We're Buying. So Stop Selling.

Nearly all of the print material went into the recycle bin. Every email was deleted unread. Allison had already begun her own personal buying process. Yet many hundreds of schools were still selling to her, wasting her time and their money.

Without being pushed by us, her parents, Allison had gotten interested in the process of choosing and applying to schools when she entered high school, and shortly thereafter she started her research about specific colleges and universities. She had already been in college shopping mode for three years by the time this sales material arrived in our mailbox and her inbox. In fact, by her second year in high school, because of her web-based independent research, Allison had already made her choice. She had settled on Columbia College as her first-choice school long before she was being solicited by other schools. She chose Columbia based on the story the college told her.

Columbia College, a relatively small residential college in New York City, is part of the much larger Columbia University. The college teaches an unusual core curriculum, a set of common courses required of all Columbia undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major. Allison was fascinated by the core as she read about it on the Columbia site. She learned that all students encounter the same texts and issues at the same time, and the courses are taught in small seminars. Since the core was begun in the early part of the twentieth century, every Columbia student, alumnus, alumna, and professor is connected by this common bond. The story Columbia told resonated with Allison, and she was sold on applying to the college years before applications were due.

“Statistics on a college website don't tell a story like people do,” Allison says. “Citing the average SAT scores, and what percentage of graduates work on Wall Street—what does that tell you? But an alumnus who says he became engrossed with prison reform because he read Michel Foucault in a Contemporary Civilization course given as part of the core during sophomore year at Columbia, now that's interesting. When I read accounts by alumni on the website, I wanted to learn if they gained a different outlook on life because they went to Columbia and took the core curriculum. And I wanted to hear from professors and their reflections about what the core means to them.”

As Allison did her research and kept coming back to the Columbia site, her mind was made up. “In addition to the strong science program, Columbia appeals to me because the core unites the student body intellectually throughout the school's history. It will stimulate my curiosity to explore all the opportunities the university has to offer in areas outside my major, and feed my enthusiasm for courses in literature and the arts. For me, Columbia is the perfect balance between a liberal arts education and a top science research school in neuroscience.”

When Allison finally visited the Columbia campus a year later, she was already extremely well informed. “When I visited Columbia, it was bitterly cold with bits of brown ice covering the streets,” Allison remembers. “Despite my dislike of winter, I was excited to see the university where so much history had been made. Columbia had always been my first choice. The neuroscience program caught my eye long before I had started my college search. By the time I arrived to visit that frozen February, I was eager to hear about the funding going into mind, brain, and behavior research. I imagined myself side by side with the bundled-up students I saw before me, hurrying to a class where the professor is an author I'd read, or a scientist I've studied. I wondered what secrets were held behind those doors, and if I would someday be part of the pioneering research conducted there.” Allison had already gone through the buying process. Columbia didn't need to sell her. She had already told herself a story about how she belonged at the school.

By the time Allison was ready to apply to schools, it had been a four-year buying process. She was in charge. All she needed to make her decision was available to her on the web.

The best schools understood this and provided valuable information at each stage of her consideration process. When she was first looking around, the college websites delivered general information about the schools and some idea of what it might be like to attend. Often there were profiles of students and professors. There would be video content and photographs. Perhaps an email newsletter subscription would be offered. The schools that really understood the buying process knew that the secondary school students looking over their institutions were early in the decision-making process, and therefore the schools avoided a hard-sell “apply now” approach. And understanding buyer personas, some schools delivered completely different content intended to speak to a prospective student's parents, too.

Allison applied “early decision” to Columbia College in the early part of her final year of high school. (Early decision is a program that allows students to apply to their first-choice college in the autumn of their high school senior year with an understanding that they will attend the following year, if accepted. It's a nice alternative to the usual process of sending off multiple applications later in the year when nearly everyone else is racing to complete their packets.) Allison was admitted, and she graduated with a neuroscience degree from Columbia College in 2015. She was absolutely thrilled with her choice of undergraduate school and is now attending medical school.

Creating appropriate content to develop a lasting relationship over a long buying cycle is possible only when an organization has a compelling story to tell, deeply understands its buyer personas, and has considered the many aspects of the buying process in detail. It's no longer a selling process. The buyer is in charge. An effective sales and marketing strategy reflects a careful and judicious examination of a website visitor's buying cycle to create well-organized and compelling content on the site.

In this chapter we will take a close look at the new realities of the buying process and what it means for an effective sales strategy. And in the next chapter we will dig into agile, social selling and how you can implement these new strategies and tactics.

The End of the High Pressure Zone

Most salespeople and many of the executives of the companies they work for increasingly realize that the hard sell is far more difficult to successfully accomplish in a world where buyers are in charge. When anyone can jump onto your site—or those of your competitors—and can review independent commentary by bloggers or access consumer reviews on a smartphone app in seconds, it's an entirely different world from the one a few years ago when the salesperson pressured someone to buy.

Evidence abounds that the hard sell doesn't work effectively anymore. For example, Herb Chambers, a leading auto dealer in Massachusetts, tells stories about how his dealership sells. For example:

How to sell used cars without using people.

So you don't trust used car dealers. Guess what? We don't either. That might sound funny, considering we sell used cars. But look closer, and you'll see that Herb Chambers isn't like those other places. We've always been committed to doing business the right way, and we believe we deserve your trust. Why?

Let's start with our Smart Pricing program. It gives you a fair, fixed price and eliminates haggling. Second, all of our used vehicles undergo a rigorous safety inspection for added peace of mind. Third, there's no pressure. Our salespeople are here to help you buy a car and nothing more. And finally, if you're not totally satisfied—for any reason at all—bring your car back within five days for a full refund, or within 30 days or 1,500 miles for full credit. Our cars may be used. But our customers? Never.

And this one:

When you don't try to sell a customer on a car, you'd be surprised how many cars you can sell.

At Herb Chambers, we don't sell cars. We help people buy them. What's the difference? A big one. When you help someone buy a car, you listen carefully to what they have to say. Then you help them find the right vehicle. Patiently. Without pressure.

It worked for us. Sales are up, and customers tell us they love our no-hassle approach. Combine it with our other customer friendly programs, like Smart Pricing, and our 5-Day 100% Money Back Guarantee for used cars, and you can understand why last year alone, more than 48,000 people decided to buy their vehicle from Herb Chambers. Sold? We thought you might be.

Herb Chambers tells a story about how his salespeople do not practice the hard sell. And that meshes perfectly with buyers who tell themselves the story that they hate high-pressure sales and dislike haggling over price.

Sure, there are still many who practice the dubious art of the hard sell. There are financial advisors who cold-call people looking for those gullible enough to buy into “guaranteed rates of return” that are too good to be true. Every few months another Ponzi scheme is reported in the press, and we learn that many of those who jumped in had fallen into high-pressure sales traps.

