Quick notes to help you find new business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week.
In this issue:
- Thoughts about Prospecting
- Being Human
- Random Stuff
- Back In The Day
Thoughts about Prospecting
- If a prospect is telling you how bad things are, let them wallow in the muck a bit. Don't offer to solve the problem, even if it seems obvious to you. Telling the person at the trail head that it's amazing at the top of the hill doesn't make the journey faster. Go back and meet them where they are.
- When it comes to prospecting, approach it with a testing technique from science. A low sensitivity test administered frequently is more accurate than a highly sensitive test administered sporadically. Being active, even if you're not great at it, can produce results equal to or better than the superstar sales prospector who gets around to prospecting new business when they can.
- The Pareto Principle says things in life are not distributed equally. You've heard 80% of results come from 20% of effort. In sales, prospecting is the 20% driving 80% of results. Unfortunately, most sales books focus on the other part.
- In the end, sales prospecting is easy. Talk to someone about what you have to offer. Preferably someone who can buy it.
Being Human – Do we need to do that?
There are a number of items on our to-do lists. More than we have time for. In the past, this meant prioritizing and getting as much done as you could in the time allotted. Today it feels like that limit has been removed. AI LLMs can do it all.
I've been thinking about this quote from Corey Doctorow:
"AI can’t do your job. But an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with a chatbot that can’t do your job."
It feels like that's right, doesn't it?
I am dealing with two situations where the ability and speed of the chatbot is producing a lot of work, but we're finding each piece of work is just slightly off from the others. In one case the work needs to be exact copies, but little variations keep showing up at inopportune times. Mind you, the output is standard, it's the bot's process that changes. So far, it's a new problem each time making fixes frustrating. We're Doctorow's bosses in this case. We replaced a team with a chatbot and it's making new work, making us a little like a TSA agents checking the output. And forcing us back into old tools for the time being.
Maybe it's good to have limits? It's early days with the bots, but that's how it feels this morning.
Random Stuff
It's Halloween weekend. My in-laws used to own a few Halloween stores. Fun fact, when the holiday fell on Friday or Saturday, sales for the year were higher. We figured it must be because the weekend holiday meant more parties. With Halloween on a Saturday this year, your local Halloween people are probably enjoying strong sales.
It was nice to have access to costumes. Some of them were returned for one reason or another and couldn't be resold. Many of those costume bits ended up in our basement because the kids were in prime costuming age. There were ancient soldiers, a Jesus costume, a Teletubbie, a taco, lots of video game characters, wigs, and props. Every year at this time I rummage through the boxes looking for something that isn't there because I imagine myself dressing up and handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Like this one from 2005:
I think my grandson would love to get a hug from me in that.
Back in the Day
What I was thinking about last year, five years ago, and ten years ago.
- Last Year: Right FIT #513 – Murder mystery rules jumps out because I am done with my attempt (minus some editing) and starting to pitch agents. What a weird world the commercial publishing industry is! Nothing like a non-fiction business book. The good news is my book follows the four rules I mention here. I got that far.
- Five Years Ago: Right FIT #304 – Tracking new sales activity in new markets should be straightforward, but it isn't. Sometimes it's because there wasn't a measure set early, so we're constructing one from incomplete info. Other times the measures are set but the tools change! I'm living through that with some free tracking tools. The free thing always comes back to bite, right?
- Ten Years Ago: Right FIT #42 – One of my little ideas jumped out because just last night I was talking about change management. That discussion was about trying to level up performance and whether or not AI LLM tools were going to help with change or leave us without the pain that teaches us how to do it. The idea in this newsletter was if you want to see a change, start with someone new. That makes it an internal best practice you can copy. . .unless the change is due to a bot.
