I was recently asked for advice by two young internet marketers that I think are really going places. Now these two young guys are seriously smart, so smart in fact that one of them has a PhD in rocket science (I’m deadly serious, he really has)! I thought for a while about what really was the absolute best advice I could give them. I actually didn’t have to think for too long at all before my answer just seemed to pop out of my mouth almost like it was somebody else saying it and not me:
“Get a job for a while doing some real selling” I said.
“And if you really want to learn about marketing in the shortest possible time then make sure you are working on commission only and if possible that you are dependant on that commission for a living”.
I told them that they already knew a tremendous amount about marketing but their education would remain incomplete until they had done a sufficient stint of face-to-face selling.
I spent a good portion of the early part of my life dependant on sales for a living. Although I didn’t realise it at the time this would prove to be the best training I could ever have had. I have since read hundreds of business books, studied in universities, and travelled the world to study under the best in the world and despite the fact that all of this stands me in good stead none of it has taught me anywhere near as much as that which I’ve learnt from actually going out in the big wide world and selling something to somebody face to face on a regular basis.
Eventually I came to understand that selling is actually simple and that it is nothing more than a process. Once you have a proper understanding of that process it becomes innate and second nature to you and you can easily teach it to others, but only providing they truly wish to learn.
This eventually led me into sales management and then the learning started all over again. This is where I discovered something very important and it’s that great salesmen don’t necessarily make great sales managers. Managing people at any level requires a completely different skill set and accounts for why so many top sales performers languish and fail when promoted to manage others. By contrast I don’t think sales management is something you ever master, its something you improve at until you reach a level of competence that enables you to first survive and providing you continue to learn and apply what you’ve learnt then you might eventually flourish. So beware! The road to success in sales management is littered with the bodies of many excellent salesmen who thought they could manage others but eventually discovered they couldn’t.
I still remain delighted that I discovered that writing good sales copy is nothing more than salesmanship in print. Put another way, once you understand the building blocks in the sales process it is reasonably straightforward to reproduce that process using the written word and get the same results as you would if you were face to face with a customer. It’s impossible to describe my excitement though in the moment when ‘the penny dropped’ and I suddenly realised that what I’d written could be used tens of thousands of times to create sales with people that I’d probably never even meet.
I still remember the exhilaration when I launched my first direct marketing business. Within a week I had to almost force open the door at my premises because there was so much mail behind it. What made this so exciting? The fact that most of the envelopes had cheques in them, some even contained cash. From that moment on I was hooked!”. It seemed almost like a miracle to me. For years I had been running my own business and had always placed myself on the front line, taking charge of both sales and of marketing. I would drive tens of thousands of miles each year and spend hours sat behind the wheel of car and wait interminably to see professional buyers and then after a full day of this I would tackle the long drive home and all in the quest for sales. I could hardly believe it when I discovered what was possible from the relative comfort of my desk and just with paper, ink a few envelopes and some postage stamps.
From there on I have studied everything I can on direct marketing and have assiduously applied what I’ve learnt in my own businesses and eventually for clients too. Whilst it may be a cliché the simple truth is that I have never really looked back since the day I properly went in to direct marketing.
The latest arena to open up for direct marketing is of course the internet. The magic of the web now makes it possible to test your ideas in minutes instead of days, weeks, months and sometimes even years. There is no doubt that as marketers we are stood on the threshold of a new age and in years to come future marketers will say:
“Imagine what it must have been like to have been there when the web was in its infancy….when it had just started…can you imagine it?”
Well we are there and we are living in that moment right now, and it’s up to each individual to identify it as the opportunity which it surely is and make what they will of it.
With that said don’t forget that off-line marketing still works and that despite the coming of the mighty web its power remains undiminished. It’s important to remember that the internet provides us with just another medium, albeit a hugely powerful one and one which we ignore at our peril.
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