The cliché used car salesman stereotype still exists, chomping on a cigar, waiting for someone to walk onto the lot in a sketchy part of town. That car salesman knows that if someone walks onto the lot, by definition he's a mark, because no educated buyer would ever be there. In a world where the unscrupulous auto dealer is instantly branded with negative write-ups on local review sites, it's risky to practice deception. But some still do. You must not.

Mingling with Buyers at the Learning Party

I've shared several personal examples of how the buying process I undertake is utterly different today than what I would have endured back in the 1990s. In the opening pages of the book, I related how I went through my own buying journey to research, choose, and ultimately buy an expedition to Antarctica. In this chapter I've talked about how my daughter Allison chose Columbia College, the perfect school for her, but one for which I had some input.

I'm sure you're doing the same thing when you buy. It has never been easier for people to learn about products and services and the companies that provide them.

When people working in sales, marketing, and service (and the executives who lead them) understand this new buying process, they help bring the buyers along so their organization closes much more business than if they did nothing or continued using traditional last-century-style selling.

“Companies need to be educating salespeople about the buying process, making them understand the buyer's journey, and educating the sales force about what things work to help move the consumer through their buying process,” says Jill Rowley, formerly in charge of Social Selling Evangelism and Enablement at Oracle. “Modern sales professionals aren't actually sellers. They are businesspeople who provide insight that helps influence what people buy.” Of the more than 122,000 people employed by Oracle, 23,000 are in sales or presales support, and Rowley led the effort to educate Oracle's people about how to be more effective in this new world.

One of the ways she delivered the new rules was by speaking at Oracle's eight-week residential training program for new sales employees. During a typical one, Oracle provides its 400 to 500 new hires, who are all recent college graduates, with classes on the fundamentals of business, sales, and Oracle, as well as details about specific product areas. “I actually don't even believe in selling,” Rowley says. “I opened the first day with the statement, ‘Everyone here may think I am here to teach you how to sell. But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to teach you how to help people buy. I'm going to teach you how to serve, and how to help. I'm going to teach you how to be relevant and valuable.’ Nobody wants to be sold to, and they don't have to anymore. The world has changed. Buyers don't have to put up with our old antics.”

Rowley's approach to training involves educating the salespeople on content, how buyers use it, and how to share it with them. Significantly, she refers to how buyers access content as “learning parties.” She places a strong focus on teaching the skills of social selling.

“Content is how you get into buyers' learning parties,” Rowley says. “Buyers are out there having learning parties without sales professionals because they can. Buyers have unlimited access to real-time information across the Web and through social networks. The salesperson is becoming less relevant. But the salesperson can be relevant by being a part of that learning party. They can do so by sharing and curating quality content that helps the buyer become educated and informed about the business issue at hand, and how your company can actually help solve their concerns.”

Rowley educated Oracle's salespeople (and by extension their managers and people in other departments such as marketing) that content sharing needs to be more than just Oracle-created information. She insisted that for every piece of Oracle content being sent by a salesperson via social media, four pieces of content from outside sources should be sent. “If all I ever shared across a social network was Oracle, Oracle, Oracle, Oracle, Oracle, Oracle, no one would want to engage with me!” she says. “You need to share content and move that buyer through the buying process. You need to teach salespeople that the buying process has changed completely and they need new mind-sets, new skill sets, and new toolkits.”

Rowley encourages salespeople to understand social tools like LinkedIn and Twitter and to use them to share content. “Social isn't a shortcut,” she says. “They are just new channels—new ways to find your buyers, listen and relay, engage and amplify. You are still building relationships, and relationships take time. If you show up at the front door for your first date naked, you're not going to get very far. Who does your buyer trust? Where does your buyer learn? To whom is your buyer connecting? You have to build that relationship over time.”

Educate and Inform

Our ongoing communications revolution has profoundly affected how sales and service are done. Buyers are now in charge! (I know I've said this many times, but it is an important concept. Humor me.) Referencing blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and other web-based tools, buyers often bypass the traditional selling model altogether—learning for themselves about your products and services, your competitors, and what customers say about you (whether true or not!).

Don't struggle to adjust to this new environment—be agile and master it. You win hearts and minds by creating low-cost (and no-cost!) measurable strategies and tactics that help buyers you don't yet know discover you. The best salespeople have become information brokers—communicating by delivering the precise information that buyers need at just the right time and in just the right way.

You have the power to elevate yourself on the web to a position of importance. In the e-marketplace of ideas, successful salespeople educate and inform. They highlight their expertise by sharing videos, content-rich websites, social streams, blogs, e-books, and images rather than using the old sales playbook of hoarding information and letting it drip out. Now you've got to be on the buyer's timetable, not yours.

We also have the ability to interact and participate in conversations that other people begin on social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, forums, and review sites.

The key is to focus on the buyer's needs, not your own ego.

Stop hyping your products and services. Don't rely on interruption techniques. You'll regret taking advantage of people's time and attention with unwanted communications.

Instead you need to deliver the right information to buyers, right at the point when they are most receptive.

Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through sharing content, and smart marketers think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience.

The Buyers' Journey

The most successful organizations understand buyer personas and how marketers and salespeople work together to serve their information needs. In the preceding chapter we looked in detail at how to develop buyer persona profiles and how to integrate what the marketing team is doing to reach an entire marketplace. The marketing team creates information of value—blog posts, e-books, white papers, videos, infographics, and the like—for each stage of the buying process. Now we shift to how salespeople reach one buyer at a time.

As buyers consider a purchase, they always go through a thought process prior to making a decision. In the case of something simple or low-cost, the process is likely to be very straightforward and may take only seconds. But for a major consumer item such as buying a new car or where to hold a wedding reception, the decision may take weeks or months. My daughter's choice of which college to attend took years. For many business-to-business (B2B) sales, the buying cycle may involve many steps and engage multiple buyer personas. For example, it might encompass a buyer from the legal department, several buyers from information technology (IT), and the buyer from the group who will actually use the product. Some B2B sales may take years to complete.

Effective organizations take website visitors' buying cycles into account when delivering content and organizing it on the site. People in the early stages of the sales cycle need basic information about their problems and the ways that your organization solves them. Those further along in the process want to compare products and services, and they need detailed information on the benefits of your offerings. And when buyers are ready to whip out their credit cards or request to speak to a salesperson, they need easy mechanisms linked directly from the content that enable them to immediately and easily purchase, donate, subscribe, or whatever.

Driving People into the Buying Process

People in the early stages of the buying process need basic information addressing their problems and offering basic information about the marketplace and the product category. Don't distract them with stuff about your company and your products at these early stages. When doing initial research, people don't want to hear about you and your company. They want the essential information about the product and how it relates to solving the problem that brought them to your site.

Make web content totally free with no registration in the early part of the buying process. The job of web content in these early stages of the consideration process is just to get buyers interested in your organization and how you might be able to help them. The best thing at that point is for your prospect to think: “These guys are smart. They understand my problems. I want to learn more.”

It is essential that your salespeople understand that buyers go through the buying process independently of the salespeople's involvement. The salespeople need to understand the strategy behind the marketing staff offering effective content directly to an entire buyer persona. This way salespeople know what to send and when to engage individuals one-to-one as they move them through the final stages of the buying process.

