Kathryn Devine:Know your product, know your customer: how academic librarians can learn from salespeople

Kathryn Devine:Know your product, know your customer: how academic librarians can learn from salespeople

1. 1. KNOW YOUR PRODUCT, KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER: HOW ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS CAN LEARN FROM SALESPEOPLE Kathryn Devine Academic Liaison Librarian University of Worcester Library Services k.devine@worc.ac.uk
2. 2. My background  Education:  Classics (B.A.)  Nineteenth Century Studies (M.A.)  Library and Information Studies (M.Sc. - current)  PG Cert in Learning and Teaching in HE.  BIALL Legal Foundations.  Work:  Financial and management accounting.  Operations Manager (later Director) for a small engineering company selling quality control equipment for the metal packaging industry.  Retail management in the charity sector.  Disability Support Worker (UW).  Hive front of house library staff/team leader.  Academic liaison librarian.
3. 3. King and Solis (2017) ‘Liaisons as sales force’  Vital to engage with users.  Sales/engagement skills are neither innate nor routinely included in LIS training or discussed in LIS literature.  Advocates Pink’s (2012) model of “non-sales selling”.  Selling is about “helping people find solutions to their problems and challenges.”  Rackham’s SPIN selling methodology used as a framework.  Every user interaction is an opportunity to “sell”.
4. 4. “Frontline librarians need to do more than just respond when the end users are looking for information. They’ve got to be out in the field spreading the word, and making the sales pitch for why the library’s resources are vitally important to the teaching and learning process.” (Bell, 2009)
5. 5. Pink (2012) “Non-sales selling” “Persuading, influencing, and convincing others” (p.19). Empathetic, not pushy. “Ambiverts” – “the most skilled attuners” (p.84).
6. 6. What does this all mean for us?  Selling our services is vital; the marketisation of Higher Education will only make it more so.  If LIS literature has gaps, adapt sales literature to help close them.  We are lucky - we have a “product” and people we can believe in.  We are the right people for the job; like Pink’s (2012) “ambiverts” we know when to talk and when to listen.
7. 7. Getting in front of “customers” at UW  Making connections with administrative and support staff.  Course, department, and institute level meetings.  Academic staff awaydays.  Researching and disseminating that research – not just amongst our library peers.  “Askalibrarian on tour” – taking the message beyond the library.  Student engagement – “Study Happy”.  Social media- consistent “tone”, planning.  Library mascot “Reffie the Raptor”.
8. 8. To paraphrase Terry Dooley (2017): Librarians can be shy about blowing their own trumpets – but at least let’s tell people we have a trumpet. Terry Dooley - University of Law, Manchester
9. 9. References  Bell, S. (2009) Academic librarians are not salespeople – but they should be. Available at: http://acrlog.org/2009/03/24/academic-librarians-are-not- salespeople-but-they-should-be/#comment-117448 (Accessed 12 November 2017).  Clarke, K. (2017) ‘Insights discovery’. Together or apart? Effective ways of working: the 48th BIALL annual study conference. The Principal, Manchester, 8-10 June.  Dooley, T. (2017) ‘Information literacy: what is means to us as librarians and how to get it across to other people.’ Together or apart? Effective ways of working: the 48th BIALL annual study conference. The Principal, Manchester, 8-10 June.  King, N. and Solis, J. (2017) ‘Liaisons as sales force: using sales techniques to engage academic library users’. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Available at: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/liaisons/ (Accessed 17 January 2017).  Pink, D. (2012) To sell is human. Edinburgh, Canongate.  Rackham, S. (1996) The SPIN® selling fieldbook: practical tools, methods, exercises, and resources. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.  University of Worcester (2017) ‘20,000? 132 chapters? 16.5 miles?’ University of Worcester Library Services blog, 28 March. Available at: https://library.worc.ac.uk/blogs/20170328 (Accessed 13 November 2017). Illustration credit: Rebecca Oxford