Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA). Small businesses have been successfully using this approach for over half of a century. Although the ‘end’ may be the same, e.g., a closed sale, the ‘means’ have now changed quite drastically with the advancement of technology and communication mediums like social media used by today’s salespeople.

This blog post is about the 4 deadly sins I see killing a lot of small businesses.

Sin#1) Awareness– Cold calling is now backward thinking. Sure there are plenty of old school tactics to get the prospects attention, but if the salesperson hasn’t even seen the prospect’s homepage and have a certain level of understanding of their business they’ll unlikely be able to sustain the prospect’s attention for very long. They may actually be offended – which is not always a ‘bad’ thing, but in this context it surely is.

Sin #2) Interest – By tracking prospect’s conversations in social media, e.g., LinkedIn answers, Twitter, Facebook Page, the salesperson will gain insight as to what’s currently happening in the prospect’s world. When the salesperson does find a gem of a conversation, they may choose to engage the prospects within the social network in which the dialog took place, or they can simply make the phone call and and make a much warmer introduction – situation dependent.

Sin #3) Desire – Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say. It’s critical that salespeople be at the point of action and the only way to make sure they’re is to do some front end work with your marketing budget. I mean seriously. What’s the return on investment (ROI) having a salesperson cold call on cold cold prospects a hundred times a day and having to warm them up over and over. Sounds like reinventing the wheel to me.

Sin #4) Action – It’s true that differentiation takes place from the very beginning, but this needs to be maintained throughout the entire process to this final stage of action. But the truth is, with inbound marketing, the prospect will be continuously taking action this whole time by downloading your whitepapers, watching your informative videos, participating in dialog on your Facebook Business Page, etc. The ‘soft touches’ are no longer follow up phone calls, it’s re-tweeting your prospects latest update.

Are you still stuck in the 1980’s,90's,200's with your sales and marketing methods? Give us your feedback (blowback or not), we’d love to hear your thoughts.