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Caveat Venditor: Up the Creek First Class with No Paddle

Caveat venditor means “we’re doomed”. At least those of us in the sales profession that continue to work the status quo while holding on for dear life. Employers who insist on doing things the same way are doomed too.

The term caveat venditor means “seller beware” in Latin. It’s a term used by Daniel Pink in his incredible work, To Sell Is Human, that describes how most of us today are going to be forced into some kind of position in sales.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll all be quota-carrying sales reps, but it does mean that while the world economy creates more and more small businesses, we’ll all be required to sell (at least a little).

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Blog Sales Advice Social Selling

How to Thrive in the New Connection Economy

New Connection EconomyAs of late, I’ve been really fascinated with the new connection economy, a subject that makes complete sense to me because it’s all around us.

If you take a closer look, you’ll see it too. People are starting to revolt against the norm – they want to learn their own way on their own schedule. And this includes our buyers, not just us.

Social selling makes intuitive sense because the buyer has fundamentally changed. Access to information is the core reason. What can you do to start tapping into this new reality? Before we look at what you can do, we should first look at what should you be.

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Blog Demand Generation Social Selling

Selling on Twitter: Can Sales Reps Create Opportunities in 140 Characters?

Selling on Twitter

Over 500 million tweets are sent every day on Twitter, but is selling on Twitter a possibility? Can sales reps really create and nurture their opportunities using Twitter? Absolutely.

Remember Mimoun Khalloufi from Spotfire in France?

Mimoun is a sales champion that’s been CRUSHING it with social selling. He’s an example of a sales rep that has truly embraced the power of social tools.

A few weeks back, Mimoun showed us how to drive new business using LinkedIn in a great blog post on 5 Steps to Social Selling in Europe!

Now it’s time for Twitter.

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Blog Sales Social Selling

Buying Cycles vs. Sales Cycles

Buying Cycle

It’s time for sales to grow up. It’s no longer about our sales cycle, it’s about our customers’ buying cycle.

I recently met with two passionate and smart chaps in London, England from Artesian Solutions (hence, the usage of the term chaps).

Andy Sadler and Dale Roberts are dinosaur pushers. They’re pushing the slow-moving and ever-lazy beast of sales. They question the efficacy of doing things normally or routinely and it was inspiring to see this level of innovation from across the pond.

You see, Andy and Dale firmly believe in the transformative power of social media in B2B sales.

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Blog Sales Advice Social Selling

Ascending K2: The ‘New’ Klout and It’s Impact on Social Selling

KloutContent aggregation tools like the ‘new’ Klout are helping social sellers serve their communities with relevant and timely information. Have you made them a part of your social selling arsenal yet?

Since hearing about the newest version of Klout a few weeks back, I’ve been meaning to write a quick review to help our community become more familiar with the key applications we use in social selling.

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Blog Sales Advice Social Selling

It’s About The Relationship, Not The Transaction

Relationship SellingIn the frantic world of sales that we live in, it’s easy forget what’s really right for the customer. We’re so focused on transactions that we overlook the bigger opportunity: relationships.

Whether you’re in the world of car sales, software sales, or B2B office supply sales, this one applies to all of us.

Our sales world is built around transactions. In the new connection economy, this approach is DOA. If you believe the saying caveat venditor (seller beware), the majority of us in our industry are dead meat.

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Blog Social Selling

The Pareto Effect: The Social Selling Dominance of the 20%

Social DominanceThe Pareto Effect tell us that 80% of results come from 20% of the causes. From a social selling perspective, striving to be part of the 20% will allow you to dominate your market.

In life we’re often presented with very real and defining choices. Most of us don’t like to face these, but these choices help us become who we are.

Our careers are no different.

The Pareto Principle, or Pareto Effect, states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the actions or causes. We know it more popularly as the 80/20 rule.

Categories
Blog Social Selling

4 Social Selling Tips to Help You Get Started

Social Selling TipsHave you considered jumping into social selling but aren’t sure where you should start? Today I’m going to talk about a few simple ways to get started.

A good place to start is by listening to potential buyers that are already having conversations online.

Regardless of whether you’re new to social selling or have been following our blog for a while now, you probably know that buyers are online asking questions, evaluating solutions, complaining, ranting, and generally trying to get input for all types of products and services.

Social listening is a great way to jump in. For example, take these conversations:

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Blog Sales Advice Social Selling

Stop Ignoring the Power of Persistence and Influence Selling

Influence SellingIn high school, most of us were introduced to the concept of positive correlation.

In case your math is a little rusty, a positive correlation is a relationship between two variables such that they increase together. Of course, a negative correlation is the opposite.

My math teacher used to give us this example:

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Blog LinkedIn Sales Advice

Lunch & Earn – How to Get Found Online (And Win!)

Get Found Online

As your customers become more and more self-directed, it’s never been more important to ensure that you and your business are getting found online.

A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to participate in a webinar about how to get found online with Webtasks, one of the web’s top SEO companies.

Webtasks has been a partner and a client that I’ve enjoyed working with over the past year as they adopted the Sales For Life social selling methodology, understanding that social selling and SEO can go hand-in-hand.

In our session, we discussed 5 proven ways for businesses to get found online and grow and provided the community with practical tips and tricks that have been proven to have an immediate impact on sales results.