by Greg Verdino

It’s probably a safe bet that many of you make your living (at least in part) by helping your clients — or in the case of the client-side marketers among you, your companies — engage consumers more effectively through social media channels.

Should your CEO blog?  What should your brand managers know about MySpace and Facebook?  Do you need feeds, widgets, a podcast or some kind of virtual world presence?  How about mobile social software or presence applications?  And then, of course, how do all of these things fit together and integrate properly with your mass media and traditional PR efforts to actually help you meet your business objectives — because we all know that tactics without strategy won’t get you to where you need to go. 

These questions — and others like them — seem to be on the minds of just about every marketer, PR practitioner and client-side social media evangelist.  And while these questions warrant answers, it strikes me that, if these are the first questions we’re asking (even the strategy question), we are starting in the wrong place.

If you ask me, starting with social media marketing can often amount to nothing more than putting lipstick on the pig (and yep, the pig in this case is your old school “anti-social” company.)  I can’t tell you how often marketers ask me for advice on how to use social media to reach new customers and sell more stuff, yet have never even considered how they can use the very same (or similar) tools to work better, smarter and cheaper themselves.  Worse still are those companies that seem hell-bent on marketing through social media yet can’t even access social media sites from within their firewalls.

The most far-reaching impact of social computing is not that it changes the way we market; it is that it changes the way we can and should do business.  Marketing is just the external manifestation of this change, but the change needs to come from within the organization and must impact everything from how we attract talent to how we share information with our co-workers to how we define ‘workplace.’

So rather than simply asking how your company (or clients) can market better (or at least different) through social media, why not get straight to the heart of the matter with questions like these instead:  Read More

Share on Facebook

by Kendra Lee, author of Selling Against the Goal

To be a successful consultative seller, you need to grow and maintain a broad base of client contacts. Before you know it, you have hundreds, even thousands of people on your contact list. Obviously it’s impossible to maintain personal contact, yet personal contact is a key to building and strengthening your client relationships.

How do you maintain and strengthen relationships with all of these people so you will be among the first – if not the first – person they remember when they have a business issue that requires your expertise? 

I pride myself on my follow-up skills and strive to maintain relationships with clients long after projects have been completed. But, the longer I’m in sales, or working with a particular account, the more contacts I have. Suddenly my simple approach to calling when someone comes to mind, or when my CRM system says I should, no longer works. This is the dilemma facing many of us as successful sellers. What to do? The answer: a two-pronged strategy leveraging today’s technology.

Begin with a “divide and conquer” approach, categorizing your contacts into tiers. The ‘A’ tier can include top contacts or recommenders you stay in touch with regularly.  These are the people least likely to slip from our sights because they will probably buy from you soon. It’s the ‘B’ and ‘C’ tiers that are the challenge.

The ‘B’ tier are contacts that don’t have an immediate need, but may have one in the next 12 months. You may have done work for them before, or discussed places you can assist, but frequent communication at this point is not required.

The ‘C’ tier are contacts that may someday appreciate your services, but not in the foreseeable future.

While both ‘B’ and ‘C’ tier clients know you are there, you don’t want to count on them to remember to call when a need arises that you can assist with. Yet our schedules are busy and often we don’t have the luxury of calling every ‘B’ and ‘C’ client regularly to check in.

Some sellers feel it is enough to hope that their paths will cross again in the future. That’s not definitive enough for me. As I look at it, there are two prongs to a strategy for staying connected and strengthening relationships with our legion of client contacts.

1. Keep our clients current on what we are focused on
2. Provide our clients with new ideas

The first prong is easy. LinkedIn, the online business networking site, shows your network “what you are working on”, updating it every week, even emailing it out to your whole network of contacts you have registered. Make sure all your ‘B’ contacts are linked to you, and they can follow your activities every week as long as you keep it updated. As you speak with or think of them, link to your ‘C’ contacts.

Client relationship manager and email database technologies can help with the second prong. Use the tools in your CRM to create a nearly automated communication strategy. Queue emails to connect with ‘B’ contacts every 60, 90 or 120 days. Write an email that shares a new thought, a related issue a client had and solved that would be of interest, a return on investment another client achieved and how. As your ‘B’ contacts reply, call to connect voice-to-voice.

The ‘C’ tier shouldn’t require a lot of time and effort. Add them to your newsletter list, or emails you might send out regarding updates in their industry. Plan to communicate with them every 4 – 6 months.

Kendra Lee is a top IT seller, sales advisor and business owner who knows how to shorten time to revenue in the SMB market in innovative ways. She is the author of the best selling book Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads they Need. Under Ms. Lee’s direction her organization has assisted sellers in increasing referrals more than 328% in just 7 weeks, penetrating SMB markets in just 6 weeks, driving new client acquisition more than 31% year to year, and increasing annual revenue.

