In this Issue

💪    Sales Atrophied
🤖    Competing with Robots
💃    Customer Intimacy

💪  Sales Atrophied

I grew up in a sales family. My brother and I learned what an “assumptive close” was before we entered high school. We had it drilled into us from an early age listening to Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar on long car trips.

The culture of selling was so ingrained in us. When other families talked about sports or politics at the dinner table, we talked about selling: from the deals we were working on to the game of sales. We loved it!

But the profession of selling is not what it used to be. Since 2005, professional selling has been in a slow decline, while marketing and procurement have grown and evolved dramatically.

Marketing evolved from an administrative function to a data-driven and strategic profession. It replaced prospecting and networking, and found far more efficient and scalable methods of lead and demand generation.

Marketing has become the revenue driver for the organization. It has taken over significant parts of the sales profession.

At the same time, procurement has evolved dramatically in the past twenty years.

Procurement went from a relationship-driven, old-boys group to a very strategic, data-driven business. It too drives the organization, and has learned how to manage and control the sales professionals knocking on their doors.

Procurement often knows as much or more about the products they are buying than the people selling them.

We can see this transformation in the size and sophistication of these departments. Marketing and procurement have grown in size, investments, and technology, while sales has not kept pace.

The irony is sales is the most efficient driver of rapid growth.

When an organization’s back is against the wall and needs to turn things around, or when a startup is trying to validate its product-market fit, marketing isn’t the answer. Sales is.

The best way to validate a market or generate revenue quickly is to get out from behind your desk, speak with your customers, and work to solve problems. Go out and sell!

Our approach at Sticky Branding isn’t to stifle or avoid marketing. It’s to drive it through a sales-first strategy. Our motto is: If you can’t sell it, don’t market it. If you can’t market it, don’t brand it or invest in it.

One Stat to Watch

>70%

70-80% of the buyer’s journey is completed before a customer ever reaches out to a sales professional. Your brand and marketing are doing the bulk of the sales work.

🤖  Competing with Robots

ChatGPT and AI chatbots are rapidly replacing Google for product recommendations. And as a brand, this is terrifying.

Try it out. In “Incognito Mode,” pretend to be a customer and ask ChatGPT for recommendations related to your products, services, or industry. See what it recommends.

You may be lucky and have your brand’s name cited, but you may also discover you’re nowhere to be found.

This is the next frontier of search engine optimization: getting recommended by AI. It’s not an easy challenge, but one we all need to be hyper concerned about.

If your customers are looking for your services with AI, your brand better be recommended first or it may not even be considered.

💃  Customer Intimacy

Defend your brand with customer intimacy. Being close to your customers protects your business in two very distinct ways.

First, it insulates your business with trust. Think of trust like making small deposits in the “Trust Bank.”

Every interaction you have with your customers helps to establish trust. Consider these interactions as deposits. Each deposit builds on the next, and soon you will have a trusted relationship with your customers.

Creating a large deposit of trust is the currency that drives purchase decisions, but it also protects your brand. If you make a mistake or there’s a lapse in service, you can leverage your trust and relationship to work with the customer to get to a better outcome.

Second, customer intimacy leads to more relevant and differentiated products and services. When you intimately know your customers and their needs, you can design not only your products but also your entire organization to meet their needs.

This is a potent form of defense. It’s hard to compete with a company that serves its customers so well that they don’t need to consider the competition.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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