In the battle between Google and Facebook, Google will win and Facebook will lose. And so will Foursquare, Evernote, and anybody else you might think of.

And Google will lose in the end too. I don’t know who to, because they haven’t started yet, but if I were a betting man, and I’m not, I’d put my money on Posterous.

Hype drives fashion, and fashion attracts the early adopters. In the process new technologies and behaviours emerge. Gmail was once that fashion, but it’s now mainstream.

Google now sits there watching, identifies the technologies and behaviours emerging, then builds those into its infrastructure. Knowing that, ultimately, micro blogging and geolocation are new ways of doing stuff.

The fashion wil wane. Early adopters will move on to the next exciting idea, leaving the behaviour behind, so the majority of people have a new way of doing things. That’s where the G-man wins.

For the social media Pied Pipers Wave and Buzz have been failures, but the Giant plays a longer game than that. Short message broadcast to contacts is a really interesting technology, as is collaborative editing. Buzz and Wave will become mainstream.

So my guess is the dominant player will build its social networking without telling anybody. They’ll just pull the parts together, with Gmail as the common factor. Its already doing it – Buzz, Wave, Profiles, Latitude, Maps, Knols, Blogger, Chat, sharing in Reader, single sign on. Add to that all the business stuff – Adwords, Adsense, Webmaster, Analytics, Apps, Markeplace, Chrome, Chrome Apps.

Its quite scary when you put all the pieces into one big picture, but it won’t last. No company dominates information technology for ever.

Old fogies like me remember when nobody got fired for buying IBM, Microsoft wouldn’t exist if MSDOS hadn’t been chosen by IBM for the PC. That was in the days when PCs had to be IBM compatible.

But who buys IBM now? And Microsoft is going the same way.

So why will Google lose out and who to?

That’s an awfully good question but if Seth Godin is right, and I’m sure he is, it’ll be determined by Content.

Google’s technology takes a copy of every web site, then uses links and traffic measures to sort the wheat from the chaff. It’s a constant battle with SPAM.

The new boys in the Content business – WordPress, Digg, Diigo, Delicious, Stumbleupon, and a host of others use people – US – to do the sorting so they only have to record the best. Quality Content per page is much cheaper for those guys.

The same is true for Posterous. And Posterous is building in the sharing. Soon we’ll see the networking. And then we’ll see the Search engine.

When Ning moved away from free sites Posterous made a big deal of welcoming all Ning users. It offers the ultimate simplicity in blogging, microblogging, sharing, collaborative editing,

Posterous is making it all ultra simple for people to publish content and hiding what its got from Search engines.

Now why would those guys do that?

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Sales Management Process is something rarely talked about in polite company. Generally people prefer the mythology of the born salesman, or the power of being positive or the good old fashioned numbers game.

Recognising sales and sales management is about being professional at the job is something most find hard to do.

There are 3 simple reasons why a sales management process is vitally important, and I don’t care which business you are in. If you depend on sales to feed the family then these are relevant to you.

Save time

Anybody who’s been selling for more than a few weeks knows 90% of what we do goes nowhere. A sales management process which sorts the real opportunities from the rainbows is worthwhile. It saves us time wasted on stuff that aint going to happen, so we have more time to spend on stuff which is.

More Accurate Forecasts

Doesn’t matter whether we’re an entrepreneur building a business, or a door knocker with an unhelpful bank manager. Knowing which deals are going to come in helps us be more accurate about cash we can plan to go out.

Better Customers

Winning customers who’ll be happy with what we can deliver, as opposed to those who’ll always be complaining, is good for our business. In the future we’ll get more referrals and be worried about fewer brickbats.

Your Sales Management Process

Quite how you develop a sales process for your business is a separate subject, and your process is unique to you. BUT with a process you’ll be more in control and know why you’re doing what.

There’s quite a lot of information in this blog about sales management and sales qualification. You can read it and then make up your own mind.

It doesn’t matter how you choose to do it, only that you do implement the philosophy and then find ways to improve your ideas as some work for you and others don’t.

