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How To Sell More, using Social Selling & Sales 2.0

CRM

5 ideas that will impact your sales career

October 22, 2014 by Nigel Edelshain 2 Comments

This post is going to be biased. Sorry.

I’m a big fan boy of David Meerman Scott dating back to his (in my opinion) classic book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I read that book in 2008 and it rocked my world. Now he’s got a new book focused on sales, The New Rules of Sales and Service.

David pretty much defined content marketing about the same time Hubspot were thinking that way and now Hubspot is a newly-minted public company. He was the keynote speaker at Hubspot’s first Inbound conference. A couple of weeks ago I went to the 2014 version of Inbound with about 10,000 other people and was thrilled to not only attend David’s talk but get him to do an interview about his new book and his thoughts on social selling.

Here’s top 5 points from that interview. Some of these points may seriously imact your sales career.

1.     Sales people need to make a choice. Ouch!

David says we are halfway through a 40-year revolution brought on by the Internet. He says in the future people will look back at this time period and see it as the era of massive change, something like the industrial revolution.

He believes companies and sales people need to wake up to the fact that buyers are now in control of the purchasing process and act accordingly.

One upshot of that is that he sees sales people as having to become providers of useful content as a means to being found and as a way to be always be helpful to prospects and buyers.

I asked David what a sales person should do in a company that has not yet embraced these new behaviors (social selling). For example, a company that still insists on cold calling and judges reps by the number of calls made per day etc. Sound familiar?

David’s answer is sales people have 3 choices:

(1) Don’t do anything. Knuckle down to how things are and keep your head down. You won’t be great in this new world of buyer-lead sales but maybe you’ll keep your job.

(2) Become the agent of change. Try to move your company to the new sales model. This is very risky but you will be doing the right thing for company and yourself in the long run—but you may lose your job as you will be “fighting the system”.

(3) Leave and go find a company that has its act together on social selling

2.     Sales managers are the biggest problem

Changing existing companies is bloody hard (OK, David said “very very hard”).

It’s easier for a brand new startup to establish its sales and marketing processes the right way, changing existing processes and structures even just a little is really hard.

David points out the main champions of the sales status quo are your sales managers.

Most sales managers, directors and VPs came up through the ranks. They were once top sales people. They figured out what worked in selling. They want that stuff repeated by their reps today.

Here’s the problem: times have changed. Buyers have changed. Selling has changed. And many sales managers have NOT changed.

They want things done the “right way” from what they know. Unfortunately what was right when they sold is now wrong.

3.     CRM is the second biggest problem

CRM is the second biggest problem. Up to this point most CRM systems really just help sales managers get reports. What they don’t do is help sales people sell.

The reporting and structure of these CRM’s is based on the traditional way of selling, e.g. how many cold calls did you make today. These CRM’s have old sales processes “baked” into them, encouraging you to sell the old way.

Fortunately new CRM’s are on the way—check out Hubspot’s brand new CRM and Nimble. (I’m not so sure that new sales managers are on the way. Let me know.)

4.     Your company needs a “customer expert”

This point actually is etched into my mind. I may go on about this a lot in future posts here.

David states that every company needs at least one “customer expert”.

He believes the customer expert should probably reside in the marketing department. Marketing people should dedicate themselves as a primary job function to understanding their buyers—in a lot of detail. They should spend plenty of time and effort researching your buyers needs, behaviors, mindset etc.

What’s so eye opening for me about this is that now I realize that so many of the revenue problems I’ve had over the last 20 years of sales and marketing really started by not understanding our buyers well enough.

You can be amazing at sales (or marketing) but unless you intimately understand your buyers you’re going to run uphill forever.

I’ll stop for now on this point but it’s so fundamental that I recommend writing it on a Post-It note and affixing it to your monitor or getting a tatt.

5.     Become a content curator

Getting tactical, I asked David how a sales person could really hope to provide their buyers with content day-in-day out. (Assuming they lived in a “normal” company, i.e. without marketing supporting them with the right content and sales managers asking them to make cold calls every day.)

David’s recommendation is that you become a content curator (rather than a content developer). This means you don’t need to spend hours writing blog posts and ebooks. What you do need to do is go find great blog posts and ebooks that other people have written and then send these links to your prospects and clients.

Content curation is pretty much what I’ve done for the last 10 years with Sales 2.0 and I can attest that it works. People associate the value they are getting with the sender not just the author, so this approach seems to make total sense to me.

You may think David Meerman Scott is off his rocker with some of these suggestions but I believe he’s spot on.

It’s tough to bet against him. Just about everything he wrote in the “New Rules of Marketing & PR” 7 years ago are now standard operating procedure for marketers. It seems quite likely he can see the future of professional sales too. I’d bet on it!

