280% Sales Increase Nonsense

A sales department head sitting next to me was shaking their head.

Their phone duly pung.

A LinkedIn message.

Not sure how, he earlier accepted a connection request from a Sales training outfit.

They now wanted to speak.

About things like “how we double sales…”

No doubt their proprietary ‘mind-blowing advanced sales methods’ too perhaps.

Also how they’d love to discuss the current plans.

Then did end by stating typical results include a recent example where they’d made happen a “280% increase in sales” somewhere.

Cue eye-roll.

You probably know my views on this type of approach.

Utterly useless.

We empathised around the lack of seeded problem resolution.

Yet this isn’t the half of it.

Apparently, such pitiful old school door-knocks are getting a run for their money right now;

“We can make your digital transformation plans work”.

That’s the new horse in town.

I was half-surprised yet relieved they didn’t seem to flag this by the acronym DX.

The days of sending such a relatively vague pitch through to any high-ish level person are long gone. Maybe social network ‘friends’ of friends gives a false sense of shortcutting.

That said, even sending such note to any “Dig Trans Mgr” entitled web-presence (there are plenty out there) may well also fall on deaf spam bins.

I did wonder about how different these good old blunderbuss response rates might be nowadays. But you’d still guess at only the once typical two to three percent at best with this approach.

There’s a new school which suggests in our b2b world, any initial approach wouldn’t even pitch anything. Rather, you give something away. Ranging from praise through support to becoming an actual client.

The last time I isolated a specific company to meet that I’d precisely zero prior history with nor any contact with personnel in situ I spent the equivalent of two whole working days preparing a long letter about how I might help, based on all I could glean from their public utterings.

A 2020 re-visioning means a lot more effort than our predecessors got away with. I hope you’re not still relying on pitching ‘doubling’ something practically meaningless right now too.