The Collective Intelligence of a Million Mechanical Engineers Creates a Unique Marketplace…and More

Consider GrabCAD as a fascinating example of how an organization uses online content to drive people into the buying process. GrabCAD is an online community of more than one million mechanical engineers. Hardi Meybaum, a young entrepreneur from Estonia, founded the venture-funded company to serve as a place where mechanical engineers much like him could share their computer-aided design (CAD) 3-D models. People from nearly every country in the world have uploaded more than 1,150,000 CAD files containing designs for all kinds of projects. As I'm writing this, I'm browsing the community and see new designs for a hospital bed, an exhaust fan, and a pneumatic spring assembly for a car's front axle.

Community members share and collaborate, making GrabCAD the center of the open engineering movement. By connecting people, content, and technology, GrabCAD also helps modern engineers get products to market faster. However, the important first step in the GrabCAD buying process is to get members to engage in the community so that they feel comfortable sharing their CAD models.

While the GrabCAD community is totally free, the site also offers business opportunities. Companies can access the international community's brain pool by offering to pay for services or by sponsoring a GrabCAD design challenge competition in the hope that it will generate a usable design that can be put into production more quickly or at a lower cost than the company's own in-house design team could do. GE used just such a design challenge to create parts for a jet engine. The engineers who are members of the community love it because their designs are seen by corporations that might hire them.

GrabCAD also sells GrabCAD Workbench, a collaboration service that makes it easy for engineers to share files, work with partners, and complete projects on time. GrabCAD Workbench lets users synchronize local CAD files to cloud projects, lock files to prevent conflicts, and work together smoothly.

By the time a buyer is ready for one of the GrabCAD paid offerings, the sale is nearly complete because the buyer has been a part of the community for months or years. Buyers already trust GrabCAD because they are an active part of the community. They understand the benefits of online collaboration and are receptive to the idea of contests and internal collaboration tools.

No selling required!

Now Raise Your Hand (Please)

After your marketers have delivered compelling information to demonstrate expertise in the market category and provided knowledge about solving buyers' problems, you want buyers to express interest. The goal of the middle stage of the buying process is to have people “raise their hand” somehow. At GrabCAD, this comes when they register to become a member of the community. They haven't yet purchased anything, but they have given their personal information. At this point, you've found a potential customer from a huge sea of buyers you didn't yet know. But this is not the time to sell. You've still got to move them through the buying process a bit more.

When creating content about your offerings, remain focused on the buyers and their problems. Don't be egotistical and create things from your own point of view, such as elaborating distinctions between your products. As people interact with your content at this middle stage in the buying process, think of ways that you can offer something of value that will motivate people to enter a subscription so that you can learn who they are.

Possible enticements range from an email newsletter, a webinar (web-based seminar), an e-book, or a research report to something like GrabCAD's membership in a community. Be flexible; offer buyers a variety of ways to interact with your company, and make contact information readily available from any page on the website. A one-click-away option is best. But remember, if you're asking for someone's email address (or other contact details), you must provide something more valuable in return. You want buyers to think, “This is an organization I trust. I can do business with them. They have happy customers, and they are responsive to me and my needs.”

Got Square Footage?

Chuck Gordon is co-founder and CEO of SpareFoot, a company that makes it easy to find, compare, and book a self-storage unit. The SpareFoot service is free to people looking to rent a unit; space owners pay SpareFoot a fee when a deal is closed. “The storage business is just like any other asset or real estate: It's all about occupancy,” Gordon says. “The more units you have rented, the more money you make. We market units for space owners on our network of websites, and they only pay us when we send them someone who moves in.”

SpareFoot offers free information to self-storage facility owners to drive them into the buying process. At the middle stage of the buying process, the company offers the ability to sign up for the free quarterly SpareFoot Storage Trends report, which is based on surveys of hundreds of storage tenants as well as pricing and reservation data from the SpareFoot network of more than 6,000 storage facilities. Because the SpareFoot business is essentially acting as a storage facility broker, it has exclusive information that facility owners find incredibly valuable, such as the average price for a 10-by-10-foot storage unit in all 50 U.S. states. The information included in the SpareFoot Storage Trends report is so valuable that Wall Street analysts and investors subscribe to the reports as source material for making investment decisions.

In the middle of the buying process, the SpareFoot Storage Trends report is ideal for salespeople to start conversations with potential customers. “The report definitely gives salespeople more to talk about,” Gordon says. “They can say, ‘Hey, let me shoot this thing over to you. Check it out, and we can talk about it on our next call.’”

SpareFoot salespeople also use the report when they've had an opportunity to speak to a potential customer who doesn't end up buying. The report keeps their company in the buyer's mind as the first place to return to should the buyer revisit this situation in the future. In a sense, it keeps that potential customer in the buying process even though the person already said “no” once. “When we get a ‘no,’ then we ask them, ‘Would you be interested in signing up for our quarterly trends report? It doesn't cost you anything and we send you lots of free data and it's interesting,’” Gordon says. “Many people say ‘yes,’ and that keeps them in the marketing loop. They continue to get these quarterly reports, and then after a while they have seen SpareFoot enough times that either they call us back and sign up for our service, or when we call them back they have seen the value we provided, so they are more likely to sign up.”

The other fascinating aspect of the report is that the actual data reported within it can help a storage facility increase its sales. Imagine you're running a storage facility with only 60 percent occupancy and an average price of $140 per month for a 10-by-10 unit. Then your copy of the SpareFoot Storage Trends report arrives showing that your city averages 75 percent occupancy of storage units and they garner $150 per month on average. You'd be much more likely to consider SpareFoot to help you rent your available units! It's content like this delivered at the right time that moves people through the middle stages of the sales process so they are ready to be closed by the salesperson.

The Merging of Sales and Content to Facilitate the Close

As each individual buyer approaches the end of the buying process, you must provide content and tools that facilitate the sale. This is where salespeople earn their commissions. Buyers may be unsure which of your products is appropriate for them, so you may need to provide online demonstrations or an application that allows them to enter specific details about their requirements and then suggests the appropriate product. At this stage buyers want to know what to expect if they do become a customer, so offering stories from your current customers can help.

Salespeople have a critical role now. In well-oiled sales and marketing machines, marketers have provided salespeople with details about each sales prospect based on the actual content the prospect accessed. Together with the form the prospect filled out, marketers should tell the salesperson details like, “She clicked the ‘I'm a financial executive’ link from the homepage and then requested our white paper.” When your salesperson contacts the prospect, he will already know additional details about her besides those that appear on the lead form. At the moment that salespeople interact with individual buyers, they need to use their selling skills to discern the customers' needs and then offer them even more focused content. The salesperson can offer to add the prospect to the subscription list for an email newsletter, invite her to a webinar, alert her to the corporate blog, offer her online calculators, feature comparison charts, and make use of other tools.

