OK, so Grant Cardone may love cold calling, but most of us hate it. (And, frankly, I find Cardone’s approach seriously off-putting). So, like many people, I was thrilled when “inbound marketing” became a thing.

I had fantasies about never having to cold call again. 

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But as the amount of content on the Internet has skyrocketed, the dream of just being “found” naturally as a result of your great inbound marketing content has become less and less likely. 

So the need to make sales calls isn’t going away. (Darn!)

As today’s guest, Jill Konrath, puts it in our interview,

“I’m not going to sit here an wait until somebody from [my target customer] stumbles across my website.”

That huge content overload (what Mark Schaeffer called “content shock“), not only makes it harder for you to reach your prospects, it even makes it harder for your sales people to do their jobs well. Because they are also dealing with content overload.

Even Konrath realized she was struggling with Internet-based distractions, which led to her new book, More Sales, Less Time. It talks about the things she’s done to overcome the overwhelm; something we also discuss in today’s podcast.

How You Sell Matters

But how we sell is vitally important to the customer experience. If I get a Cardone-type on the call, I’m outta there!

And I’ll be warning all my friends to stay away.

Konrath  is one of the sales gurus whose approach to sales is a lot more aligned with what I believe makes for good customer experiences.

It’s about building a relationship based on honesty and openness, right from the start. A relationship that will leave prospects feeling good about you, whether or not they ultimately become customers.

 

Now to be fair, with good content marketing, some inbound calls or emails are likely to happen. But they probably won’t be enough to keep you in business. Even Hubspot — one of the first companies to really push the idea of “inbound marketing” — admits that it does outbound sales too.

Sales in the Digital Era

So if you can’t rely on inbound marketing efforts, what do you do instead?

Well, the elements of inbound are still important:

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You need a good, informative website.

Pretty well everybody is going to go to your website before contacting you, and/or after you’ve reached out to them. It had better answer their questions. (You might find our 85 Tips to a Winning Website helpful.)

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Social media matters.

It’s like advertising: it builds brand awareness, which can make people more open to talking to you when you try to contact them.

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Target specific niches, and develop content just for them.

Some of this content you’ll use on the webs...