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Harvey Mackay's
Column
for the week
of January 9, 2012 |
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How Weird Are
We?
For years I have been promoting
the concept that you must “humanize your selling strategy.”
The short explanation for this plan is that you must match your
sales approach to the individual or company who will buy your
product. How will it benefit them?
Let’s use envelopes as
an example. What sets your very ordinary product apart from all
the other envelopes that your customers can choose from? Your
selling strategy. How you sell. The relationships you have
built with the buyers. The pricing, quality and delivery that
you are able to promise, and then the follow through. Because
you’re not just selling envelopes. You are selling a person. |
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That strategy has been my ace
in the hole for my entire selling career. And no matter how
much the customers change, the formula continues to work.
I just finished reading Seth
Godin’s fascinating new book that reinforces my thinking.
Starting with the curious title, “We Are All Weird,”
I was taken with his observations. Godin says that “human
beings prefer to organize in tribes, into groups of people who
share a leader or a culture or a definition of normal. And the
digital revolution has enabled and amplified these tribes . .
. who respect and admire and support choices that outsiders happily
consider weird, but that those of us in the tribe realize are
normal (our normal).
“My argument is that the
choice to push all of us toward a universal normal merely to
sell more junk to the masses is both inefficient and wrong.
The opportunity of our time is to support the weird, to sell
to the weird and, if you wish, to become weird.”
He explains that years ago,
mass-marketing led to greater profits, that specializing or acceding
to choices was not necessary because producers could make more
money from “forced compliance and social pressure.”
Godin cites a statistic that
in 1918 there were 2000 car companies active in the United States.
You may recall that Henry Ford’s production line process
changed car manufacturing forever. And he’s rumored to
have said that a customer could have a car in any color, as long
as it was black. Was that the beginning of mass marketing?
On the contrary, years later
Microsoft “knew that every single company in the Fortune
500 was using their software, usually on every single personal
computer and server in the company.”
With that sort of success, Godin
asks, “Is it any wonder that market-leading organizations
fear the weird?”
Godin predicts the end of “mass”
as we know it. And he says that may make you uncomfortable if
your work “revolves around finding the masses, creating
for the masses, or selling to the masses.”
Rather than seeing this change as a threat, he says it is the
opportunity of a lifetime. “The way of the world is now
more information, more choice, more freedom, and more interaction.
And yes, more weird.”
I can certainly relate to Godin’s
premises. My customers are not the folks who buy plain old #10
envelopes. They need all sorts of specialized products that
they can’t find at the mega-office supply store. I would
not characterize them as weird, but we see each account as having
specific requests and needs that we can fill better than any
other company.
Our company motto is “To
be in business forever.” We can’t accomplish that
if we refuse to accommodate the specific, unique and occasionally
weird orders that we receive. Because if we don’t do it,
someone else will. And we are happy to take customers from other
envelope manufacturers who don’t appreciate the “weird.”
So let’s go back to humanizing
your selling strategy. Whether you are selling face-to-face
or through a website, your customer has to feel like their business
is your most important account. Do you know enough about them,
about their lives outside their work, about why they buy from
you rather than another vendor? Do you tailor your sales presentation
to address those needs? Can they trust that you aren’t
just all talk?
Will this trend put mass marketers
out of business? Probably not, but small businesses should pay
particular attention to this phenomenon, because they can most
easily adapt to selling to the “weird.” Call it what
you want, but Seth Godin makes being “weird” the new
normal.
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Mackay's Moral: |
If you can’t be all things
to all people, aim to be all things to some people. |
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