As I was reading The Future of Advertising is Invisible by @SarahMerion and all I could think of was sales. I thought of the old insurance and vacuum salesman that use to go door-to-door. His approach was to get you face-to-face and then not go away until you buy something. Then you had the transition to the phone. The stockbrokers are probably best know for their fast talking ways and in your face approach to making a sale. Finally, today selling is about the introduction. It’s about trust and credibility. It’s about being an advocate not a vendor.
Things Change
For sales it could probably be traced to a series of events.
- People stopped answering the door. Couple this with an increase of women in the workforce and now you had less people at home. The prime target to the door-to-door salesman was the stay-at-home wife. Take her away and things had to change
- People stopped answering the phone. The add on to this was the introduction of caller id. Now caller id is included with every phone. It’s common behavior to screen your calls. Does anyone answer the phone without looking at it first?
- People have information at their fingertips. Today there’s the internet. If you want to know about something you look it up. You read reviews, specifications and customer experiences. How powerful is that? It has changed the way people shop. They no longer have to trust the salesman because they might very well have more information than he does.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on advertising because I’ve done very little of it. I guess it’s just not in my budget. The basis of what I read in Sarah’s post makes me think that advertising is following this same path. It just might be lagging behind a bit. Today, the best salesperson is someone you have a conversation with and you don’t even realize they are selling you something. Can advertising say this yet? Or is this where they want to be? I’ll tell you in general sales still has a long way to go but at least there is help.
In the end it’s about relationships. Maybe it always has been. The problem is the definition of ‘relationship’ has morphed. In fact, there’s a lot of different definitions. It might just be about finding the type of relationship for the customer instead of finding the customer for the type of relationship. Does that make us more sophisticated than ever? I don’t think I can give myself that much credit.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree, in the end it is about relationships – with Twitter and so many online social networks today we are building the relationships a bit differently than we traditionally had in the past.
And at the very end of the day it all comes back to the Know-Like-Trust factor – once those people have hit all three of those points, sales will come and so will the referrals.
.-= Michelle Mangen´s last blog ..3 Twitter tools to manage your followers =-.
Michelle, thank you for your comment. I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m actually working on a post now centered around the creditability and trust factor. It’s such a driving force in anything business related today.
PS- Great blog on social media tools. I definitely recommend my readers check it out.
Great article CJ. Your points about the different types of relationships being a major driver in the shift of how advertising is done is right on the money. I have Facebook relationships, Foursquare relationships, Twitter relationships, LinkedIn relationships, strict professional relationships, friendly social media relationships, and then my totally off the grid personal relationships. The increased ways to communicate and the increased amounts of information available ultimately increase what we’re exposed to. This is advertising’s challenge.
.-= Sarah Merion (@sarahmerion)´s last blog ..Outrageous Customer Service =-.
Sarah, thank you for the comment and the great inspiration. It’s the new modern day challenge, maybe more of a balancing act, building, massaging and growing all these different relationships at one time. From a business standpoint doe this put us in a constant search for which ones are the most rewarding? And from a personal standpoint it could be a different measure of ‘rewarding’ or maybe it just doesn’t matter?
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