I came across some excellent tips from Johnty Mongan, Managing Director of The Mongan Group concerning the new European sales environment post-GDPR. Selling in Europe will be trickier in May as reps need to obtain opt-in approval
Mongan provided the following advice:
GDPR is about protecting our interests from unlawful behaviour. GDPR removes the unwanted cold calls, email campaigns and any other processing that we haven’t agreed to. A transparent and fair existence for all. I really like it, it fits with my karmic views of the world.
It won’t how ever stop marketing activities through publicly available information, like a company email or a company number…
It’s time to go old school… here’s what you can do to reach new customers in a lawful and GDPR way:
- Get consent from current customers to continue marketing to them. Do it in an engaging way. That’s a must.
- Provide explicit consent of your intentions to all new prospects when luring them in with shiny content. For example, download this form so I can phone you. That’s a must.
- Go to the events your customers go to, get over yourself and introduce yourself. That’s a must.
- Hold your own events.
- Get more business cards…. they are not as useless as you may think.
- Offer referral schemes to current customers. You should do that anyway.
- Market your services within ethical channels. Where you customers go, you go
My list goes on, but it all centres around building clear authentic relationships. This is a good thing because most “sales” are won on the back of authenticity and trust. I see leading the charge with GDPR compliant sales processes a fantastic way to demonstrate your intentions.
So basically, what’s old is new again. While marketing needs to be particularly attuned to GDPR, sales reps also need obtain permission.
For the US and North American markets, GDPR compliance is becoming quite challenging as companies are struggling immensely with scoping issues and documentation issues. More specifically, I’m finding that controllers and processors are unclear at times as to what’s in scope, then further challenged by the complete lack of policies and procedures in place. I look at GDPR compliance as a two-fold process, and that’s (1). Putting in place the actual processes and best practices, and then (2). Documenting such processes and practices with well-written, factual policies and procedures.
The amount of time and money that organizations are spending on policy creation, along with acquiring additional tools for GDPR compliance is quite staggering, but again, it’s got to be done. Hopefully, as time passes the EU will provide better guidance on many of the articles that are currently somewhat vague. This has been done to obviously account for the large number of industries that need to become compliant. Well, good luck to everyone’s GDPR compliance issues and do all you can for meeting the deadline of May, 2018.