- Image via Wikipedia
Selling has always been about ideas, and that’s more true today than it’s ever been. Whilst customers will do everything to avoid the traditional sales pitches they’re cruising the Internet looking for new ideas.
It’s those ideas which excite and engage customers, creating aspiration and tearing down the barriers to doing business. Selling our ideas requires us to be able to put those ideas where the customers hang out, and that means we have to join in the Big Sort as described by Seth Godin and Kevin Kelly.
There are now lots of ways quality information gets sorted from the garbage on the Internet. As sales people our job is put our best ideas out there.
Bookmarks, tweets, Likes, will all work to make sure the best ideas, like the cream, rise to the top.
Where will you be when the big sort gets going? How will you be selling your ideas?
The big sort
Kevin Kelly argues that the most important breakthrough in the history of mankind was the invention of language.
Before language, we were wild animals. After language, humans as a species took a huge leap forward. Language allowed us to coordinate, to teach and to learn.
The second great breakthrough on this axis was writing. Writing is language solidified. Writing permits language to travel through time or over distances. It ensures that ideas last more than one generation.
Now, we’re on the cusp of the third breakthrough, one that is proving to be as powerful as the other two. And we’re living through it, not reading about it history books…
We’ve taken the smartest and richest people on earth, hundreds of millions of them, and put them to work sorting and organizing and polishing data.
We’re sorting everything. Not just which videos are imitations of other videos, but identifying local breakthroughs and spreading them around the world, highlighting problems or insights and leveraging them and connecting resources to each other in ways that create massive amounts of leverage.
Think about all those folks checking their Blackberry, upvoting Digg articles, retweeting links and connecting people to ideas online. Think about the human enabled filtering, a giant system working without obvious compensation.
Right now, the big sort focuses on finding clever viral videos, but it won’t for long. The power of this coordination is so huge it won’t stop with building Wikipedia and turning the founder of ChatRoulette into a millionaire. Instead, the big sort will relentlessly find and connect and spread ideas that generate productivity and impact.
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