Partnerships

I’m feeling betrayed today.

You see, I follow a few different bloggers — a few sales blogs, some marketing blogs, and then some personal blogs on various things.

I’m feeling betrayed by the sales blogs. Two of them in particular. No, not gonna name names. Buutttt, they both are in the sales consulting business — you know, those high-paid individuals that come in and do seminars every year to tell you how to sell.

So, yesterday I get an email from one of them telling me to buy a “awesome sales book that will help you save hours a day”, but, it wasn’t their book — it was another persons — in fact, it was a book from one of the other bloggers that I follow. Hmmm.

Today, I get an email from the blogger who’s book I was supposed to buy, but, they were pushing a book from the blogger I get an email from yesterday.

Collaboration is wonderful, isn’t it?! But, unfortunately, they pushed me to not taking them as seriously — as they are both saying the same thing about each others books.

Lessons learned? Well, I know that from now on, my colleagues and I are going to redouble our efforts to not send the same Spark page to the same customer. We’re going to make every effort to insure that our partners and us don’t share and communicate the same information to the same prospect over and over (either one or the other, but not both).

It’s a great lesson in “perception”. Individuals, especially those in the market to “buy” something, don’t like getting hammered by vendors who are selling the same product. Competing products, fine. But, not the same product. And, this is where I think a lot of the frustration comes from — we go online, we look up an item to find out who sells it, where it’s sold, what’s the price, etc. and then from that day forward (until we clear our history and delete our cookies), we are advertised to for that product, over and over, from a multitude of vendors. It really isn’t that far of a stretch to bring that same perception over to the selling of enterprise software or hardware to a prospect — how many times did we make an inquiry on a website and then started getting emails and calls from different vendors asking if we were interested? Yes, many times, it is only one vendor asking us to purchase it, but, there are enough times where it is multiple vendors selling the exact same product (just different pricing), and that is where the damage is and was done.

That’s it. Just needed to post how much I felt let-down by these bloggers.

Good luck selling!

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