DIY is the Order of the Day

I've been spending a quite a bit of time recently with small business owner/managers, independent traders and freelancers of one sort or another, helping them to improve their sales success rates. This came about because we decided to run our first open, public workshop which attracted a number of new business starters, in addition to delegates from established companies. I had been going around the various networking events , breakfast meetings and local business clubs raising the profile of a workshop designed to help business owners generate their own new business leads using the telephone. I noticed a common theme that united these 'Go It Aloners' with their corporate brethren, despite the fact that their respective business challenges, resources and even reasons for being in business were so radically different. It seems that most people in business, of whatever sort or size, will do almost anything at all to avoid having to pick up the phone and make an unsolicited sales call to a prospective customer.

It's been apparent to me for a long time that this is the case in larger corporates, and that seasoned salespeople will enlist the services of outsourced telesales companies in the face of evidence that tells them that the leads they get are far inferior to the leads they could create if they took the job onto their own shoulders, rather than relying on a 19 year old in a basement in Brighton, working for a minimum wage. In many ways, it's completely understandable: they've grafted their way up the greasy sales pole for years, and now that they are finally able to call themselves 'Senior Account Manager' with some degree of credibility, the last thing they expect to be asked to do is to make 'cold calls' - oh, the indignity of it! Plus, of course, they work for companies with Marketing departments and budgets, so it's relatively easy to persuade management that this is a job for someone else, even if that someone else has no experience of their complex solutions, or their markets, or even much experience of how to speak to business decision makers. An industry has been built on the luxury of being able to pay rooms full of students and job-market vagrants £250 per day to make the whole nasty job just go away.......

It's less obvious to see why small business owners and freelancers take the same attitude. In most other respects, independent business people know they have to take on any number of unappealing tasks every week - licking stamps, fixing printers, humping stock, doing the VAT return. But generate new business? Nearly everyone I've met would rather stick pins in their eyes. Or go to a networking club, or spend a small fortune sending out pre-paid postcards, or pay Google £200 a month on AdWords - basically, in fact, do some cheap marketing and wait for the phone to ring. Which it doesn't - not nearly enough, anyway.

This really does puzzle me, because most people who have managed to survive their first 6 months running their own business have a degree of belief, energy and resolve which would lend itself perfectly to the business of growing a pipeline using the phone. All the drive and resilience required to create some really solid results is at their finger-tips, not least the added spur of sheer fear of (total business) failure if the sales dry up, as most of us must recognise in 2009. But I met quite a few chaps and lasses who were quite content to spend serious money on dodgy telesales operations (one had even hired a bored housewife to do it for him). It's funny - most of these folks have stepped up to the challenge of learning many other new skills to run their business - doing the books, figuring out HR issues and legislation, fixing the PC - but I found the suggestion that they could themselves learn the techniques for making successful prospecting calls to new clients tended to produce slight embarrassment: a ready acceptance that it was in principle a terrific thing to do, and probably pretty necessary at the moment, but no inclination whatsoever actually to do it, or learn how to.

I think this has something to do with the fact that the whole idea of 'sales' as a category of business activity has a pretty nasty 'smell' about it for most people without any proper sales background. It comes tainted with all the negative associations of doorstep selling, double-glazing antics and 'wide-boys' who exist, in the public mind, on an even lower social plane than estate agents and traffic wardens. This is a terrible shame, because the art and science of professional selling is a world away from anything remotely dishonest, or deceitful and manipulative - in fact, quite the reverse. As any successful professional salesperson will tell you, it is the scrupulously honest and respectful approach that wins the long-term, lucrative customers, coupled, of course, with a good sprinkling of planning, strategy, technique and emotional intelligence.

I don't know who said it, but the adage "If you want something doing properly, do it yourself" rings true when it comes to generating new business opportunities - no one will do this for your business better than you can, if you bother to learn how. Unlike marketing or graphic design, or building a web site, this is a proactive initiative that anyone can do with just a telephone. It costs virtually nothing, and it is one of the best and quickest ways to learn what it is about your business that needs fixing, and what is so appealing. Do It Yourself in 2009!