How can businesses open the floodgates? Is there a strategy for involving customers in your business decisions? Tannebaum and Schmidt (1970) created a model based on participation and authority, theorizing that as you give more participation to groups in the decision-making process, you give up authority or control. This model presents a new way to think about how much customer involvement you want and how the social media might play a role in that involvement. It gives us some tips for developing a strategy for opening the floodgates.
How can businesses open the floodgates? Is there a strategy for involving customers in your business decisions? These are the questions we are all asking as we examine and explore the power of the social media.
According to an editorial in Selling Power Magazine, Gerhard Gschwandtner said we must stop selling in the old way. He wrote, “. . . selling has fundamentally changed and pursuing the old tried-and-true tactics results in more of the same: high stress and lower sales.” He went on to discuss what he called the “conversation” economy and gave us action ideas that correspond with the new handshake: 1) join the conversation; 2) match your sales process with the way customers buy; 3) replace pitching with collaboration; 4) make buying easier and create social networks that showcase your knowledge.
In The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, we introduced a decision-making model that might help companies understand how to involve people and at what level. Tannebaum and Schmidt(T&S) created this model in the early 1970’s and published it in the Harvard Business Review. We combined and reworded the stages to make it easier to comprehend within the framework of the social media.
Basically, what T&S did was create a model based on participation and authority, theorizing that as you give more participation to groups in the decision-making process, you give up authority or control. This, then, becomes a clear and basic question companies must address as they become more transparent.
The model begins with complete authority in the Tell Mode: You simply tell people what you want and expect no feedback. As you move up the continuum slightly, giving up some authority, you move into the Sell Mode. Here you share your decision by “selling” or persuading others to your point of view. You really don’t want feedback, but you at least care about what others think. The third stage moves toward the center of the continuum where you’ve made your decision, but you are willing to change it. You are in the Test Mode. You throw the idea out there and listen to the responses and maybe you’ll change your mind. In the fourth stage, you move into the Consult Mode. Here, you have not made a decision. You wish to consult with others and listen to their views and then you will decide what to do. Finally, in the last stage, the Join Mode, you join with others to make the decision together. This is where you have the least authority and the most participation.
Ways to Adapt the T&S MODEL to Open the Floodgates
Excerpt from The New Handshake. . .
“1. Use the Tell and Sell Modes to create visibility. Your blog posts and your Tweets simply tell readers about your product or service. You might also add information about the proper use of the product or service and you could include testimonials from others. The Tell and Sell Modes’s purpose, then, is to create an understanding of the product or service, not to engage the customer in decision making.2. Use the Test Mode to discover new ways to operate, to try out new services, and to explore how services are being provided. You ask them to react to what you have created or decided.3. Use the Consult Mode to enable you to really engage your customer. If a large number of your customers are hooked into the social media—that is, your customers are actively involved by creating blog posts, they are responding to and bookmarking the content on the Web, or they are signing up on social media sites—you can engage them in many of the decisions that your company might face. 4. Use the Join Mode when you want your customers to make decisions with you. In the Join Mode, you no longer make the decision alone. Here you share decision making with the customer in a completely collaborative manner. This level of participation becomes messier. The best example of the Join Mode and the social media is with Wikipedia. The founders of Wikipedia decided to ‘crowd-source’ their online encyclopedia, with the idea being that many people have more information together than we each have separately.”
This model presents a new way to think about how much customer involvement you want and how the social media might play a role in that involvement. It gives us some tips for developing a strategy for opening the floodgates.
Social Savvy Means Time Management
How can you budget for social media time? People keep asking me how they can add social media to their already packed daily schedule. They fear that employees will be using their work time to Tweet about personal things or to talk to their friends on Facebook. One of the biggest complaints I hear from salespeople as well as CEO’s relates to time. Here are some time-saving tips!
5 Tips to Use Social Media to Sell without Selling
What is your Social Media IQ? We all know about traditional means to market our products. We know about advertising, branding, finding our niche. What we do not yet understand is the power of the social media in all this. The point of it all is to sell without appearing to sell. Here are some tips for using the social media to help you sell without “selling.”
Eight Tips to Deal with Bully Emails
Recently, I had the misfortune of dealing with a colleague who liked to intimidate through email. I suspect some of you might have had similar experiences. The entire process made me think about what is the best way to deal with bully emails. There are two very important points in the Say It Just Right model of communication. One, you cannot change the other person. And two, it is important to understand where the person is coming from, but it’s not our job to psychoanalyze the person. Given those two important points from the model, let’s look at some tips for dealing with bully emails.