“Salespeople get invited into conversations much later these days because of online content,” says Neil Fletcher, product sales manager in the United Kingdom for Siemens Metals Technologies, a company that focuses exclusively on the metals production industry. Fletcher's direct responsibility is a range of measurement systems used in the flat products part of the steel industry: steel mills rolling hot strip for making things like automobiles and refrigerators, and plate steel used for pipelines and shipbuilding. “A buyer's first protocol is the Internet to find out who's saying what about the products they are interested in,” he says. “But I think the modern salesperson needs to be able to weld together old-school techniques with the useful new techniques.”

Fletcher got his start in sales in the era before the web. But unlike many others, he has successfully made the transition, understanding the role of real-time content to educate today's buyers. He has adapted the skills he learned in the old days to the new realities. “As a salesman, you need to bring something new to the party,” he says. “Now the buyer is very well educated when you get to his doorstep. So you can't just regurgitate what he's already seen on the Internet. You have to be much more switched on. And you need the understanding of his business. I think that's always been the case, but it's more critical these days.”

Fletcher says that many of the techniques that he learned in the days before the web are just as important today. Success is driven by the knowledge of sales fundamentals paired with an understanding of how buyers go through the buying journey. In particular, he emphasizes that an ability to deliver content as a way to help move potential customers toward closing a deal has always been an important sales technique.

“Content curating is a fancy new label,” Fletcher says. “And I don't mean that in an insulting way. One of the things I remember learning a long time ago is if you read a story in the news that you think would be relevant and fresh to a customer, clip it out and send it to him. Now you just use Twitter to do that. It's exactly the same technique, but it's much easier. That absolutely has to be part of the modern salesman's toolkit. But large companies are often very slow to catch on to modern trends.”

In an increasingly competitive marketplace with its complex sales processes, web content will unlock success, even in highly competitive industries where smaller players are often beset by larger, better-funded competitors.

A Customer for Life

Once the deal is closed, there are two more steps. You must continue the online dialogue with your new customer. Add her to your customer email newsletter or customer-only community site where she can interact with experts in your organization and other like-minded customers. You should also provide ample opportunities for customers to give you feedback on how to make the products (and sales process) better.

At this point, you'll also want to measure what content is being used and how. Understand through web metrics what's working, and constantly tweak the content to make it better. Meet regularly with salespeople to gain insights into the buying cycle and how your web content is helping the process.

How the New Rules of Selling Contributed to a Math Education Program's Success

Imagine you're an educator charged with developing a brand-new graduate-level program in math. You've got to attract men and women to the program.

How about doing this within a school that has been an undergraduate-only, all-female liberal arts college since 1837?! The graduate program is brand-new. The co-educational aspect is brand-new. You're venturing into uncharted territory on multiple fronts.

What would you do to promote the program to the world?

That was the challenge faced by Mike Flynn as he took on the role of Director of Mathematics Leadership Programs at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Mount Holyoke in 2012, Flynn was a successful elementary school teacher and in 2008 was named Massachusetts Teacher of the Year.

“The program that I run used to exist at Mount Holyoke as a professional development organization called Summer Math for Teachers, where professionals would spend a week or two on campus to learn new ways to teach math,” Flynn says. “I inherited a program that had a long, solid reputation over 30 years, but it was known as a summer program. But we were launching a new master's degree program.”

While the existing program was known around the United States, its name, Summer Math for Teachers, became a misnomer. “With the new year-round master's degree program and other program offerings throughout the year, this name didn't make sense,” Flynn says. “So we changed the name to Mathematics Leadership Programs, which is more descriptive of what we do: training teachers to be teacher-leaders in mathematics.”

When Flynn started to generate interest in the new program, he did what most people do—traditional sales strategies.

“The first year I was doing everything wrong!” Flynn says. “I would do cold calls. I'd create Facebook posts, which were just advertisements. I was that guy who was just handing my business cards out saying, ‘Come to this program,’ and it just wasn't working. I also registered as a vendor at a national math conference because I thought that would be the place to go—just pay the fee to have a booth at a big conference and have all our materials there, and then stand around and hope people come to our booth. And that didn't work because we didn't get any applicants from it.”

The first year he ran the program, six people expressed interest and just four applied for admission. “They were four really good teachers,” Flynn says. “But the thing that was interesting is that out of those four who applied, three of them we knew really well; they were people who were already within our network who knew us. Just one person applied who was outside our circle of colleagues that first year.”

Flynn clearly faced a massive challenge. He had to increase the number of applications significantly or his program would be in jeopardy.

“If we're not bringing in enough participants to cover the costs of the program, then they can't hold on to us,” Flynn says. “I started to worry about the program and my position.”

Flynn began to focus on content creation to generate interest in his program. He created a site separate from the Mount Holyoke site at mathleadership.org where he started a blog and offered other information of value to teachers.

“What resonated with me was that we are known for having really good classes,” Flynn says. “People who experience our work come back time and time again. Because we knew we had strong educational content, I started developing free webinars to give people a taste of the math work we do for teachers. And those started getting well attended. But we don't do it from a sales perspective. I wouldn't even mention our program other than having the website and my @MikeFlynn55 Twitter handle. There was no sales part of it at all. I would just give something out that helped teachers immediately in their classrooms. And what I found was that people were very appreciative of it and they would tweet about the experience. The next time many would come back and they would bring a couple of colleagues with them.”

Flynn also created content for use on other sites to attract people to his program. “I would guest blog for big names on Education Week,” he says. “I didn't try to sell, but rather I was simply showing my perspective as a way of developing my expertise in the field. That started bringing traffic to both our website and my Twitter feed.”

The focus on guest blogging helped Flynn to develop a following among educators. “It helped me incredibly because I now had access to all of these great thinkers who were sharing their blogs and their great ideas,” he says. “I would retweet and/or comment on their work. And I started to grow myself professionally as a result of following these people. But then they also started following me and we started to develop this huge collaboration. For example, I connected with Dan Meyer, who is well known in the math world and has done a TED Talk, and he's got nearly 40,000 followers, and it's amazing. He and I connected on Twitter and collaborated on a huge event called Shadow Con at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference. I'm connected with this guy only because of my work through Twitter and approaching it from the angle of helping other people and sharing their work and driving people to them. Then they in turn will drive people to me. What's nice about it for me is that it's genuine. I'm not engaging in this community as an effort to draw sales or to draw people to our program.”

Flynn went from four applications to 40 as a result of content creation! He made the program a success and in the process assured himself a fascinating career that he loves. How fantastic is that?!

At this point, Flynn says they have firmly established the program because they are now reaching the broad demographic that they need to reach. “We're now inundated with master's degree program applications,” he says. “We filled our program and are on track to do it again. More and more people are contacting us for professional work. I just got back from Abu Dhabi training teachers out there, and my presence on Twitter has doubled since applying these ideas.”

