Next time you say, “I don’t care what somebody had for breakfast,” or some similar, disdainful phrase about the B2B selling power and value of social media tools, re-read the following story…
Sometimes a memory is very vivid and sticks in your brain. For me, one of those dates back to 1986. I was a sales manager for IBM back then. (btw – What an awesome job that was!) The use of a new productivity tool was exploding inside the company.
Actually, at the time, it was referred to as a “productivity” tool.
The quotes around the word productivity indicating that not everybody was so sure this tool had a positive impact on sales performance. The tool in question? E-mail.
Over the course of most of that year, a good 30 minutes of the monthly sales management meeting was spent discussing how much time was being wasted/invested in using PROFS. (i.e., The PRofessional OFfice System – I still giggle at the tortured efforts to turn everything into an acronym.) A minority intuitively saw real value. The majority said things like, “I have sales people showing up in the morning and spending 30-40 minutes playing with PROFS.” Or, “I didn’t hire her to be a damn typist.” Or, “I can just pick up the phone and share the 3 sentences of important information in 10 seconds; vs. hunting and pecking at a keyboard for 10 minutes.”
That last one was the weak spot in the argument of the nay-sayers. Sure it was 10 seconds to share the info. How much time to look through your rolodex to find the number? (The cooler, younger folks like me used a box filled with 3X5 cards instead of that old-fashioned, ridiculous-looking rolodex.) How much time chatting it up with the secretary? (In those days, even a lowly sales manager like me had a secretary who answered the phone.) How much time sharing pleasantries with the callee? How much time wasted when the callee wasn’t in or available, requiring re-looking up the number, re-exchanging pleasantries, etc.? How many misinterpreted messages due to the speech-to-secretary’s-phone-memo-slip-to-recipient’s-brain system? How much lost productivity due to the hours/days/weeks of delay in getting a response via the same clunky process in reverse?
Sadly, the debate raged on LONG after the productivity producing proof of e-mail’s value was abundantly clear and non-debatable.
NEWS FLASH: The productivity producing proof of the value of social media tools for B2B sales is now abundantly clear and non-debatable.
If you’re still one of the doubters, watch for the patronizing, polite smiles and nods when you scoff. Maybe, just maybe, it’s you who doesn’t get it.
