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In the restaurant and hotel sector, a quiet revolution has taken place without us realising it because of TripAdvisor. How many of us these days use this website to screen our food choices? Would you really ring a friend and boldly declare that the restaurant you have chosen is rated 3.5 out of 5 on TripAdvisor? And beyond the website itself, when we see the coveted “TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence” sticker in the café window, don’t we feel a bit more confident to push the door open and order our lunch? Building a brand in this sector is every bit as much about managing your reviews on social to stay above the psychological barrier of 4 out 5.
Imagine if the equivalent of TripAdvisor found its way into B2B transactions? How would that transform the buyer seller interaction? Probably in much the same way – service, consistency and a memorable experience would all come to the fore as sales attributes. David Meerman Scott has championed this idea in 2014 in his book “The new rules of sales and service”. It is a clarion call to sales organisations to make service delivery central to their sales proposition.
These creeping Darwinian forces in sales are the very reason why this year we will launch a new sales programme called “Iterative Selling” to recognise the absolute need for sales and marketing professionals to be equally adept in the virtual and actual worlds. We read the signals to mean those sales organisations who don’t manage client satisfaction and client experience really well will quickly be exposed and lose ground to competitors who do.
Of course, giving excellent service is hardly a new idea: What is new is the velocity and scale with which a good / poor reputation can propagate via web channels. Whilst there is no obvious B2B TripAdvisor yet, the conceptual space exists for it to emerge, and indeed we already know that 60-70% of the buying decision has already been made by the time a B2B prospect contacts us.
Contact us to find out more about the “Iterative Selling” programme which helps sales people become adept at selling in the digital age.