Category: Sales

It’s 2014 and social media has become a bona fide and legitimate communications medium in society.

Everything from sharing updates about family to organizing massive country-wide revolutions is happening on social media platforms. Some governments around the world have banned social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter (the latest news comes from Turkey where country leaders have banned Twitter outright).

But we’re not in a foreign country – we’re in the hotbed of open markets and free economies. Right?

LinkedIn’s “Who Viewed Your Profile?” feature can be a very effective and useful sales tool. But should you be connecting with all of your LinkedIn profile viewers?

Sales professionals commonly ask the question, “Should I connect with people that are viewing my profile, even though they are not my ideal buyer?”

It’s a great question. But the answer is simple: ABSOLUTELY.

Here’ are 4 great reasons you need to make these people 1^st degree connections today:

Who doesn’t like lists? Staying organized is a huge part of our day (at least I hope it is for most of us). For social sellers, Twitter Lists are a must.

We’re all up to our eyeballs in work and sometimes the only way to feel productive is to run your day with a well thought out and efficient list.

Your time on Twitter shouldn’t be any different, especially if you’re new to the 140 character beast. Whether you’re just starting out with Twitter or wondering if you should jump in, there are a ton of great reasons to start with Twitter Lists. Check out a few here.

There are a mountain of blog posts and articles that cite the advantages of the second to market strategy. But is it really advantageous to hold off on changes that won’t hurt you?

Here’s one that makes you want to crawl back in your cave and hibernate until someone else takes a leap first. I’m not sure who came up with this saying, but it’s one that I’ve heard before that stops people dead in their tracks:

“Pioneers get slaughtered. Settlers prosper.”

Continue reading “The Idiocy of the Second to Market Strategy”

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.

Social media has created a new dynamic in the relationship between salespeople and customers. For organizations still living in the 90’s, embracing this dynamic is the next great sales challenge.

There are many analogies, explanations, laws, theories, concepts and interpretations of karma.

Maybe I’m too simplistic, but I like to think of it as the law of causality (like Wikipedia describes).

In military terms, we’d call it blowback: suffering an unintended consequence due to your actions (or lack of). I don’t think that many corporate leaders today are naïve enough to think that they’re just buying time, imagining they won’t get left behind as the world of business evolves.