Sales and marketing tactics to avoid can be grouped into three distinct categories.   

  • The first is poorly written, cold emails.  
  • The second category of tactics to avoid is overly aggressive sales tactics and strategies.  
  • The third is using syndicated tools or services when your peers are using the same, low-quality content for social media and other digital platforms.  

Mistake # 1: Poorly written, cold emails and calls  

Cold emails are emails sent to prospective customers without prior personalization, research, or knowledge of their interests. The problem?  

They lack any kind of context or information that could help build credibility and interest with your recipient. Cold emails and cold calling without personalization, research, or client knowledge, are ineffective and viewed as intrusive, unhelpful, and irrelevant.  

Emails that are canned, salesy, and lack any sort of trust-building aspect only hurt you, your brand, and professional email marketers.   

Same thing with cold calling.   

Most, not all, SDR’s and cold callers have some low-quality, canned script to try and sell you something instead of building trust through an established relationship. And cold emails (you know the ones) don’t help either, stuffed full of uncompelling, bad, totally ATROCIOUS copy and subject lines.  

The solution: Instead of low-quality cold callers, hire an SDR internally and train them to connect with potential prospects through a process of giving value to those they’re contacting. In business, you must give to get, get to give. Giving and serving is unselfish, and it shows you actually give a damn about the person you’re contacting.   

The other solution: Using networking tools, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.   

LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows your sales team (or yourself) to create lists and saved searches, and connect with anyone, no matter if they’re a 1st-degree, 2nd-degree, or 3rd-degree connection. It’s truly the BEST tool for sales that helps you avoid sending poorly written, cold emails.   

Mistake #2: Overly aggressive sales tactics and strategies.  

The second category of tactics to avoid is overly aggressive sales tactics and strategies.   

What makes an aggressive approach? Trying to push a customer into making a purchase before they’re ready to commit or intimidating them into accepting your immediate offer.   

These strategies put off customers, making them more unlikely to buy than they would’ve been without any of the unnecessary pressure. Aggressive sales tactics are fear-based, negative, and only focus on selling your buyer something instead of creating value through a healthy connection.   

It’s not consultative, it’s combative. Nobody goes shopping and looks for a fight.  

The solution: The best sales professionals I know are ones that desire to be helpful and solve problems. They only want to “do the right thing” and help their prospective buyers through a process that guides them to a successful outcome. An efficient sales team is one that builds trust, creates good relationships, and seeks to understand FIRST. They don’t follow a sales process that makes their prospects left feeling like they just bought a used car from a slimy car dealership. (No offense to auto dealers). 

Mistake #3: Low-quality content generated by syndicated tools or services  

Here’s what I mean by syndicated content: It’s words, copy, and social media posts that you pay $50 bucks a month for, download from some dashboard, and that SAME content is ALSO used by 1,000 of your peers in the IT channel. 

And you get this “deal” for one low monthly fee.   

Sounds like a good deal, right?  

Wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth.   

By using content that’s also distributed to thousands of channel peers, your results usually equal a significant drop in performance, bad outcomes, and a lack of clarity.   

We’ve found that most IT firms have a lack of clarity around their target market, customer demographics, and don’t understand their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).   

If you choose syndicated content, you need to be aware of a few things.   

  • Using content that’s also used on thousands of websites across the world wide web HURTS your SEO. 
  • You’ll never get the performance from your content that you want when it’s not personalized, customized, or tailored toward what your ideal buyer is looking for.   
  • Lead gen efforts will struggle because the quality of the content is so low that no one would ever think about reaching out to you.   
  • Content services that say things like “marketing content that includes daily social media posts, prospect email templates, and newsletter templates” aren’t valuable because your ideal buyer isn’t into quick, fast, templates – your audience wants to know HOW your tech firm will make their lives easier through a proven process to keeping their data secure and solving their most annoying IT struggles.   

The solution: Hire a copywriter or outsource it to a writer who can create content that addresses the four points below.   

  • Create in-depth buyer personas using the information gleaned from your various teams, client interviews, and your systems.  
  • Determine the issues and difficulties that your potential customers may be facing.  
  • Develop ideas for content in collaboration with sales.  
  • Rather than trying to sell to your audience, focus on educating them because education sells!  

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