This week, we brought you a genius in online cross-channel marketing and communication, the author of a bestselling book, “Combo Prospecting” – Tony J. Hughes.

TUNE IN to an Award-Winning Episode (Gold Medal Winner For The Best Webinar Awarded by Top Sales World) – COMBO PROSPECTING on the Heads Up Adviser Show.

Learn how to leverage different marketing channels and your sales expertise. Create a structured “sales machine” that attracts and converts clients into your brokerage business.

TONY J. HUGHES:

Right before my flying instructor let me go solo, he asked me: “What’s the definition of confidence?”
I said: “Confidence is when skill and experience come together.”
He responded: “No. Confidence is the feeling you have just before you understand the situation.”

I’ve carried this through my whole life in business. There’s always something going on inside the customer organization with politics, projects, and initiatives all competing for funding. With desperate competitors approaching your prospects and clients, you’ve got to be “positively paranoid,” not confident and complacent.

The failure rates in B2B selling are climbing every single year. It’s getting increasingly difficult to be successful, and yet the reality is it’s never been easier. The tools, information, and different channels available to us should be making it easier. And in my view, the reason people’s pipelines are drying up is they’ve stopped using the phone. They’ve stopped time-blocking daily activity to go and build a high-quality sales pipeline. People have bought into this false notion that if they groom their Linkedin profile and do a little bit of marketing, then the world will be the path to their door – and it’s just not true.

Besides, we need to target the right buyer personas. I would argue we’ve got to go and get to the person with economic power in the decision-making process. So, rather than HR people, we need to get to the financial control of the CFO, and be able to have conversations with them that they regard as highly relevant.

One of the rules of selling that normally works against us is we get delegated down to what it sounds like we deserve to speak. So if you talk about lower order issues, if you talk about healthcare to the CFO, who think: “There’s someone in HR that looks after employee benefits” – and they’ll just try to push you off there. And the reality is, you need to start HIGH in an account, and you need to anchor value, and get SPONSORED down – not delegated down – so you’ve got access to come back.