Flynn says he learned that it doesn't work to be always selling. “Instead, engage the population that you want to attract in a way that's meaningful, in a way that you're seen as an authority and respected by what you offer,” he says. “Once you do that, then people naturally want to know more about what you're doing. The selling happens naturally as opposed to forcing it. It's night and day how we changed our approach and the effect it had on our program.”

While Flynn is an educator and is responsible for developing a program around education, his experience is not unlike others in countless other lines of work. I see examples like this all the time, so I know the ideas around creating content work for all industries, products, and services.

“As a teacher, we have a skill set of an educator,” Flynn says. “We spend all our time learning how students learn. We don't learn business. I never took a marketing or sales course. It's not something that you can just take for granted. It's not something that comes easy and that the things that seem obvious as an outsider are actually all wrong. People think they should use the old ways to [sell], but that's not the way that people search for programs. They're not looking for advertisements. They're looking for content.”

Lead Generation Calculus

I've shared several examples in this chapter, including those from Oracle, GrabCAD, SpareFoot, and Siemens Metals Technologies, illustrating the realities of today's buying process. Savvy marketing professionals and salespeople alike understand that sales and marketing must work together to move buyers through the pipeline. This is especially important in the complex sale, with long decision-making cycles and multiple buyers. Fortunately, web content hastens people through the process and shortens the sales cycle for any product or service—especially complex ones that involve many steps and take months or even years to complete.

For decades, the traditional demarcation point between marketing and sales was the lead handoff. This was the moment when name and contact information about a potential customer were delivered to the salesperson.

Every salesperson loves leads. And marketing people spend a lot of effort to provide them. But now that buyers learn about products and services through their own web research, and because they are already educated by the time they raise their hands, there is no reason for the artificial demarcation between sales and marketing. Too often sales leads go directly into a sales bucket, never to be marketed to again. This happens especially in B2B transactions. What a loss.

Think about the average corporate website. There are usually only two steps. A visitor goes to the site and there is a “contact us” form or some sort of offer (maybe for a white paper). At most companies, that lead is passed on to sales and all too often it is viewed as a “crappy lead” and ignored. Even worse, at most companies that site visitor receives no additional marketing. What a shame.

Or consider the business-to-business trade show. Many companies spend thousands of marketing dollars to design, transport, build, and staff exhibit space at important industry events. But after the show concludes, marketing staffers usually just tie a pretty ribbon around the business cards they collected from prospects who stopped by the booth, and then toss these leads over their shoulder to the sales manager.

In the auto industry, salespeople at the dealerships who obtain consumer email addresses hoard them as “our property” and never pass on the contact information to the automaker so that its marketers can send information to the potential buyers of its cars. That means people who want to receive information about new model rollouts cannot. Ugh.

Of course it's the salespeople's job to follow up on leads. But you might consider how you can integrate marketing with sales by, say, sending each of your trade show visitors an appropriate thank-you offer, such as a free trial of your service or a complimentary download. Or add the sales lead to your email newsletter list.

We're in a world now where sales and marketing coexist throughout the entire sales process. Buyers are evaluating your offerings throughout the sales process based on what the salesperson does and says, and what they see and do on the site and in social media.

Smart marketers need to educate the salespeople so they understand that we're in this together. We are no longer in a world where marketing passes the baton to sales, and sales leads are seen as the primary measurement of marketing's success. Marketing needs to create content for each step in the process. And salespeople, if they are active in social media, can drive prospects into the top of the funnel.

Growing Business in a Shrinking Industry…without Leads

Before we dig into a deep discussion on sales leads, I thought it a perfect time to share the story of a company enjoying success by understanding its buyers and building a sales process that fits its market perfectly. Notably, the company doesn't rely on the traditional marketing and sales demarcation, nor follow the sales lead approach so common in business-to-business outfits. Keith Spiro serves as entrepreneur in residence at Kendall PRess, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, commercial print shop. That Kendall PRess—a 28-year-old business in a nearly 600-year-old industry—continues to grow in a shrinking field provides evidence that a reliance on the old sales lead model isn't right in today's world. Spiro was initially hired as director of sales and marketing at Kendall PRess because of his experience at a very large corporation, which had trained him to work through a sales process to achieve positive results.

As so many others have noted, Spiro reports that the biggest change that he has witnessed over the past few years is that buyers are now more educated. “They tend to come in with much greater knowledge, and they often think they know exactly what they want. There's so much information online and companies like Microsoft have created products where everyone can be a publisher. So my role evolved very quickly from how do we market the company to what do our customers need? More importantly, we also need to focus on where the future customers are coming from, and what is it that's not getting resolved for them?”

Kendall PRess does no advertising. People learn about the business primarily through word of mouth and web searches. Kendall PRess has an extensive library of content on its site numbering many hundreds of pages, because Spiro knows people are using Google and other search engines to research print shops and also to check up on the reputation of Kendall PRess. “We have an unusually large number of Web pages for a print shop,” Spiro says. “There are no barriers, no walls. There are no sign-up forms. People realize we don't have an ulterior motive, because we don't make them register to receive content. And we try to prove that by giving them plenty of information about what they need at every step of the process. And we also provide additional information about things that we can't anticipate. The core to how we function as a company is to try to answer these questions: ‘How can we help you? What do you need? When do you need it?’”

Spiro understands the words and phrases buyers frequently enter into search engines, and creates his content to rank as highly as possible in search results. “When a buyer has a problem and they're looking for a printing solution, they search using whatever words they know such as ‘perfect binding’ if they know that, or a phrase used in professional book production or printing. We've worked very hard to make sure we're as high up in those listings as possible.”

The web content serves to provide the initial information, but most people want to connect with Kendall PRess to discuss their specific needs. This is where the “non-sales-lead” approach kicks in. Rather than forcing everyone to fill out a response form and let a salesperson take the next step and make a call, Kendall PRess allows buyers to contact them in whatever way they are most comfortable. And the company has no salespeople. Rather, it often is Spiro, or the CEO, or somebody else who responds to the inquiry. “When the right information hits, we want people to contact us in the way that's most convenient.” Spiro says. “I learned that in Sales 101. If somebody sends you an email, you send an email back. If they call you, you phone them back. If they write a formal letter, you respond with a formal letter. So we have many ways for people to contact us, including a mobile site where there are three buttons: ‘call us,’ ‘email us,’ or ‘get directions.’ When we did that, our smartphone hit rate doubled.”

Spiro joined the company several years ago as employee number 10. Now there are 14 employees. In today's always-on web-based world, many people talk about the demise of print. Newspapers are going out of business, and magazines are folding. Companies aren't sending as much print-based marketing material as they once did. While all that is certainly true, Kendall PRess proves that you can grow your business using the new rules of sales and service even in difficult markets. “We have created a true inbound environment,” Spiro says. “And it's working.”

Please Don't Squeeze the Buyers

Okay, take a deep breath. Really. Nice and deep. Because we're about to have a sensitive discussion. About sales leads. And it might get uncomfortable. Ready?