Get Connected | The Sales Store

Share on Facebook

By Jeb Blount, author of the new Power Principles Audio Book

This week I had the chance to demo the newest release of Landslide. Now if you know me you’ve heard me talk about Landslide because I love the company, the product, and the people who work there. After seeing the new release I’m absolutely gaga. These guys have made it so easy to use and salespeople everywhere, who hate CRM, will be celebrating when they see this program. Landslide is one of our advertisers here on SalesGravy.com, however, I would print this regardless, because this program rocks. In fact, I fell in love with the product long before I begged them to advertise with us. Check it out yourself. They will even give you a free copy of my book PowerPrinciples just for test driving Landslide.

More:

Landslide Technologies, Inc. today announced the  launch of its Summer 2008 Release, which offers a breakthrough in usability, new Web 2.0 capabilities and an innovative Sales Workspace that allows salespeople to engage, interact and sell using the proven best practices of their company and industry.

Landslide was created with the belief that there is a need for an application purpose-built to achieve one goal: increase sales performance. This sales-centric approach has been the driving force behind Landslide and the Summer 2008 Release and continues to expand its offering based upon its in-depth understanding of sales work styles. 

“We are extremely pleased with Landslide’s Summer Release because it provides an intuitive process for our sales force,” said Cathy Garland, VP sales and marketing at Scholar360. “The Landslide solution allows us to streamline daily sales tasks, making workflow more effective and efficient. We are able to put our resources towards selling and focus on closing accounts as opposed to the administration involved in the sales process.”

Building on its focus in helping sales professionals effectively navigate complex sales cycles, Summer 2008 Release features a comprehensive set of new capabilities including a completely re-designed Graphical User Interface (GUI) that minimizes the number of clicks needed to complete any sales tasks, a four-tier deep sales process with embedded sales job aids, mash-ups with Sales 2.0 offerings like InsideView and unique, new VIP services designed to offload the pipeline management and forecast reporting work from sales managers and senior executives.

“Landslide is on the verge of reshaping this industry,” said Michael Bosworth, co-founder, CustomerCentric Selling. “The new features in the Summer ‘08 Release offer a breakthrough in the ease with which sales teams can institutionalize best processes to manage opportunities and support the needs of the individual sales professional.”

Landslide is the only company that combines live services with its software offering to support the work styles of salespeople. The Summer ’08 Release adds to this offering with the launch of eVIP—a new set of services for the sales executives specifically designed to help them manage their sales teams.  

“Today’s announcement of the Landslide Summer 2008 Release marks the changing landscape from the old generation data entry driven CRM to the new innovation in selling, where the salespeople use web technology to follow a best of class selling process, interact with their buyers and close deals,” said Razi Imam, CEO and founder, Landslide Technologies.

Highlights of the Summer 2008 Release:

Increased Sales Work Style Support through New User Interface
• Minimum clicks to accomplish any sales—two to three clicks to accomplish 80 percent of sales tasks
• Anchored in the Sales Workspace—most sales tasks accomplished from one screen
• Work the way you think—an innovative user interface designed to help users work in lists
• Mash-up with InsideView’s socialprise application—built-in access to InsideView’s SalesView application lets Landslide users access company and executive profiles, company news and executive relationships right from within Landslide

Expanded Sales Process Features
• In-process sales tools—access sales tools right from within the process
• Access to free sales process builder—define and experiment with as many sales processes as you want
• Integration of buyer’s buying process with selling process

Email Prospecting
• Purpose-built for sales to use customizable emails for prospecting, lead nurturing and growing customer and partner relationships

Support for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Set up dashboards in Landslide Pulse for forward-looking KPI driven sales management
• Forecasting based on actual sales process activities and tools used to move the deal through the sales cycle
• Forecast confidence based on sales tools used, sales process activities and buyer interactions

eVIP Services for Sales Managers
• Dedicated SIOs—Sales Information Managers for sales VPs and CEOs to help define and track relevant sales metrics and regularly create reports and updates on these metrics

About Landslide Technologies
Landslide Technologies, Inc., a pioneer in Sales Work Style Management, is the first company to directly address the software, collaboration and support needs of individual salespeople. Built for salespeople by salespeople, Landslide enables the salesperson to follow the best process for driving large complex deals through the pipeline in a consistent manner, provide access to sales tools that help engage buyers and removes data entry burden from the life of the salesperson. The Landslide product line maximizes salespeople’s time, drives them to action and delivers results. The company is privately held with headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA. Additional information can be found at Landslide. To sign up for a free trial, and get a copy of Power Principles, click here.

Free eBook: Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales

Close Deals | The Sales Store

Share on Facebook