Do good customers buy from bad sales people? How come there are so many really bad sales people making money in this world when the professional guys are finding life hard?

If you’re the CEO and wondering why that difficult, unsociable, lazy, good for nothing rep makes more money than you do? Or if you’re one of the good guys, working hard at professional selling, but bemused and annoyed to watch really bad sales people being more successful? You’re in good company. There are a lot of professional people upset by the same injustices.

But if you think about it, the reasons aren’t hard to find. Bad sales people can be successful whenever the customer has no choice in buying and the Rep doesn’t care about customer experience. The success is built into the relationship between the customer and the product. Either the client has no choice about buying, or about who to buy from. And most often they’re working for businesses which don’t care what the customer thinks, either.

Bad sales people make good numbers when they work for brand leaders – when the customers come knocking on the door pleading for some attention. High performance cars is a really good example – did you ever try to buy a Ferrari or a Porsche? Electronics and electrical goods is another. These days business banking is the same, (although those bankers really don’t want your business).

But the best example I can think of is Enterprise Software.

In the Enterprise Software business product selection is often made by people who have no idea what they’re deciding on. They’ll choose their software based on what consultants or regulators, or their friends recommend. And in big companies that’s most often SAP. Imagine having to buy SAP licenses when the board has decided that’s the only software good enough. The sales guy doesn’t have to be very good, or work very hard, does s/he? The buyer is going to pay top $$$$$ and accept being just another license.

A better example, but still in the Enterprise Software business was my erstwhile colleague. Nick. We worked for what had been the preferred ERP software vendor for IBM mini computers – System 36, System 38, and AS400. They were the most popular business machine and all the big manufacturers bought them, and the software sort of went along for the ride. In previous years the sales guys didn’t have to be any good to pick up vast commissions – just lucky in the allocation of accounts.

In the mid 90′s the ERP business went through a trough. All the new business sales guys left for richer pickings, and Nick stayed on quietly picking up all their accounts, but not making any money. Come 1998 the worm turned.

You may remember the Millenium Bug – the theory the world would come to an end on Jan 1 2000, when all the computers would reset their clocks to Jan 1 1900. As it happens the problem never showed but Nick’s accounts couldn’t anticipate that. Between January 1997 and December 1998 Nick’s entire customer base upgraded to the latest Y2000 compliant version.

And they all paid absolute top $$$, in fact more in some cases.

Nick wasn’t any sort of salesman – good or bad. In fact nobody else would ever have given him a job in sales. He should have been an actuary or something – perfectly pleasant, highly intelligent, and as warm as frozen cod. He didn’t care what the customer thought, didn’t have any kind of process, wouldn’t make social or service calls. When the customer called about the upgrade Nick simply sent her a contract to sign, and it was always $millions – no discount and cash up front.

He made more money than I’ve ever dreamed of. And he was an absolute hero with the management, basically keeping the company in business with his cash flow.

So my recommendation is, to be really successful in sales you need to get a job like Nick’s and forget about being a great salesman.

I’ve tried to find one of those for 20 years, but unfortunately nobody would offer me one

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A bad sales manager can be more damaging to the business than almost anybody else. The problem is s/he appears to be one of the team and yet undermines the most important function – winning and keeping customers. It can take a long time for the bad sales manager to get found out, and even longer to get rid of him and repair the damage. Of course the same applies to any bad manager, but this blog is about sales and selling.

We might think they’re easy to spot, but whilst the sales team will know, the corporate management won’t, because these guys are adept at blaming other people. Only once the morale of the team is decimated and quarter after quarter numbers fail to please will the focus turn to the sales manager.

In my experience there are 3 main traits evidenced by all bad sales managers.

Having to be Right Even When Wrong

There’s a manager I worked with who couldn’t take anybody in the business knowing more than him. A major contract was up for renewal. The sales rep explained the situation presenting a strategy for driving the price up. The manager agreed, but in a service meeting with the client got into negotiating a renewal of the contract. He knew the client had nowhere else to go. The rep had explained letting the contract expire would leave the client between a rock and the proverbial hard place. All the manager had to do was sit back, and placate the client after the rep had forced an increase in price and reduction in service. But he didn’t. He did the negotiation himself, without telling the rep, and discounting the price by 30%.