The debate about putting a gate in front of valuable content on a site rages on. The question: Should you require buyers to provide an email address and other contact information before they are permitted to download information such as e-books, white papers, research reports, and the like? Or, like Kendall PRess, should you be completely open and require no registration?

At countless organizations, barriers are erected. Sometimes called “squeeze pages,” these sign-up forms are put in front of the information so that the only way for buyers to get the good stuff is to fill out the registration details and disclose their personal information. But other organizations like Kendall PRess make all of the information on the site freely available—no registration forms at all.

To squeeze, or not to squeeze? Those who advocate requiring an email address and other personal information prior to being permitted to download content contend that each person is a potential sales lead. Advocates for open unrestricted content, including yours truly, contend that far greater value results from many, many more people consuming and spreading your content than would otherwise occur if a gate was in place.

This really is a bit like debating religion or politics—each side strongly believes in their position, and many are eager to argue passionately in its behalf. It's just like there are those who believe that global warming is an accelerating trend happening due to human activity on planet Earth, whereas others contend that what has been observed in recent years is merely a sign of our planet's natural cycles. And just like the global warming debate, once people have made up their minds about squeeze pages, it is virtually impossible for them to change. You believe one thing or the other.

Let me state clearly—I do not believe in squeeze pages under most conditions. Rather, I think that all organizations should take a page out of the Grateful Dead's playbook and allow people free access to content.

Can I Have Your Phone Number?

A guy goes up to someone he finds attractive at a bar, and the first thing out of his mouth is: “Give me your phone number.”

A girl sees someone she finds interesting at the local coffee emporium and starts the conversation off with: “So…how much money do you make?”

If you're a famous celebrity or amazingly hot, this approach might work. However, for mere mortals, you're not likely to get very far in the dating world acting like this.

Yet this is exactly how many companies behave when they require personal information, including an email address and a phone number, before sending you a white paper.

Their inane “contact us” forms require you to reveal intimate details, such as how many employees work at your company, before you can even speak with a human.

Lessons from the Grateful Dead

Starting in the 1970s, the Grateful Dead encouraged concertgoers to record their live shows, establishing “taper sections” where fans' equipment could be set up for the best sound quality. When nearly every other band adamantly said “no,” the Grateful Dead created a huge network of people who traded open-reel and cassette tapes among themselves during the pre-Internet days. More than 4,000 shows from the band's 44-year history have been taped.

The band was happy to have Deadheads trade tapes and make copies for friends. The cult of the Grateful Dead concert became a viral sensation before Mark Zuckerberg was even born, driving millions of fans to the band's live shows for more than 30 years and generating nearly a billion dollars in ticket revenue. Photography was also encouraged back in the pre–mobile phone camera era when it was the norm to ban cameras at concerts and shows. The tickets for other bands' concerts came with a printed warning: “No cameras or recording equipment.” Almost all the other bands of the era—The Who, the Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd—coldly declared “no” while the Grateful Dead said “sure!”

While I hope to convert you to my religion of making your content freely available during the early part of the buying process, I recognize it will be difficult to sway the opinion of those who have long advocated the use of registration forms to generate leads. So let's begin by taking a look at the facts:

• Registration through squeeze pages is a holdover from the days of direct mail, when a business reply mail card was the way to fulfill a white paper request and collect names and addresses. When direct mail experts flocked to the web in the early days, they adapted the strategies they knew best. Is a postal direct mail technique right for today's hyperconnected web?
• Requiring registration greatly reduces the number of people who download something. Think about your own behavior. How willing are you to provide an email address to register for an e-book or white paper from a company? I've had marketers tell me they've run tests that indicate that the number of content downloads can be 50 times greater when no registration is required. Stop and let that soak in! You can get 50 people (and potential customers) downloading your report if no registration is requested, or you can have just one reader (and potential customer) if an email address is required. You need to consider this: Do you want 100,000 people exposed to your information so they can learn about what you do? Or do you want 2,000 email addresses instead?
• Because bloggers and people who share on social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter do not like to send their followers to something that could cause them to get added onto unwanted email lists, a registration requirement is a disincentive for people to talk something up on their own blogs and social sites. So if you do use registration forms, you need to assume very few people will share your content.
• When lots of people link to your stuff because your content is freely available, your numbers will rise in the search results. For example, MailerMailer's Email Marketing Metrics Report is number one for its important phrase “email marketing metrics” as a result of free content. My own free e-book The New Rules of Viral Marketing is on the first page of Google for the phrase “viral marketing,” and the e-book has been downloaded well over a million times. Many other people tell me that offering valuable free content causes them to rise to the top of the search engine results, too. With a squeeze page, you're lucky to get into Google's first 20 pages for a phrase like “email marketing metrics” or “viral marketing.”

Here is the detailed calculus showing the two different approaches to delivering a typical white paper to buyers.

Content Delivered with Squeeze Page Requiring Registration

• No sharing is done on social networks.
• No inbound links are created.
• Every single download captures an email address lead.

  Ten thousand people initially exposed to the white paper content offer, × the 5 percent who register their email addresses to download the white paper.

  RESULT = 500 email addresses are captured from people who read the white paper. But there is no sharing on social networks, and no inbound links are created.

Totally Free Content

• Lots of sharing is done on social networks.
• Inbound links are created.
• Zero traditional leads are captured.

  Ten thousand people initially exposed to the no-registration white paper content offer, × 50 percent who download the no-registration white paper, + 10 percent of those who read it share on social networks to create an additional 5,000 people who download the free content.

  RESULT = 10,000 total people download the white paper. Lots of sharing on social networks means inbound links are created. But zero email addresses are captured, so there are zero traditional leads.

It really comes down to goals. Do you want a few email addresses? Or would you rather have a small city of people exposed to your ideas?

The Hybrid Lead Generation Model

When asked about this religious discussion in my live presentations, I also offer a third option, which is a hybrid.

I suggest the first offer be totally free, such as an e-book or white paper. Then within the offering, have a secondary incentive that requires registration that you can use to capture leads. A secondary offer might be a webinar that is related to the content in the white paper and educates people further on the topic.

Hybrid Model with Initial Free Content Followed by a Secondary Offer

• Plentiful sharing on social networks
• Lots of inbound links
• And a bonus capturing of traditional leads!

  Ten thousand people initially exposed to the no-registration white paper content offer, × 50 percent who download + 10 percent of those who read it share on social networks, creating an additional 5,000 people downloading the free content.

  RESULT #1 = 10,000 total people download the white paper. Inbound links are created from social networks.

  Additional secondary offer within the white paper offers a registration-required webinar; 5 percent of the 10,000 who download the free white paper register for the webinar.

  RESULT #2 = 500 email addresses are captured from people who attend the webinar.

Clearly, while the gated-content approach simply generates email addresses from people who want a white paper, the hybrid approach yields stronger leads of people who have not only read the white paper but now are likely to want more information about your company and its products and services. Their eagerness to take the second step and attend the webinar distinguishes them as serious core customers.

Simply put, the hybrid model leads are hot, while the white paper leads are not.

