Sales training tip for the day: Get up close and personal

Someone’s trying to sell me something at the moment. They met me at one of my sales training seminars and told me a bit about their products. I get that a lot as you might imagine! I said that I was pretty interested in what they had to offer. Now I don’t know about you but I’d call that a green light! They should be all over me. And they are… well sort of anyway.

You see they’ve decided to take the sale on by email. Email after email after email. It’s got to the point where I am beginning to get a little sick of them.

I feel like I am being harrassed!

In these days of email, sms, hotspots, voicemail and cellular phones it’s much, much easier to stay in touch with people but people seem to have forgotten the power of the personal touch when selling. Now don’t get me wrong here. I use technology to support my business. I have an email newsletter (cheap and easy!), I use email autoresponders (these little fighters sell when I am asleep) and I have a blog site (hey! you’re looking at it!) but none of them replace that personal touch.

People assume that all forms of communication are equal. They are not.

I don’t expect people to feel personally touched when they receive an email. Few people are excited to get voice mails anymore! And I read yesterday that some shops are trialling blue-tooth technology that sms’s your phone as you walk past the shop! Not that’s not going to be popular at all is it! One of the main problems is that we all know how easy these new technologies are to bombard people with and we get far too many of them, every day!

Most companies are so busy contacting people through these new mediums that they forget to continue with the rather more time consuming tried and tested methods.

This makes them all the more impactful and all the more effective.

Sales training tip for the day: Think about how you can create that personal touch… a phone call rather than an email, a hand written Birthday card rather than an e-card or a snippet of information ripped out of the newspaper in the post to an existing or potential client. They love it.

Why not share you ideas for giving that personal touch in an impersonal society and comment on my blog here.