive questioning in this technique will reveal your flaws.
Ask a lot of questions. In an ideal world the client will him/herself come to realize that they need you. That is a distinctly different approach from backing the client into a logic corner the way that is often done in telemarketing. The questions “do you care about your children’s education?” or “is your health not important to you?” are…evil. Also take note that they are not open ended, which is typical for a hard selling situation (although there are exceptions, especially when closing).
Create a lasting relationship with the client. It is a lot of work but the real reason for choosing a softer approach is to build trust and allow for repeat business. There are of course costs associated with changing a prospect to a client, so the longer they stick around the further amortized those costs become. Not to mention that long term clients are the least price sensitive.
Hard (or Traditional) Selling is Not Evil
One important notion to recognize is that the opposite end of the selling style spectrum is not all bad news. Hard selling does have a bit of a bad rap because it does tend to create a more pressure-filled environment. However, in some instances a bit of pressure helps the situation along. The old fashion sales cycle is very didactic and not so subtle, but it also makes no qualms about asking for the sale. Sometimes when we are deep into the relationship-building process, asking questions and crafting solutions, it somehow becomes difficult to ask for the sale. It’s important to create some language around closing that feels natural so that the process can be relaxed start to finish. My favourite line, taught to me by one of the most talented sales people I know, was “you must have a reason for saying that, mind me asking what it is?”. This is a typical ‘dig deep’ question to help the prospect overcome his/her obstacles and come to a close. It may feel or sound rehearsed to you, and if it does DO NOT USE IT! You have to find something that rolls off the tongue for you.
Another characteristic of hard selling that I believe is important is the concept of sales being a “numbers game”. Just because we are nurturing real relationships with clients doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep track. Let us use dating as a metaphor for soft selling; I can understand how it feels a bit dishonest to constantly be counting dates, but sales, while having many similarities to dating, has one distinct difference: the goal is never to end up with one perfectly handsome buyer.
Keeping track of progress in sales is instrumental in helping you achieve your goals. The more accurate and complete your sales notes are, the better! This is especially true because as you work on getting to know your clients you will have a lot more information about them. Continuing the dating analogy, imagine calling a date by the wrong name and how this would set you back!
There are many solutions out there for managing the information you gather about your prospects. You can go as low tech as folders with handwritten notes to as high tech as cloud based customer relationship management software. Perhaps you are encouraged to use a company system that is already in place. Go ahead and check out its features. A popular system that you may have heard of is salesforce.com. I am not a current user or promoter of this software, I simply mention it because of its popularity.
At the end of the day, the more people you contact the more chances at new clients you have! Yes, cold calling clients, however you do it, is important in relationship selling. Just make sure that the decisions about whom to call are meaningful. Also, continue to always treat your current clients as if they were still prospects – keep the romance fresh!
Marketing and sales: a synergistic relationship
To all of the sales people out there, are you already working with your marketing team? What has marketing done for you lately? And marketers, are you talking with your sales team? They are your front lines of customer information gathering. It is shocking how often sales and marketing teams don’t work together. Marketers have the ability to create talking pieces and campaigns that hook prospective buyers. However these can only be made as good as the knowledge about the buyers. Sales people have access to information about their prospects. There needs to be a constant conversation between the two groups.
I think part of the issue is that marketing in business to business situations is often less obvious and not as sexy. You probably already do some form of the following: a paper or special finish upgrade, a desk calendar, some pens, and maybe even holiday baskets. There is nothing wrong with that list if you put some thought into it and do it well. As an example, if you are printing a standard calendar and mailing it, you are wasting your time and money. A nicely printed calendar hand delivered is better, and a calendar that showcases your capabilities (maybe even including a variety of printing methods) hand delivered is best. Marketers can create these pieces and make them even more successful by working with sales people to identify what is currently hot in the market. Some creative examples of sales and marketing joint projects will follow.
Educational sessions
One of the aims of soft selling is to create a relationship with your client. One of the best ways to do this is by becoming a trusted resource for them. People buying printing from you don’t want to have to think about the “how” involved. On the other hand any prospect and customer would be interested in becoming an expert in understanding the variety of solutions they could offer to other people within their own company. Why not host a training session that will position you as a mentor in developing their ability to buy printing solutions? As an example have marketing develop a personalized mailer that invites them to understand personalization. Or perhaps you want to take this one step further and develop a lunchtime learning series that includes a variety of topics. Employees, prospects and current customers can attend! Some companies already do this; in fact I’ve attended some great Fujifilm Lunch and Learns. The key is that the purpose of the session is to educate, not to directly sell services. Of course you will want to make sure that the speaker is excellent and that the event is well organized. Perhaps your company can run one internally for practice, as a start.
Social media contests
Ask any marketer if social media is important today and they are bound to say yes. Ask them if it makes money and the answer may not be as unified. While there are tools to track leads created from social media sites, printers as a group have far to go in just being a part of the social media conversation. If you choose to have social media pages for your company, one simple way to keep the content fresh is to have contests. There are both passive and more involved ways to do this but the general aim is to remain top-of-mind as well as spread the word about your company. An example of a less involved contest might be doing a draw for people liking a Facebook page. Something more sophisticated could be a photo contest (which perhaps creates content for that great calendar the sales team will distribute). This second option engages the user more and begins to create a community.
