Social Selling and Sales 2.0 Blog
How To Sell More, using Social Selling & Sales 2.0
The future of sales belongs to sales geeks.
You can already see this in marketing. Marketing is already way more numeric and analytical than it used to be. And if you buy into the story that future sales people will look a lot more like “mini marketers” then sales people are going to need to be into numbers.
And not just your quota and commission check. I mean operational numbers. Read More…
I think I got the same email that Trish Bertuzzi got. Trish is spot on with this post about email prospecting (as always).
We live in a world awash with low cost Sales 2.0/Social Selling tool. If you don’t use these tools to customize your prospecting to the recipient, you are wasting your prospect’s time.
Nobody has time today (like nobody!) So you deserve to be shut out. Get smart people! Read More…
Nice post by Melonie Dodaro via the Linkedin sales blog on the basics of using Linkedin to build relationships (i.e. sales!)
To the last point I’d like to add: Take the conversation offline if you really want to have someone as a real contact for the future. There’s a huge difference between a Linkedin connection and someone you have spoken to on the phone or even better had a coffee with.
Are you struggling to grow your network with meaningful connections on LinkedIn?
Perhaps you have hundreds of connections but have been unable to do anything productive (or profitable) with them.
LinkedIn is most effective when you use it as a relationship-building platform.
You can quickly grow a healthy network of relationships that will increase your sales lead generation by changing how you view your LinkedIn connections and by changing how you approach them.
Here are 5 essential best practices you need to follow when developing relationships on LinkedIn.
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.
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
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Some sales people in my firm were discussing where they could get the best prospect lists. They are building out a new territory so they need people to contact.
Some of the team were leaning towards a trial account with Hoovers. I jumped in to try and be helpful and told them I already had an Insideview account that they could use. They took me up on that offer and so far seem contented with Insideview.
But did I really do them a favor?
The answer is maybe or maybe not.
The skinny on prospect lists is that one size does not fit all. The best source of prospect lists for you very much depends on your target industry/industries and target contacts in those industries.
Each provider of data has a different “breadth of data” (which companies and industries they have records for) and a different “depth of data” (what kind of information they have on each company and contact).
Providers build their data in different ways. Some are like compilers of other people’s data and some used “crowdsourced” approaches to get sales people to enter information into their databases.
My friend Ruth Stevens is the only person I know that’s been brave enough to try to figure out the relative strengths of different databases. She’s been doing studies on B2B data providers for the last several years and has written up each study in a white paper. You can grab these white papers here. I highly recommend doing so, if you’re considering spending any decent cash (or time) on a prospect list.
My takeaway from some of Ruth’s work and my own messing around with different lists over the last ten years is that you need to test your data source in your own environment.
Reading about data sources from their marketing information and using them “in combat” when you’re trying to crack into a key account are two totally different things. In my prospecting experience I always seemed to come up with an obscure title, or company, that was not in my data provider’s database.
One giant database that I find critical to B2B prospecting that is not usually considered a “data source” is Linkedin. Using Linkedin in combination with one of the data sources above can really help you add data to your own list and make it a lot richer.
In many sales jobs you’re targeting a specific niche. Often you can great some lists from associations that serve this specific industry niche. For example, in our business there is an association for hospital marketers and we’ve found the list of members very useful.
Your own list will always be more valuable than any third-party list for your own specific situation. As you prospect, you should develop and maintain your own prospect list. You can use third-party lists as your source but you should build your own list as you go.
But your goal as a sales professional should not be to build a list–not even the best one ever. Your goal should be building relationships.
One of the key distinctions between sales people and marketers is that sales people need to develop real human relationships. Marketers don’t. Marketers deal with large lists of names and email addresses. As a sales person it’s OK to start here but if you want to build your personal value you need to build your “Rolodex” of people that know, like and trust you.
So as you’re in a market for a while you’re reliance on “raw” lists from vendors should taper off and your focus should shift to your own “Rolodex”. The key then is how you maintain your “Rolodex”. You need to be nurturing your relationships with all the contacts in that key list. That will be your personal asset that your employer and others will pay big bucks for.
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.
