By Phil Horn, Senior Vice President, Sales and Service, Sacramento Kings
Phil is excited to be presenting a session, Collaborating with Customer Service to Capture Voice of the Customer and Drive Retention and Revenue at our upcoming STAR event
Sales 3.0. What is it? Simply put, a movement based on a realization that sales and sales management practices from the last decade have become outdated and inefficient. And for customers, a turn-off. It’s time to shift our mindset to a buyer-centric space.
Many Sacramento Kings sales all-stars have embraced the concept with huge successes becoming the next of over three dozen that have been promoted in the last year. Communication is evolving at an exponential rate.
Our ability to adapt to that pace in big-ticket sales environments has lagged. As a result, buyers are making more decisions to buy (or not) without us. Today’s sales professional’s job is not to sell, but rather to smartly engage.
It’s not that our prospects don’t want help today, they just don’t have the time or attention span to deal with a pushy sales person’s old methods. We’ve got to shift our process towards how the buyer wants to buy and away from how we’ve always sold. Who has the patience to slog through our voice mails, long-form emails and call scripts from the last century? Start engaging in the space the buyer prefers.
Without us, is their vast information available at a buyer’s fingertips to help inform and lead them towards a decision? Absolutely. Our next generation of buyers prefer it. Many though, get lost along the way. Do they still have a desire in the end to have a perceived expert double-check, recommend or confirm before making the final choice? You bet. Many are defaulting to consumer opinions for this validation. Is that because they trust them more, or because the more informed experts are nowhere to be found in the same space?
Harvard Business Review discusses the importance and availability of online information in the purchasing process explaining how it often leaves “the consumer as confused as ever about the ‘best’ choice.” The author goes on recommending to “Build cadres of trustworthy advisers.” We’re missing an opportunity to have our internal experts be these advisers. Don’t just put them on Twitter and have them start pushing products and selling though (I don’t love the term “social selling” – that’s not what we do). Engage, inform and advise.
What will separate a successful sales pro from that of the past is their ability to aide a buyer’s decision based on how and where they engage in the buyer’s journey. Today’s savvy sales pro can quickly decode a prospect’s background, knowledge-base and needs to enter the conversation with the right communication tool, with the right information, from the most efficient point in the process, keeping it simple and enjoyable for the buyer from start to finish. How?
Enter the Sales 3.0 toolkit.
Follow me here or on Twitter at @PhilKingsTix and keep an eye out to learn more about the specific technology tools and practices supercharging Sales 3.0. #Sales3pt0
As Senior Vice President, Sales and Service, Phil is responsible for sales strategy, development and execution for the Sacramento Kings, Golden 1 Center & the Reno Bighorns. Previously, he was Vice President, Ticket Sales and Service, for the Sacramento Kings, where he led the ticket sales and services team and the ticketing transition to the new building at Golden 1 Center. He was also responsible for long-term strategy, and high-level decision making, managing cross-functional deliverables with marketing, public-relations, community relations and corporate partnerships while driving the implementation of Sales 3.0.
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