Personalization
Last but not least, if you have the capability to create some personalized marketing pieces you should. I’m not talking about just using your prospect’s name in the title. Go all the way tech…create a QR and a PURL and make sure that the online components also showcase your capabilities. In another words show the client what you can manage for them by displaying the skills through your own successful example. In an ideal world a client will call you and say “I want to make one of these for my business.” Make sure you follow through on a campaign so that you can understand how all the pieces work together.
Interview with T.J. Tedesco
Hopefully you can see that both sales and marketing teams would have to be engaged in creating the examples above. So now that you’ve brushed up on soft selling and marketing I wanted to conclude by offering another perspective. I had the opportunity to interview T.J. Tedesco, the Founder and Team Leader of Grow Sales Inc. and the author of Win Top Of Mind Positioning, the book we use in our sales course at Ryerson. His advice comes from many years of experience.
What are the most important tips for soft selling?
The Prospect/Customer Nurture Program, the cornerstone of my 17-year-old company, is based on a soft selling approach. Here are some best practices we adhere to when creating and executing these programs for clients:
Lead with information. A highly effective form of soft selling is simply giving your prospects and customers information that helps them do their jobs better. If you position your company as helpful, knowledgeable and smart, customers will think of you the next time they have a printing challenge to solve.
Frequency matters. Frequent outreach is key to the success of the soft selling approach. While there’s no one-size-fits-all frequency that applies to every company, generally you want to be in touch with your A prospects the most, your A customers slightly less, your B prospects slightly less than that, and so on.
Different messages for different roles. With the information-based soft-selling approach, it’s important to make all communication streams relevant to recipients based on what you know about them. Prospects are usually less knowledgeable about a company’s service offerings, so basic informational needs should be emphasized. On the other hand, communications with existing customers should be focused on up-selling premium services and cross-selling different services. If possible, you also want to send customers and prospects different information based on their job functions, past experiences with your business, and so forth.
How would you describe the ideal relationship between sales and marketing?
Ideally, marketing and sales work hand-in-hand to create a closed-loop sales system in which sales continually helps to improve marketing effectiveness and vice-versa.
It’s marketing’s job to generate demand and produce qualified leads to pass onto sales. Then, it’s sales’s job to close the deal. When the two departments operate in sync, sales keeps marketing apprised of results: leads closed, overall quality of leads, etc. Using this information, marketing can make the informed decision to either change up their strategy or stick with what’s working.
Could you maybe share a funny/insightful story about soft selling or hard selling gone wrong?
One benefit of the soft selling approach is that you end up wasting less time meeting with those who weren’t that interested in the first place. Early in GSI’s history, while still working as a solo consultant, I discovered this – and one limitation of the more aggressive approach – the hard way.
I flew out to California to make what I assumed would be a slam-dunk sale with a nice three-facility company. While the company president appreciated my visit, he told me I seemed desperate. I asked why, and he told me, “You were willing to fly all the way across the country for our meeting without asking me for anything in return.”
Based on this feedback, I instituted a qualification procedure for new prospects. Before I would fly out for a complimentary no-obligation day-long meeting, they had to agree to pick up my travel costs. If the prospect won’t even pick up a plane ticket, they’re not qualified. If they will, they are. In more than sixteen years, I’ve rarely waived this qualification step, and since then my “batting average” on these trips has increased from average to very high.
Do you think the printing industry displays lots of examples of top-of-mind positioning? Why or why not?
There’s very little top-of-mind positioning in our industry. It’s a paradox: most printers fundamentally don’t believe in marketing, but marketing is a lot of what we do for our customers. This paradox has served my company well for nearly two decades, as the printers who do grasp the value of top-of-mind can easily differentiate themselves and outperform their peers.
Of the nearly 100 retainer clients we’ve had in our company’s history, I can think of only four or five that are no longer in business. This is impressive when you consider that the number of printing facilities has declined by around 50% over the past decade.
What is a recommendation you have for using social media or technology in general to assist in the selling process?
Social media today can be compared to websites in the mid-90s. Back then, every printer knew they had to have a website, even if most of them weren’t quite sure how it would drive business.
Can you think of a serious printing company today without an excellent web presence? Soon, the same will be true of social media. GSI consistently tweets, posts and interacts with customers via social media on behalf of our clients. I’d be lying if I said we could connect these activities with new business as easily as we can with more “traditional” marketing activities. But that will change.
Hands down, the most exciting technology we use for demand generation is Marketo, specifically its ability to integrate with Salesforce and other CRM systems. Marketo allows us to automate streams of customized communications to prospects based on their activity with us. By seamlessly connecting their CRM systems and Marketo, companies can track prospects throughout the sales funnel, helping to bridge the gap between sales and marketing and create the kind of closed-loop sales system discussed earlier.
In conclusion
We hope that this was a positive refresher of considerations you should be making while executing a sales cycle. Now it’s time to put these to use and hit the pavement.