Should you want to see the future of your sales career, I highly recommend picking up a copy of his book on Amazon here. It’s a fun read and cheaper than a crystal ball. Or check out David’s Slideshare below.

The New Rules of Selling from David Meerman Scott

Filed Under: CRM, Customers, Marketing & Sales Integration, Sales 2.0 Tools, Sales Management

The State of Inbound-SALES!

September 19, 2014 by Nigel Edelshain Leave a Comment

I’m still pretty jazzed up about the Hubspot Inbound 2014 conference that I attended this week. A lot more to come on that over the next few weeks.

The big reason for my excitement (apart from seeing so many sales friends) is that Hubspot has joined the CRM game and is looking to help sales people succeed through social selling.

In this vain, a lot of good stuff pouring out of Hubspot right now on sales. First stop check out the report below. Here’s some of the Hubspot post announcing the report.

If you know HubSpot primarily for its marketing software and content, you probably already know that we’ve recently released our sixth annual State of Inbound Marketing report. You might also know that this year, we dropped “Marketing” from the title, and have rebranded it simply The State of Inbound.

Why?

Because one notable finding from this year’s report is that inbound methodologies are being used to power not just Marketing, but Sales, too. With the growing prevalence of the inbound mindset among today’s sales reps, growing alignment between Sales and Marketing teams, and our own release of the new HubSpot Sales Platform, we thought it appropriate to publish a sales-specific edition of our annual report — our first annual The State of Inbound: Sales Edition.

Read the full post here.

Filed Under: CRM, Sales 2.0 Tools

New Nimble app–much needed. Thanks!

August 26, 2014 by Nigel Edelshain Leave a Comment

Nimble announced today it has released a new app for the iPhone. This very good news.

I was staring at their old app over the weekend thinking “this does not do much. Why can’t I do some of things I do on the web?”

Well now I can…on the new app. Yeah! It’s always pleasing when things happen on my schedule (not too often)!

If you’re into social selling and have not checked out Nimble, you should. I run my Rolodex from it. It’s the CRM that best aligns with a social selling approach (that I know of).

Here’s the Nimble post about their new app…

NIMBLE LAUNCHES NEW IPHONE APP

In keeping with our Everywhere You Work strategy, today we released our new Nimble iOS app, which delivers to you intelligent relationship insights on the road and on the go. Mobile is key to Nimble’s core focus of supporting your unique social selling workflow and with mobile, we tie the Nimble Way together. This is just the first of many releases that delivers what our users want and need.  You aren’t boxed in with Nimble, because we give you the ability to work how, when and where you like to work.  Our Nimble Android app is in beta and will be released soon.

Read the full Nimble post here

Filed Under: CRM, Sales 2.0 Tools

The Sales 2.0 Gift Horse

October 28, 2012 by Nigel Edelshain 4 Comments

A story from my consulting work.

I thought it would be a good idea for my client to see if they could sell more to their existing top accounts (I’m quite the strategist you will note.) The first step to doing this was to get a list of those top accounts.

After playing with the client’s accounting software for a fun few hours I managed to get a list of their top 100 accounts by revenue for the last year. Opening this list I thought I’d take a look at how their sales coverage was on account number one. What had they done to sell more to this top account?

I was working a hypothesis that my client’s sales people were mostly selling their main products not all their products. I thought there might be room to boost revenue by selling more to their strongest existing clients.

I jumped into the client’s CRM system to see what notes lay in there. Which contacts in this top account had been spoken to; met with; and what other activities had been completed?

One thing I found in the CRM system was the name of this account’s head of marketing.

So then my habits kicked in. I typed this head of marketing’s name into Linkedin. But he was hard to find. I typed in his name and the name of this account into Linkedin’s search function. I did not find him. Then I searched by the account’s name and the word “marketing”. He did not come up. So then I searched Linkedin by only the account’s name and waded through pages of employee profiles.

Still the name of this head of marketing did not come up.

Finally I just typed his name into Linkedin (without the account name) and got a bunch of profiles (luckily his name was not “John Jones” but it was not that unique either). After a lot more time wading through profiles I finally found him.

You may have guessed by now…he was no longer at the company per his Linkedin profile! He had left a year ago.

So next I typed in just the title “VP Marketing” and the account’s name into Linkedin and came up with two people – one who literally had the title “VP Marketing”. I like to cross check such findings. So I looked this guy up in Insideview and found that he was also listed there as the VP Marketing for this company.

Admittedly this was on odd situation where the sales person did not know who a key contact was in such a key account. The account had changed hands as a sales person had left. The new sales person had been told by someone at the company who they should talk to. But that person was not the head of marketing – more of a gatekeeper. And the sales person (here’s the key) never investigated any further. Even though they could have found out in 15 minutes by searching Linkedin, Insideview or Jigsaw – like I did.

