Disruptive Selling

One of the new marketing trends is “disruptive selling.” This is defined as any marketing strategy that is bold enough, unique enough or enough out of the ordinary to create buzz and, consequently, sales. It could be marketing that runs counter to the time of year when competitors are running campaigns or that runs in the opposite direction of other campaigns, such as Dove’s True Beauty Campaign. This counter motion results in greater effectiveness and far less cost in terms of time and money for disruptive marketing.

Launching a successful disruptive marketing or sales program usually follows four basic steps. The first step is to throw out pre-conceived ideas you may have about what would make for a good marketing program. The second step is to set a huge goal- for example, the number of people you want to reach and the amount of sales you want to make. The third step is to look at other industries and companies of all sizes and types and consider what they’ve done from a sales and marketing perspective. The last step is to identify a period of time when your competition is not typically doing any sales or marketing.

What you ultimately decide to do must be attacked with reckless abandon. Too often great sales campaigns are developed only to be abandoned prematurely because the campaign lacked a sturdy backbone. Once you start a disruptive campaign, don’t back off; keep running the campaign and expect positive direct and indirect results to accrue. In fact, the greatest return on investment is usually found in the indirect results of a campaign that emerged without your anticipation. To find good examples of this kind of indirect result, you can look to companies such as Nike, Starbucks, Fox Television, GEICO, or Aflac, to name only a few. Each of these companies has used disruptive marketing or sales techniques to stand out and therefore be noticed. For several of these companies, the disruptive marketing was out of necessity, because they couldn’t afford to implement “normal” marketing programs; but in the end, these disruptive campaigns were far more successful than if the companies had followed the norm.

Remember, the underlying sales principle of disruptive selling is that success in sales comes not to those who do things the way everyone else does but rather to those who are willing to step out and do things differently.