There’s a great story in the book Ogilvy on Advertising that when someone was made head of an Ogilvy and Mather office, David Ogilvy would send him a Russian Matrisoshka Doll. When the receiver opened up all of the dolls until he found the smallest doll, he would find this message, “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”
For me, it’s a useful analogy in the digital age to describe how people must work together in order to build a giant company, rather than work alone and become small. The digital Matrisoshka doll Ogilvy would be handing out today, would hold hands and not be buried underneath six people.
Best known for his advertising prowess, Ogilvy was also a sensational sales executive that needed to both market and sell his firm’s services. In fact Ogilvy started in sales before he went into advertising. His sales advice today still holds, but it needs to be updated for the digital age.
I asked Sean Burke, CEO of Kitedesk to help me with the update. Burke has just released his latest version of Kitedesk which he believes is the next generation digital answer to Ogilvy’s advice. Burke’s company has raised a total of $4 million to date from angel investors to bring its B2B sales productivity platform to market.
Here’s Ogilvy’s top sales advice:
- “Find out all you can about your prospects before you call them; their general living conditions, wealth, profession, hobbies, friends, and so on. Every hour spent in this kind of research will help you impress your prospect” – David Ogilvy
How many times have you received a call or email from a salesperson that knew nothing about you? That’s because in today’s hyper fast world, salespeople are expected to smile and dial from a list of prospects without having a proper understanding of them. Worse, the salespeople’s peers may know the prospect, but there hasn’t been an easy method to connect the dots.
According to Burke, that’s why KiteDesk allows sales reps to quickly understand how and through whom they have connections into the prospect, which helps turn cold calls into warm introductions. Reps can also identify qualified leads from among millions of potential contacts provided by cloud-based data providers, expanding the company’s prospecting footprint. Advanced filtering delivers just the leads that reps have mutual connections into.
- Foster any attempt to talk about other things; the longer you stay the better you get to know the prospect, and the more you will be trusted. Pretend to be vastly interested in any subject the prospect shows an interest in. – David Ogilvy
According to Burke, your relationships are scattered over your employees’ email, calendars, social media networks, and CRM system. The meta content contained in this information is important to understand your prospect and the strength of your mutual relationships so when you speak with her, your salespeople will have more to discuss with her – which will lead to trust.
“We believe these connections should be in one place so they are easily accessible and searchable by anyone in the company. So if a sales rep wants a list of names of people within their own company that have active relationships with
- “The More prospects you talk to, the more sales you expose yourself to, the more orders you will get. But never mistake a quantity of calls for quality of salesmanship.” – David Ogilvy
According to a recent Docurated study, only one-third (1/3rd) of a salesperson’s time is actually spent selling. This, despite the facts that sales productivity is seen as one of the top 3 drivers of sales performance. Poor planning and poor alignment with the company’s sales goals are to blame.
Companies like Kitedesk, Hubspot and Nimble are making life easier for sales reps. Burke’s Kitedesk offers a single interface where reps can see their most important daily schedule, tasks, opportunities and leads which allows them more time to focus in on communications, emails and meetings that pertain specifically to the sales pipeline and opportunities that drive results. Every action taken on a custom to-do list is automatically logged into the CRM. That way, sales reps stays focused on selling, and sales managers can be assured of that fact.
- “Selling does not materially differ from military campaigning, and we may analyse it under two main headings, ATTACK and DEFENCE.“ – David Ogilvy
Ogilvy recommended a combination of attacks (delivery of content) and defenses (responses to objections). He stressed the importance of always being on the attack while swiftly countering objections.
But today’s prospective customers are also armed with information and data from the internet. In other words, the playing field has evolved since Ogilvy’s tenure. But his advice still holds true. Burke explained to me that he believes salespeople can still stay ahead of their prospects by using tools that make salespeople more efficient about gathering and using prospect information – certainly more effectively than their prospects can. Burke hasn’t heard of a Kitedesk-like tool for buyers of solutions.
