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Blog Sales Sales Advice Social Selling

Content Roundup: Top 10 Social Selling Blog Posts for Beginners

Sales and marketing professionals suffer from information overload more than other industry teams.

Whether internal or external, from playing catch-up with current projects to meeting the challenge of learning new programs, time – and ironically, information – is your worst enemy.

There is seemingly never enough room in your schedule to complete necessary and meaningful career and revenue building initiatives.

And yet, there is always an abundance of information to digest.

The question I receive most often – in tweets, InMails, emails, phone, conversation – is, “How do I get started with Social Selling? Where do I begin?”

If only there were a CliffsNotes version of what’s important.

There is now.

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Blog Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Attention Sales Pros & Marketers: New Year’s Resolutions For Social Selling Success

The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to look back, look ahead and reflect on lessons learned during the past year. It’s also a good time to make some resolutions about doing things differently. Here are some encouraging numbers about New Year’s Resolutions from Forbes:

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Blog Sales Sales Advice Social Selling

Eleven Social Selling Lessons from 7 Inspiring SlideShares

Social Selling Lesson

SlideShare has emerged as the “quiet giant” of marketing. The combination of short nuggets of wisdom alongside motivational images draws 60 million visitors every month. For example, Fast Company blogger David Brier turned his insights on branding into 70,000 views in less than two weeks. That’s a lot of potential customers.

SlideShare matters most with the prospects who matter most, as well. A report from comScore found that business executives are five times more likely to go to SlideShare over any other social network. It’s where they go for inspiration, information and resolutions.

There’s one more great reason to go to SlideShare.net. They make a perfect channel for repurposing content like tweets, webinars, blogs, videos, infographics and just random thoughts. Reaching a wider distribution without having to generate new content is a more productive way to identify new prospects. Consider learning how to excel at selling from Social Selling experts along the way as just an added bonus.

Anyone who doesn’t already carve out some of his or her weekly sales time for education via SlideShare should correct that error immediately. In the meantime, here are some of the most powerful ideas for better Social Selling directly from a few of the biggest names in the game.

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Blog Sales Advice sales training Social Selling Social Selling Training

You Better Watch Out: Have You Made Santa’s Social Selling List?

When the calendar turns towards December, the thoughts of sales and marketing professionals turn to… more business.

The new year, and a new start, is just around the corner, but before you can wrap 2014 in a big, red holiday bow, there are current deals that must be signed, accounts in negotiation that must be closed – all of this with the increased pressure of a compressed work schedule.

And while some sales and marketing pros may feel the stress, others may be indifferent, and still others will rise to the occasion as the top performers they’ve been throughout the year.

One thing remains certain: your end-of-year behavior will likely determine whether you find cool toys or a lump of coal in your stocking during this holiday season.

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Blog Sales Advice sales training Social Selling

LinkedIn’s Forgotten Rule: If You Want to Connect, Just Connect

Before the advent of social media, conversation was easy.

And by easy, I mean unencumbered.

I’m certain that accomplished sales and marketing professionals will disagree with that statement – and with good reason – the evidence is on their side.

The sales/marketing pros who have fully embraced the concept of Social Selling have leveraged social media for unprecedented access to key decision makers.

A platform like LinkedIn, the epicenter of the Social Selling universe, has made conversing and connecting with buyers and prospects a relatively pain-free process.

Or has it?

One of the most common functions executed on LinkedIn is the act of making a connection. With more than 332 million LinkedIn users, that’s a significant task.

But something noteworthy is somehow lost among the approximately 1 million or more of these daily connection requests: common sense.

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Blog Social Selling Social Selling Toolkit Social Selling Tools

Top Business Intelligence Tools For Sales Pros

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. This week’s post is dedicated to tools you can use to gather business intelligence and tracking information about your buyers and competitors.

So often having insights into the business that we interact with on a daily basis as well as their engagement with our emails can make the difference between closing a deal or not. The following tools have been designed to help you do just that.

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.

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Blog Infographics LinkedIn Social Selling

How Does An Ideal LinkedIn Profile Look Like? [Infographic]

Having a strong LinkedIn profile is the corner stone of any Social Seller’s activity. Our LinkedIn profile illustrates who we are, what we do and, most importantly, how we can help buyers.

Your LinkedIn should NOT be a replica of your resume. Your resume is your career history. It’s dull, boring and often task-based. Your profile should rather reflect your future, what you’re focused on and how you can professionally serve others.

Our friends at Hubspot have compiled a very insightful infographic on how to structure the perfect LinkedIn profile. Is your profile optimized for success? Will it attract your target audience? What should you change? See below!

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Blog Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Social Selling Success: The Importance Of Visibility

We’ve known this for years. That’s why our sales managers hammer ask us to stay in front of prospects by constantly calling them. They know something that we all do: without staying top of mind with buyers, our chances of a sale diminish rapidly.

What are you doing to increase your chances of visibility so buyers become more aware of you?

Check out this video to see what I mean.

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Blog Sales Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Sales Enablement Social Selling Training

The Three Way Lovefest: Ensuring Revenue With Training

Listen, I’m going to give you a really important piece of advice. DON’T DO TRAINING. Honestly, you’re not ready!

That’s what we’re forced to tell companies that just aren’t prepared to improve their sales performance.

Why do companies do training?

To either improve the speed-to-revenue or probability to increase revenue. Unfortunately, too many sales organizations are not prepared for the following reasons:

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