Sure, he got the renewal, but cost the business $000s in the process.

Process is More Important than Result

When managers don’t know what they’re doing they focus on process, as opposed to results. They just want to tell their boss the deal going bad wasn’t their fault. They’d done all the right stuff. Really bad managers of any description go by the book rather than the circumstances. The idiot coming to my mind insisted every first meeting should begin with a corporate presentation. That’s what the book said.

Setting Up the Fall Guy

Real sales managers understand their job is enabling and supporting the sales rep. It’s the rep wot gets the credit and the manager who gets to smile, knowingly. Bad sales managers are the ones who set themselves up to take the credit and the rep to get the blame.

Whenever a deal goes bad the good sales manager accepts responsibility. That deal shouldn’t have gotten into the forecast without the manager’s approval.

How good are you at Selling Souls? More specifically, how good at selling your soul?  How important is your integrity? When the client acts like a jerk will you go along to get the order? When your manager is a useless pen pushing politician do you smile sweetly and agree? When you just know the organisation will screw up delivery do you toe the party line?

Everybody who sells anything in any industry comes up against this problem. Some are really good at it, and others aren’t. Usually the guy who goes along gets along. S/he’s rewarded for being one of the team. Nobody likes rebels who challenge the status quo. After all clients and managers and pen pushers all have to swallow their pride. Why shouldn’t the guy doing the selling?

The difficult types who don’t go along end up retaining a perverse sense of self worth but lose friends and money in the process.

Who’s the winner here? The one with the clear conscience, or the other with the cash?

Ultimately we all have to go along to get along. The only question is at which point do we bale out, because doing stuff the wrong way always ends in tears. Selling the wrong thing in the wrong way makes other people happy, for a while. After that comes the downside.

This is a conundrum yours truly has wrestled with for more years than he cares to remember.

Circumstances have always dictated the answer. There are times – actually most times – when I’ll find ways of justifying the selling of my soul but eventually conscience takes over and I’ll lose it.

Personally I resent somebody who doesn’t act in accordance with the professional standards I expect of myself, and ultimately they’ll get told to find another guy.

Knowing I’ve done the wrong thing to gain a short term advantage, because the only way to win was to go along with somebody who didn’t understand the implications, ALWAYS leaves me feeling dirty.

For me Selling My Soul always sucks.

But then I’ve never made as much money as the people who didn’t care.

How about you?

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Why we use social media when it seems a waste of time is readily demonstrated by a couple of real life examples – business benefit we achieved in the last 24 hours. More of that in a minute. First the background.

Earlier this week we wrote Why Social Media is a Complete Waste of Time and followed up with How Social Media is Changing Everything as it Dies.

The message we were trying to get across was simple. Anybody, from a business perspective, dipping a toe into the social media water right now will be doing so with high expectations. They’ve been led to believe this is an easy and cost free route into simple and cost free marketing. That’s what the snake oil salesmen are pushing. But it’s not true.

There are massive benefits to using social media to enhance business opportunities, but they aren’t what the evangelists say.

The first article attracted a derisory comment from a consultant in Canada. “Great title, Weak Content” he posted on Twitter. Benefit number 1 is at least he knows about me. Who was it said “It doesn’t matter what they say about me, as long as they say something”? When I asked him to explain the line went quiet.

Laying in bed, reading my Google Reader I “shared” one of our articles about a business line we’re pursuing in Europe. Within a few minutes somebody Tweeted their interest in talking. Two hours later we had the partner we needed for a $ multi million project in European research.

In a different business line, this morning we posted an article about a local hotel. Within a few minutes somebody Tweeted they’d had lunch there and enjoyed it. A reply asking for a comment on the blog post resulted in a new testimonial for the hotel, on our site.

As far as I’m concerned these are real business benefits, but they didn’t come from me wasting hours connecting with people telling me about their hangover, or their kids, or their latest scam to help me make money out of social media.

