"Spray & Pray Selling" Has Been Defeated. It's Dead.
Selling has never been easy. It was difficult back in the days of door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen, and it is still difficult today.
We have seen many new sales challenges pop up just over the past two years. Businesses are struggling to respond.
New challenges require new strategies but too many sellers are trying to force their “Spray & Pray” methods on buyers who are done with that approach.
You see, MarTec and SalesTec stacks have made it far too easy for sales organizations to abuse the system... and alienate the buyer. I mean, just because you can reach out to 100,000 “leads” at the push of a button doesn’t mean that you should.
Bombarding prospects (often referred to, incorrectly, as “leads”) with unsolicited sales pitches has taken a heavy toll on the entire sales industry.
Buyers who used to put up with the daily assault from sales reps, SDRs, and outsourced lead gen firms are no longer willing to do so.
The era of adversarial selling is over.
Buyers don’t want to be ambushed with unsolicited – often poorly constructed – sales pitches.
They don’t like having their busy days interrupted by cold calls. Deep into a project or in the middle of making an important decision, the last thing anyone wants is to be disrupted by unwanted solicitations.
Incidentally, why do sales organizations think it wise to make their most junior reps responsible for placing a huge number of calls to senior executives? They are hoping to secure appointments, but would YOU take such a call?
Buyers also don’t want to be manipulated into transactions with cheesy objection handling techniques.
And they certainly don’t want to be pitch slapped on social media.
All these awkward attacks from sellers are causing buyers to retreat into their offices and put up their guard. They have developed a defensive attitude towards any attempts to sell to them.
And their default position looks like this:
“No matter what you’re selling, I’m not buying!”
Yes, this is now the prevailing attitude among your ideal prospects.
It makes for difficult selling, doesn’t it?
Buyers have defeated the old selling strategies. The usual shortcuts to making a quick sale have vanished. The time of lazy volume selling has ended.
The pandemic put the final bullet into “Spray & Pray Selling” techniques.
Sales leaders who have not grasped the significance of the situation continue to lament:
“We need more pipe.”
“We need to close more deals.”
That, however, is looking at the battlefield the wrong way. Awareness is growing. Modern sales leaders are starting to understand that doing more of the same old thing does not lead to a better, or a different, result.
There is a shifting of old sales management attitudes.
In fact, in a recent LinkedIn poll, 83% of respondents confirmed that they need to engage their prospects better, not harder.
83% of sales respondents confirmed that they need to
engage their prospects better, not harder.
The question sales leaders everywhere are now asking themselves is this:
How can we begin engaging our prospects better and more effectively?
My clients know how.
My clients know that there are only two ways to engage better and more effectively with their ideal prospects:
Create “Lean-Forward Moments”
Leverage the three exact ways to engage Executive-level Prospects
“Spray & Pray Selling” is finished, but that shouldn’t mean selling becomes even more difficult. We can adapt, we can evolve, we can find better ways to win sales in this modern environment.
Get in touch. Let’s discuss your business situation and discover your opportunities to modernize your selling..
Here’s to doing better!
Peter Strohkorb
About
Peter Strohkorb is the Founder and Principal of Peter Strohkorb Advisory, the international Sales Acceleration Advisory firm with a growing list of clients in the B2B services and tech space in the US, Australia, and in the UK.
Our motto is: “More Sales, Faster”
and that is exactly what we deliver to you, our clients.
Contact
Phone AUS: +61 (0)411 865 301 | pstrohkorb@peterstrohkorb.com
Phone US: +1 (628) 246-1242 | peterstrohkorb.com