This week's question is not one I have been asked - well at least not by one of my customers or newsletter readers, or from an audience member at a talk I have given. No, instead this week's question is one that I have asked of myself after a couple of shocking realisations.
It all started when I went to a bookshop and could not find my book, Click.ology, on the shelves. I didn't know whether to be elated because it had sold out, or upset because the shop wasn't stocking it. As I pondered this, I wandered over to a different section of the bookshop, the "Smart Thinking" shelves where the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton have their books. Well, you could have knocked me down with the proverbial feather as I stared at the shelves to find my book next to "The Tipping Point".
At first I was proud and my ego was nicely stroked, until I realised that anyone looking for a book on e-commerce would not be looking in this section. The potential for selling my book had been placed in the hands of the individual who decided which shelf to put it on. Upon doing a bit more research, I discovered that there is no central decision made by the book chain as to where to stock books. Instead the decision is made by the person who has the trolley of books that need shelving each morning - and that could be a part-time teenager earning a bit of spare cash.
Having discovered this, I looked around the shelves in another branch of this chain. I found my friend Paul McGee's book, "How to Succeed with People" in the midst of books on family trees. I also found Zoe Griffin's book, "Get Rich Blogging" tucked away amidst several titles on writing your own CV.
As you can tell, the sales of my book and those of other authors are in the hands of people who have no real interest in selling the book. They merely want to get the task completed of stacking shelves with books as quickly as possible, probably not being paid much more than the minimum wage for doing so.
But let's not be too hasty to blame the booksellers. They are not the only people performing sales in a less than perfect way. On Thursday I was at the Internet Retailing show at the NEC in Birmingham. I wanted to speak to some executives from a couple of leading businesses. But what did I find when I got to their beautiful stands? No-one from the business was there. The people running the stand were freelance promotion people, hired simply to hand out leaflets and take names of "leads". These significant firms had put their entire lead generation potential in the hands of people who probably, in spite of their smiles and fake tans, could not care less.
We see this all the time in businesses. After all, I expect you get sales calls from agency staff reading scripts out in tired bored voices. Their only target is the number of calls they make and they don't care whether you buy or not. Besides it isn't their product they are touting and tomorrow their call centre will switch them to another product or company anyway.
It seems to me that wherever you look, the people selling things have no real concern about what they are selling. It is just a job. Which begs the question - who do you get to do your selling? Someone (like you) who has a keen and personal interest in the sale, or some "representative" like a disinterested shelf stacker? Even in the speaking business which I work in many speakers put their sales in the hands of agents and bureaus who don't really care who gets the gig as long as one of their myriad of people do, so they can get their commission.
If you want to sell more - and who doesn't - you have to ask yourself, as I have done this week "who is responsible for my sales?" As far as I can tell, we often divert that responsibility to people who don't really care too much.
WHAT I LEARNED THIS WEEK
There is a great deal of difference between hearing and listening, as I am sure you realise. Often we hear what people are saying to us, but has our brain truly engaged and listened? For some time now I have included a couple of slides in various presentations and workshops which look at the place of digital within corporate structures. For instance, do you include the web as a marketing function or should it be within IT? Or is it distributed throughout the organisation? I have used these slides merely to trigger conversations to get people talking about how they use the web within their firm. However, the other day I was in a meeting with a client and I reminded them of my slide as I had written a blog post about some recent research from the consultancy firm Forrester which backed up what I had been saying. My client looked at me, smiling, and said "that's something we would be interested in exploring". It was a mild hint - but then after discussing it some more it transpired they had said something similar when I showed them my slide last year...! It turns out I had heard them, but I hadn't listened. This time, I was listening and realised they were asking me to expand on what I had said before about how corporate structures need to be altered to accommodate changing mindsets. I could have helped them with that a year ago, if I had been listening, not just hearing.