Several months ago a client of MediaSauce challenged me to consider why he should tell his sales force they have to change following one of the Sales 2.0 seminars I give. As someone who has interfaced and challenged existing sales approaches for most of my career, I was zealous to give input on the topic. The result was a diatribe that finished with our client asking simply, “Could you write that down?”

I did, and later the manifesto was published in The Social Media Bible as part of the contribution MediaSauce made to this important book.  And now, I share it here with our readers of the MediaSauce blog.

Why do we sell the same way we always have? Because it’s safe and reliable. Because it’s what we know. Because we’ve become entrenched in thinking that what we have to say is what our customers want to hear. Because it has worked for the past (insert your number of) years!

But the world is rapidly evolving. Advertising, messaging and communication behaviors are changing more quickly than how we tell our story. Worse, our messaging is competing more and more with the noise that overwhelms our target customers every day/hour/minute/second of their lives. Customers are tuning out our old messages while social media and the Internet connect them with information that bypasses our expensive marketing communications strategies.

The old tried-and-true tactics of the past (insert your number again!) years like our flashy direct mail pieces, our witty trade media advertisements or those well written, but terribly expensive, brochures aren’t setting us apart.

Worse, they aren’t even being looked at. They’re being ignored. And we’re becoming irrelevant. We’re becoming part of the noise.

Can we stop being noise and become relevant again? Yes! Absolutely we can. But we have to have a new way of speaking to our customers. We have to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the world and be fresh and exciting.

We need to transform the way we touch our clients, and integrate ourselves into the very fabric of what they do every day. We have to embrace that social networks, digital connections and the online experience and build an organization that embraces conversation and transparency.

We need to take advantage of a new approach to selling; where we are problem solvers and the “go to” team for our prospects whenever a project arises that we contribute to. Everyone sells [product]. We have to be bigger than our [product]. We have to solve our client’s pain points.

We need to get digital. We need to take advantage of the tools digital and social media can provide us to open up new channels and speak to prospects on the business issues and problems they are trying to solve.

We need to tell our story in a way that doesn’t just interrupt our clients, but engages them and gives them a reason to pass it along. We need to be viral, innovative, non-traditional and aggressive in how we seek out new business.

How will we do it? By embracing the opportunities that social media offer us to become connected to our customers. We’re going to build a culture where communicating, engaging and embracing the feedback positive and negative, to make us a better organization

There’s a new standard in sales: smarter, not harder work and doing more with less. And it’s required to be in business in our 24/7 economy.

What are you thoughts? Do you believe this Sales Manifesto is accurate and reflective of where our new economy is going?

James Burnes is VP of Strategy at MediaSauce. You can reach him at james.burnes@mediasauce.com, follow him on Twitter at @jamesburnes or call at 317-512-3612.