They came out of the new behaviour – publish and subscribe.

Social Media is creating that behaviour.

In our case self hosted WordPress blogs help us share ideas with the world. Feedburner adds tags and publishes them on Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile Twitter search watches the Internet and sends us, over RSS, a note of what’s been said and Google Alerts monitors the news and blog posts for other stuff we want to know. Everything comes through our Google Reader.

Technology enables us to publish ideas we want to share and watch for other people doing the same. Luckily others are doing it as well.

It’s the behaviour that’s changed, and how we get the benefit.

The ultimate win from social media is the ability to publish and subscribe, and the behaviour to do just that.

It doesn’t take a lot of time – just a clear view of how the technology and associated behaviour changes everything.

The Social Media tsunami which flooded the world over the last couple of years is rapidly coming to the end of its power, having changed everything. Selling in the post social media world needs new rules. Here’s my take on what selling will be like after the flood.

It was exciting while it lasted, and especially so in the beginning, but it’s dead now. Killed off by the way capital attempted to blind side community. The minute anybody tried to make money out of our social interactions that stuff was doomed.

It started with the crooked spammers of course. They’ll always be there early in the growth of something new. And they’ll ultimately drive ordinary people away – there goes Twitter. Linked In is stuffed full of a different sort of spammer – sales people of all types pushing their wares. In lots of cases they’re pseudo executive types pushing their resumes, which explains the garbage they trot out. And as for Facebook – that’s a combination of social media snake oil and stuff “my mother would rather not know” – her words not mine.

But after the flood subsides we’ll find the world a better place – no longer dominated by a few big brands and their PR Agencies. The world of one way communication has gone forever.

Ordinary people will have become used to checking the marketing hype against real people’s experience. They’ll get at the truth more often, and certainly faster. They’ll make better decisions, more quickly, and be better at managing risk.

Everybody can now find people who have real knowledge they can use, and return the compliment to somebody else. We can all publish whatever we like, and read whatever floats our boat. We can communicate as individual, or in groups, at the speed of light.

In the post social media tsunami world genuine sellers will find new ways to create customer value. So for sales guys like us there’s the message and 4 rules for preparing for the post social media world

• Ignore what the snake oil merchants are saying, they won’t be around to count the cost.
• Work hard at creating customer value.
• Be available wherever prospects want to find us, with the information they need presented in ways they can understand.
• Be prepared to stand up for our customers against the beancounters and short term management.

Working with Social Media is a complete waste of time for businesses. Nobody listens, nobody’s interested, nobody cares what you think, or say or do.

In fact the majority of people who tried Twitter, or Facebook or Linked In, or Stumbleupon, or You Tube, or Digg pretty soon gave up on the whole idea.

There’s something not very pleasant about the way people pitch themselves or their ideas. Their ineptitude embarrasses me. It’s like watching a drunken woman throw up in the street.

Personally I can’t stand the “god squad” and there’s a whole bunch of them wanting to save our souls. Neither can I stand the “have I got an opportunity for you” crowd. They’re worse than sharks. They’re moronic sharks, hoping to stumble over somebody more stupid than them. And I really don’t want to know where they had dinner last night, or breakfast this morning. And I don’t want to play stupid games.

So that about lets me out of it. I agree with Chris Brogan (for a change) about The Social Media Crash is Coming.

• In a couple of years Facebook will be as relevant as last weeks Northern Times – only fit for lighting fires or serving chips.
• Linked In will die off as employers decide their sales guys hanging around on that site are just avoiding doing something productive – anything productive, including finding another job.
• Twitter and Foursquare, and a bunch of others will have been blown away by Gmail.

The great social media experiment will be over.

OK so that’s dealt with the Social Media Snake Oil salesmen. All of you people wanting to help me get more followers and friends are wasting your breath. You, my friends are as irrelevant as the spammers. In fact in some cases you are the spammers.

On the other hand some things will have changed, for the better, along the way.

Stay tuned. We’ll post on that soon. There’s good news coming.