Do you have a “Koka” in your business? Haha. This was a great quote from the LinkedIn SalesConnect event in San Francisco on Thursday, September 17th.
I’m pretty sure it was Meagen Eisenberg from Docusign that came up with this beauty…
When Meagen was describing how important it is to have a Social Selling rockstar in your business, so sales reps have a resource. Not only a resource, but a benchmark and context to see how applicable Social Selling is in THEIR business.
Welcome to the Social Selling Tool Kit Series. This is a bi-weekly blog series that focuses on a specific segment of Social Selling tools in each post. The topic focuses will cover areas like CRMS, tracking & automation tools, mobile integrations and online meeting platforms.
Under each tool highlighted we will provide a short summary and use case for the tool as well as a link back to the tool’s website where you can learn more about it. Some tools will be available free-of-charge and some will be available only by paid subscription. We will notify you which is which with the price range of Free – $ – $$ – $$$. And as always, if you have any suggestions for other tools we can include in our post, please feel free to mention them via the comment box provided below.
As a sales professional in this day and age, are you interested in building relationships or collecting connections? Sounds like a rhetorical question and one that may rub some of you the wrong way (which is not my intention).
In the world of social media, especially LinkedIn, it is plain to see that there are many people who are going the way of being L.I.O.N.’s (LinkedIn Open Networkers/LION). I’m asked about my feelings towards being a LION, meaning you are open to accepting anyone’s connection regardless of professional background, geography, or typically any other qualifying criteria that the non-LIONs would use to determine acceptability.
So what’s the difference and why should you care? Watch this video to learn more.
It’s called brand building. In academic circles, it’s essential to advance your career and keep your job.
For sales professionals, while not a job requirement, individual brand building is a crucial component of career success.
Much like college professors seeking placements in professional publications, perhaps the easiest route for sales pros to establish themselves as industry thought leaders is through blogging.
The writing process instills feelings of fear and dread in many sales professionals, especially those emotionally scarred by traumatic sentence diagram experiences when younger. (OK, maybe that’s just me.)
There’s no question that closing the gap between sales and marketing translates into real numbers on the bottom line. Aberdeen Research concluded that the companies that are best-in-class in merging sales and marketing have been able to post a 20 percent growth in revenue, while those that have fallen behind have seen a 4 percent decline.
Sales reps have traditionally been taught that their only priority is reaching their set quota. However they can get it, for the penalty of failure is high. Marketing, for decades, has been taught to stick to strategy, branding tactics and overseeing the creative direction of the company. The two of them have rarely worked together.
If your organization is struggling to bring these traditionally separate players into alignment, here are five relatively easy adjustments that can be put into practice today to begin making a measurable improvement.
In Version 2.0, Module #7 (Create Action in your Account) of our Social Selling training curriculum, we had been training sales professionals with named accounts to “Social Surround the account”. The reason is simple, you don’t want to get caught being “Single Threaded”, as you see from this slide:
At this point you already know that great content gives you the power to engage people and create meaningful connections with potential prospects. You also know that LinkedIn has launched its own publishing tool to create long-form posts and attract users within your industry.
But how do you ensure that your LinkedIn content resonates with specific buyers? Which topics work better? Is there a specific writing style you should employ? The following tips will help you optimize your content for the world’s largest professional network.
The value of Twitter is implicit to sales and marketing professionals. Everyone knows that it is important in some respect and that they should probably be using it more than they do but are not really sure how or why.
By contrast, the value of LinkedIn is much more explicit. If you asked someone in B2B sales what they thought was valuable about LinkedIn, they would probably tell you that “it is an amazing tool for prospecting, nurturing leads, researching, etc.” The same goes for marketers, recruiters, business owners and so on. All of them would give you different but similar answers about why LinkedIn is a valuable tool for them.
You read that right! Your buyers are prospecting you now. As much as you’re prospecting them, they’re also prospecting you.
Whereas you had access to information before, that’s just no longer the case. And here’s the deadliest part in all of this: your buyer is doing this out in the open. You’re just not aware of it. You’re too busy cold calling, e-mailing and going to happy hours to notice!
Sales for Life was founded with one goal – to become the most trusted sales resource for its customers. During our journey, we’ve had the privilege of serving thousands of sales professionals and leaders around the world, from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations.