Defining Your Business in the Marketplace

There are many ways to compete in a marketplace. But are you really conscious of your place in the landscape?

How do your customers define you? How do you define yourself? What makes you special? You've got to know what you do better than the other guys and deliver even more of that.

You cannot do everything, so letting the other guy offer the cheapest price or have the slickest product is just fine if you're offering, say, the very best service.

When I traveled to Morocco a few years ago, I became fascinated with the local produce markets. I went to several daily markets in the city squares of Marrakech, and visited a country market held once a week in Asni at the foothills of the Atlas Mountains.

The produce sellers offer the same basic items—carrots, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, apples, and the like—and they sell from very similar stalls. But lingering and observing, I noticed the ways the proprietors differentiated their presentations.

1. Location—Some sellers got a prime position near the entrance to the Medina, the ancient walled city in Marrakech. A similar strategy was to stake out a location near the entrance to the marketplace in Asni. I'm not sure if these spots go to the first to arrive in the morning or if somebody has been paid a bribe, but there are definitely good and bad locations.
2. Product—It was orange season in Morocco. The oranges were at nearly every stall and were delicious and cheap. I ate so many I thought my skin would turn the same color as someone who applies low-quality instant tan lotion. If everyone basically sells the same thing, how do you differentiate product? Then I noticed that some sellers had beautiful green leaves still on the oranges they were selling. This indicated that the fruit had just been picked, because the leaves quickly wilt.
3. Comfort—A few stalls had coverings where people could shop away from the direct sunshine. While this might be comfortable while haggling over some fruit and veggies, sunlight enhanced the look of the products in the stalls without a covering, so…
4. Display—When artfully arranged in direct sunlight, the items simply looked tastier.
5. Service—Being friendly, offering a free sample, tossing in a few extras, and providing two bags instead of one to ease carrying the purchase home are all indications of good customer service, and another way to differentiate one seller from the nearby competition.
6. Price—When everyone sells the same thing, there's a lowest-cost provider. But with thin margins, that's a tough position to be in.
7. Advertising—Some of the sellers called out information about their fruit and vegetables. Most stayed silent until approached by a buyer.
8. Kindness—Some sellers smiled and caught your eye.
9. Sales—Others tried to hustle people into their stalls. But usually the hard sell didn't work.

There are probably other ways the produce sellers differentiated that I didn't notice or understand. Certainly, as I don't speak the local Berber language, there was a lot happening that I didn't catch.

We all compete for business in a crowded marketplace of ideas, services, and products. There are many different ways to compete and differentiate your offerings. Just copying the other guy is a tough way to succeed.

You've got to know how you're different from the competition. You've got to stake a claim as being the best at something.

These are all important aspects of the story you tell to the marketplace.

Are You Watching Your Direct Competition or Your Customers?

In late 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook asked Scott Forstall to resign, reportedly because Forstall, the head of Apple's iOS Software, refused to sign the company's apology issued after the crappy Apple Maps debacle that was then part of the latest iPhone software. I was glad to read this at the time, because it signaled that Cook put greater value on his customers than merely “beating Google,” which was probably the only reason Apple changed the mapping platform on the iPhone.

Many companies obsess about the other guys. Why in the world would you name your business Seattle's Best Coffee unless you were directly competing with Seattle-based Starbucks?

My sense is that the various social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and the like) are spending far too much time worrying about each other (the competition) and not enough time worrying about their users.

For example, Google worries about Twitter. So Google eliminated the excellent real-time search feature that had delivered tweets as part of Google's search results. While tweets no longer appear, Google will happily show updates from Google+ in search results.

Most executives and nearly all salespeople have a relentless focus on the direct competition and use that as a benchmark for comparison. They look at the competition's products, price, and marketing, and try to do the same but with an incremental increase.

But the strategy of comparing your business to your close competitor means that you are likely to become a me-too enterprise that's just a little better, faster, or cheaper. That's no position to be in.

True leaders forget about the competition. The best salespeople don't focus on what the other guys are doing. Some benchmark themselves against people and companies in other industries, not their own. For example, in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and finance, the competition is very likely to follow the pack and be fearful of engaging the market with compelling content and social media. “If none of the hospitals in our area have a YouTube channel, why should we?” Smart marketers don't worry about other healthcare providers. If they did, they would say “no” to blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and the like. Instead, they look to the best of consumer products companies as their model for success.

Learning from Outside Your Comfort Zone

It's always fun when nonprofits look to for-profit businesses for inspiration. Successful B2B outfits take a page out of business-to-consumer (B2C) playbooks. Service businesses look to product companies for inspiration, and vice versa. A lawyer markets like a novelist. And a novelist communicates like a journalist.

Try to get away from the comfort of your peer group and see what you can learn from those outside your industry.

As for me, I'm a huge live music fan and I'm interested in how musicians and bands perform as well as how they market themselves. So I compare myself to them in my speaking business. Most public speakers either stand behind the podium or, if they venture out, they just hang out near the center of the stage. Some go back and forth to the corners like a metronome. True professionals work the entire stage like a rock star.

I model my live presentations on the stage performances of the masters. As of this writing I've seen 630 live shows. (Nerd that I am, I actually keep a spreadsheet.) In my live speeches I apply lessons learned by watching live the likes of Mick Jagger, Bob Marley, Joey Ramone, Frank Zappa, Madonna, David Byrne, Michael Jackson, Pink, Perry Farrell, Matt Berninger, and Miley Cyrus. For example, in the summer of 2013 I went to two Rolling Stones shows in Boston, a field trip to observe Sir Mick working the stage. Jagger knows exactly where he is at every moment. There is not a wasted gesture, move, or step. He knows where the other Stones are, where the spotlight is, and most of all what the audience is doing. He's probably the most self-aware performer I've ever witnessed. I want that, too!

I've got no musical ability, but I've always loved watching how rock stars move and interact. How cool that I can learn from observing the savvy dynamics of the music pros but in a different business! Sometimes at my gigs I jump onto a large monitor for a moment. I've never seen another speaker in the hundreds of events I've attended jump onto a monitor. The move was inspired by someone outside my direct competition—I learned it from a rock star. I'm convinced that by observing musicians and bands, I've developed a more personal style than had I just copied other business authors and speakers.

How about you? Do you copy the direct competitors? Or do you look outside your industry for inspiration?

Do You Even Need Salespeople?

With all the pages I've devoted to the new buying process and all the reasons I've illustrated about why buyers are in charge today, companies may ask the question, “Do we need salespeople at all?”

Just a few short years ago, questioning the need for salespeople inside any expensive consumer product company or at most business-to-business companies would be absurd. Of course you need salespeople! Otherwise, who would educate buyers? But today, with the web, a completely different sales model not only is possible, but is being used successfully by many pioneering organizations.

With e-commerce on the web, everybody knows that many products and services are now self-serve online, bypassing salespeople. I buy many of my everyday products such as electronics, clothes, personal care goods, and the like on sites like Amazon. So do many others. Products and services of all kinds can be easily purchased on the web, even relatively costly ones like an intercontinental business-class air ticket at $5,000 or more.

