Scott - The new rules of sales and service : how to use agile selling, real-time customer engagement, big data, content, and storytelling to grow your business

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program (with Richard Jurek)

Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products That Grow Your Business Now

Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History (with Brian Halligan)

Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage

World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs (with Craig Stull and Phil Myers)

Cashing In with Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers into Buyers

Eyeball Wars: A Novel of Dot-Com Intrigue

Cover image: iStock.com/Zeffss1

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright 2014 by David Meerman Scott. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Scott, David Meerman.

The new rules of sales and service : how to use agile selling, real-time customer engagement, big data, content, and storytelling to grow your business / David Meerman Scott.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-82785-7 ISBN 978-1-118-93910-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-93911-6 (ebk) 1. Selling. 2. Customer service. 3. Internet marketing. 4. Big data. I. Title.

HF5438.25.S347 2014

658.8--dc23

2014022280

This book, my 10th, is dedicated to my grandmother Dorothy Miller Jones (19051996). When I was a child, Grandma Jones taught me that if you want to receive letters, you've got to write letters. I wish I could share with her that the same thing is true today about social networking and customer engagement; you have to give to get.

Are you old enough to remember when travel agents were an essential part of your life? To book a vacation you had to go to a travel agent. There was no other choice. Every town had at least one, and in the big cities travel agencies were on every corner.

First, before you set foot in the travel agency, you might do a little research about the sort of vacation you had in mind. Warm weather at a beach? Or perhaps a week of skiing? Maybe a cruise? Did you want to go somewhere exotic and far away? Or nearby within driving distance?

Doing the research was really, really difficult.

You would ask friends for recommendations, but they knew only so much. You could read a travel magazine, but with only a limited number of pages in each issue, it was hardly comprehensive. Guidebooks helped, but because of the book publication cycles, they were inevitably dated. If you wanted to compare different destinations, you needed more than one guidebook. And by definition, a book is just one person's opinionthe author's. No matter how much research you did, it was never enough to get a total picture of a potential holiday location.

Sooner or later you had to go into that travel agency, and that's when you surrendered control of the already imperfect process: You had to put yourself at the mercy of a salesperson. As she sat behind a terminal, she tossed out destination options, quoted prices for flights and rental cars, and suggested hotels. Perhaps she loaded you up with a bunch of brochures to look through.

The best travel agents were adept at matching destinations, experiences, and properties to a traveler's needs. They built a loyal following and made a good living via repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals.

But too often, agents weren't very good and just sold what was most convenient. They would steer clients to the easy sale in Florida instead of the more complicated booking at a small resort on an obscure island in the French-speaking part of the Caribbean. Worse, unscrupulous agents would sell crappy cruises simply because they earned additional commissions from low-end operators desperate to fill their ships.

The bottom line in booking a vacation 20 years ago was simple: The travel agent was in charge of the sales process because she had the information. The unfortunate traveler was limited to her recommendations and her prices.

And it wasn't just travel. This was the case for nearly every sales situation one transacted.

It's a new world now. The way we book travel today is so utterly different from being tied to agents as to be unrecognizable.

In December 2013 my wife and I went on a 10-day expedition to Antarctica. Since I was a kid I'd dreamed of seeing giant blue-green icebergs up close and encountering penguins and whales in the most remote continent on earth.

We began our independent research on the web more than a year before to our expedition.

We used Google to find the results for such phrases as Antarctica travel, Antarctica expedition, and visit Antarctica. Our searches led us to about a dozen expedition outfitters, and we carefully checked out each of them via their sites. We also found personal blogs written by people who had undertaken such an expedition. These offered great information about what we needed to consider. There were independent reviews of operators and expedition ships. We found articles profiling Antarctica travel on newspaper and magazine websites. We even landed on the site of the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, and while it is a trade organization, we learned a lot more there.