It’s All About Recruiting Sales People Who Will Work for Free
You only need sales people for bad products. It’s official, you’ve read it on this blog. Sales people are obsolete for good products. Of course, by good I mean remarkable. However, if a product isn’t good enough for someone to tell their friends about is it good at all?
Being remarkable has almost become a manta for the modern marketer. As a result, it should be a mantra for new entrepreneurs. You need to be noticed. You need people to tell their friends about you. In other words, if you step back and take the big picture view, you will realize that you are an engineer building a word of mouth engine.
You see, the default setting for new businesses is full camouflage. They don’t stand out. As an entrepreneur, it’s your job to take off the camouflage jacket and put on a yellow high visibility vest.
If what you are doing is not exciting, funny, controversial, revolutionary or really cool you are facing an uphill battle. The chances are, that you will not make it to the top of the hill. However, if what you are doing is one or all of the above, then you have a great chance of building a fan base and generating word of mouth.
You don’t need sales people. Why pay someone to deliver the “hard sell” when you can get somebody’s friend to deliver the “soft sell” for free by recommending your product? Nothing works better than social validation. Today, it’s easy to recommend stuff to friends. The person who recommends something cool (early adopter) will get social kudos. The followers (who are the majority) will feel good because they fit into this new trend. This can reverberate through different social structures. See the scalability?
You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sales force. From the start, build your product and business with word of mouth generation in mind. As I pointed out earlier. Marketing today and engineering have a lot in common. Instead of building an actual machine, with marketing, you are building a structure that helps generate and reverberate word of mouth. That’s where the money is!
It makes perfect sense. Doesn’t it?
Excellent point! In today’s world people have become so de-sensitized to any pitch that the hard sell is just not a sustainable strategy. There is simply too much noise in the background. This then forces us to dig deep for what it is that is really of value or interest in our offering.