I admit I’m a crazy fan boy of Sales 2.0 tools like Linkedin, Insideview or Jigsaw. But as this story illustrates these are valuable tools. These tools are massive repositories of information on companies and they are available right from your desktop. They are very low cost or often free. But the information you can get from them could make a huge difference in your commissions.

Not using them to cross-check/update account information seems like looking a gift horse in the mouth to me. What do you think?

Filed Under: CRM, Customers, Sales 2.0 Tools

CRM’s for the Real World

April 13, 2011 by Nigel Edelshain 4 Comments

Over the years of sales consulting with companies of all sizes (many ironically in IT), I’ve seen some darn ugly CRM databases.

Back in the first days of this blog I compared these databases to a 2-year-old’s bedroom (in fact I should have said a 4-year-old’s bedroom I believe having now passed through that milestone for real).

Being an atypical sales dude (a self-described sales geek in fact) I have always been rather type A about keeping my own CRM databases spanky clean. This has resulted in an incredible amount of ctrl-c/ctrl-v actions on my keyboard that have worn down several keyboards and probably set me on the way to carpal tunnel.

Well, finally there are some new-fangled CRM’s that seek to address the lousy-data-in-the-database problem and the too-much-typing problem. I thought I’d start sharing my thoughts and experiences with the ones I’ve been allowed to play with so far.

The first one to tell you about is one I’ve been playing with for the last two weeks and I have to say I am quite enjoying the experience. It’s called Nimble.

One of the best things about Nimble is that it’s designed with the typical lazy sales dude in mind. (OK, I know you’re not lazy but you hate typing into your CRM – fess up dude!)

A key feature with Nimble is that when you enter a new contact in to its database it does a nice job of going out to Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook and pulling down all the profiles for that person from these social networks (I’ll cover other tools that do this too in future posts) – with minimal typing involved for you.

Once you set up a contact there’s a nice display of all the communication you’ve had with them right on their contact record: email, Linkedin, Tweets and FB updates. This will be increasingly helpful as people choose which “channel” to communicate on and communication gets more-and-more fragmented.

You can also see all your inbound communication in one place: all your email, all the Tweets featuring you, all your Linkedin messages and invites. This makes a lot of sense but I found in my testing so far that there is something about the user interface here that needs some refining. I’ve found myself dropping back to my Gmail inbox most of the time to see my emails.

The final tab on Nimble shows you all the activity from all your contacts and that seems quite promising too but right now I’ve been too busy cleaning up all my contacts to really get value out of this area.

What I have gotten great value out of is Nimble slapping me in the face and reminding me of who I am connected to on Linkedin that I don’t really know and should either get-to-know or disconnect. I’m amazed by all the people that are dead-ends in my Linkedin network and now I am actively working on that. I suspect there’s a huge ROI just in this lucky side effect of using Nimble.

I’ve spoken to Nimble about their plans and it seems there are going to be lots of add-on modules down the road that will provide additional functionality to what is currently a fairly stripped-down CRM. For example, right now there’s no reporting or opportunity management but that stuff will probably come soon. I’ve found myself keeping my Zoho running for that “old fashioned CRM stuff”.

I’ll be talking soon about other tools that take this kind of “real world” approach to CRM (“Social CRM” is the hot jargon) so please do let me know about your favorites (or the one your uncle is selling). I am a natural geek so playing with these things is more fun for me than tidying up my six year olds’ bedroom.

Filed Under: CRM, Sales 2.0 Tools, Social Media

Your Prospect List is Like Love

August 11, 2007 by Nigel Edelshain Leave a Comment

We still don’t spend enough time on figuring out who to call.I’ve been talking to a few business owners this week about how to develop their business. We’ve talked extensively about prospecting and it keeps striking me that the #1 ingredient to successful prospecting for them is going to be the quality of their prospect list.

A little while back I may have picked your value proposition as the #1 ingredient in a successful prospecting program but now I put the prospect list first and the value proposition second (but of course both better be really good or your conversion/sales stats are going to suck!)

The tough part about having a great list of people to call is it takes a lot of work. A great list is like love – you can’t buy it! Going out to list brokers or online systems (even the “Sales 2.0” ones like Jigsaw or Spoke) won’t get you a list that will perform that well (although you can start there). Lists need a ton of cleaning and nurturing — constantly.

Only after you’ve spent a lot of time and effort defining the profile of who you need to call. And spent tons of time on cleaning your list. And then spent ages on calling people and nurturing the heck out of them, will you have a list that you will start to appreciate…your “house” list.

You can’t buy a list that will work well. You have to develop it with love!

Filed Under: CRM, Prospecting

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