But how about expensive consumer purchases that have always required working with a salesperson—cars, for example? Sure! Tesla Motors, the American company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars, encourages consumers to purchase their cars on the Tesla website. Consumers go to the online “Design Studio” to choose and customize the car based on options such as battery type, color, wheels, interior finishing, sound system, and much more. The base car plus each option has a fixed price, and the site calculates the final price, required deposit, and wait time for delivery. Buyers have a choice of paying the full price or financing the purchase, which is available right there on the site in the same transaction. All of this eliminates the need to speak to a salesperson for those who have done their research and know exactly what sort of Tesla they desire and how tricked out they want it to be.

And Tesla is making this business model work. Tesla Motors said it delivered 11,580 vehicles in the third quarter of 2015, which was 49 percent higher than the third quarter of 2015 and the sixth consecutive quarter of sales growth. And this for a car where the starting price of the Model S is about $70,000.

It seems totally radical, doesn't it? In an industry notorious for pushy sales techniques, here is an automaker that sells online, with no need to speak to a dealer at all.

Within the marketplace, business-to-business enterprise software is noted for its hardcore salespeople. They sell products used by businesses to manage complex tasks throughout the organization such as accounting, human resources management, collaboration, security, billing, and payment processing. These software products and associated services can cost tens of millions of dollars for a large-scale installation of enterprise software in a global organization, and the sales process has traditionally followed the quota-carrying sales representative whose income was based primarily on sales commissions.

The enterprise sales marketplace started undergoing radical change with the “freemium” model of marketing, which grew in popularity in the middle of the last decade. In the freemium model, a company offers a free version of its software to use that includes an upgrade option to a more powerful version of the software for a price. In most cases, people begin to use the free product without interfacing with a salesperson at all. But once they start using the free version, the company will engage them using email, telephone, and other sales techniques to attempt to persuade the free user to upgrade to a paid service.

Executives in some forward-thinking companies have thought, well, if it is possible to run a freemium product without salespeople, maybe we can run our entire business without salespeople! That's exactly what Atlassian, an Australian enterprise software company that develops products geared toward software developers and project managers, has done. The company has no salespeople, and using only a self-service model to sell its product it has passed $300 million in sales with tens of thousands of customers, including Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Oracle, Procter & Gamble, Exxon, BMW, and NASA. The company went public in the stock market in late 2015 and has more than a $5 billion market capitalization.

The Product That Virtually Sells Itself

“We have a very untraditional sales model,” says Jay Simons, president of Atlassian. “It's true that we don't have any traditional commissioned salespeople, but we have a lot of people who still help clients. The simple philosophy behind our model is that the most important entity within our company selling our product is the product itself. If you can establish within the fabric of your company the belief that the product needs to sell itself, then you end up investing more in engineering and R&D to make sure that the product lives up to expectations and that it will be self-sufficient.”

Many tend to consider enterprise software as one of the less sexy product categories. It is notorious for being cumbersome and very expensive to implement. Enterprise software also has a reputation for requiring a lot of hands-on human sales involvement, thus explaining why many companies overinvest in their sales department and often leave the installations department without sufficient support. In contrast, the Atlassian model invests its resources in the product and its implementation rather than in the sales process.

“Salespeople introduce friction into a transaction when they say something like ‘I can't give you pricing for 3,000 users (or more) until I understand the magnitude of your problem,’” Simons says. “We empower the customer to self-serve. We reduce friction by printing a price list rather than bartering over each contract and we make it easy to understand the purchasing process.

“Even before they try it,” says Simons, “buyers first ask us: ‘How much does it cost?’ If you are building a business that doesn't require human selling, then you eliminate all the things involved in taking a sales phone call. So our pricing needs to be transparent.”

A starter license for Atlassian is $10 per month for a 10-user team. The company donates that money to Room to Read, a nonprofit organization for improving literacy and gender equality in the developing world. Once an organization goes above 10 users, the price goes up to $1,200 for a 25-user, small team license. For companies that have more than 10,000 users, an Atlassian product can cost $24,000.

The Atlassian sales process largely depends upon the distribution of free content that is accessible on its site. The content is designed to arm buyers with everything they might need to make an independent purchasing decision. There is no registration form on the site except during the final step in the process when the buyer is ready to download the product. Unlike most enterprise software companies that keep information under lock and key, Atlassian makes it freely available. “We don't care about qualifying people,” says Simons. “Rather, we want the software to qualify the buyer.”

Many buyers learn about Atlassian via word of mouth and social media. Additionally, company representatives create awareness by participating at events, speaking at conferences, and making sure their content is found in the search engines. When potential buyers learn about the company and are curious to find out more, they will encounter a wealth of free content on the Atlassian site. In a typical month, Simons reports that there are 1.5 million unique website visitors. As people interact with the content and learn more, about 15,000 will download a trial version of the product.

While Atlassian makes a very simple product available for people to try on their own without needing to ask for help or for permission, the company recognizes that some people will need help or will want questions answered. “If you try our products, we will send you an email,” says Simons. “It says, ‘We are thrilled that you are giving our Atlassian product a try. If you need any help, we are at the other end of this phone number or can be contacted at this email address. Write or call us anytime, and we will be delighted to help you.’ The only difference is that we are empowering you to make a bunch of decisions on your own. We don't need to persuade you to make that decision. If we arm you with all the answers to questions others have asked in the past, we will make it easy for you to discover that you are smart enough to decide whether or not the product does what you need it to do, and if it's right for you, you'll buy it.”

In an average month, this strategy converts around 800 new customers, representing about 3,500 licenses.

In the enterprise software world, there continue to be skeptics about this kind of sales strategy. “When we were really young, we hit a million dollars in revenue and people said: ‘Great, that's cute. You've got a self-service model that got you to a million, but you'll never get to five,’” Simons remembers. “When we got to five million dollars, they said we wouldn't get to ten. When we got to ten, they said we wouldn't get to a hundred. And when we got to a hundred, they say we won't hit a billion dollars. We say, ‘Bullshit, we will get to a billion.’”

Simons says there are many doubts that still arise about doing business using this model. Often someone at Atlassian begins to suspect that the company may need to add salespeople. But maintaining faith in this model as the right one for the company has so far proven the wisdom of that decision.

Good for You, but What about the Rest of Us?

While doing business without salespeople like Tesla and Atlassian are doing might seem tempting, for many organizations that's just not possible. After all, both of these companies were founded using a model that doesn't rely on salespeople. When you establish a new start-up, you can build the entire infrastructure around a business model that does not have a sales team. That's very different from taking an existing company with an army of salespeople and making the change.

But running an existing sales team doesn't mean you must continue to follow the same old paradigm. After all, buyers are in charge. In the next chapter, we'll look at agile sales with examples of companies implementing quick, flexible, real-time sales, and suggest ways that you can implement this ideal in your organization.