Why will Telkom always sell more than Joe Seep, a small telecoms entrepreneur? It cannot be the service, because they don’t have any. Or their pricing, because they are about the most expensive in the world.Joe Seep consoles himself with the fact that he offers better, more personal, service at a much better price.
Yet 96% of Joe Seeps go out of business in the first decade. Telkom, by contrast, seems to have been around since before Alexander Graham Bell invented the first phone!
This has long puzzled me. Over the past few months, however, as we’ve helped hundreds of small business owners find thousands of prospects, we’ve realised one thing. The average small business owner could not sell a set of shoes to Imelda Marcos.
I say this gently and respectfully because anybody that forsakes the security of a real job and wades into these entrepreneurial waters has my undying admiration.
However, as a marketer and salesman for the past 25 years, a few things bother me immensely. One of these is this enduring belief that if you’re good, you must succeed better than if you’re bad. That is rubbish. Telkom is living proof!
It doesn’t matter how bad you are, as long as you have a stream of prospects, you cannot help but succeed in business. It has very little to do with your quality of service, and everything to do with your stream of leads.
At least, that’s what I used to think until I started looking at how some of my clients handle a hot prospect.
Badly! The response is often late. It’s often an inadequate e-mail. It’s hardly ever followed up. The concept of phoning somebody who wants to buy what you sell is right up there with time travel. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the concept of doing a little research to check out how hot the prospect really is – that doesn’t really exist in real life.
Allow me to share a simple f’rinstance.
Let’s say I sell luxury cars, and a prospect lands on my desk, out of the blue. And let’s assume that I have the name, e-mail address, phone number, and the desired vehicle. Then surely it would make sense to do a few simple Google searches to establish whether this name (or phone number, or e-mail) belong to the MD of Eskom, one of our leader’s many relatives, the new head of Massmart, or a 17-year-old student. (All of this is there if you just ask for it.)Nope, almost all the auto sales folk we spoke to have no Internet access because Joe Skeef down in spare parts was caught last year checking out the spare parts on 1989 Gold Hunni instead of a 2007 Bronze Hummer. So, all dealership Internet access was banned. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your exhaust pipe.
I wrote about this research thing some months ago, but I fear that most of us just yawned. And most of my clients don’t have the time, inclination, or skill to do it by themselves. So we’re adding it as an option for any leads generated through our Global Warriors system.
A single click will open a series of searches – Google, Linkedin, Facebook – so that our hero can quickly assess (with increasing accuracy) whether this is worth a phone call or an email. And how fast.
So why does Telkom knock spots of the rest of us littler businessfolk? Well…They have systems to generate prospects and to follow up those prospects. (Most of us don’t.) They don’t rely on word of mouth marketing. (Most of us do.) They’re not shy about their prices. (Most of us are.) And of course, they have the government as a shareholder. But there’s nothing you or I can do about that.