Categories
Blog Demand Generation Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

2013 and Beyond – Macro and Micro Marketing Combined

Macro and Micro Marketing

For the last few years, sales and marketing have invested heavily into marketing automation tools that help attract, nurture and influence prospects. This method of business development has now entered the “growth phase” for many industries – as companies are flocking to marketing automation systems. While marketing automation is vitally important for mass communication, most marketing campaigns can lack focus through USER ERROR.

Focus is exactly what more and more buyers require to capture their attention. Buyers are less interested in a generic marketing email that speaks to “decision-makers in general”. They want to hear about how to solve their unique problems when they are ready to start solving them!

Categories
Blog Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Saturday Nights Alright for Writing

Content Writing

Ok, who’s kidding who – I don’t write on a Saturday night, but I do write the majority of my content on Saturday mornings. This is the window of my week from 7:00 a.m. – 8:00am , when my mind is relaxed to think about our business, the sales industry, and what’s important to sales leaders.

This didn’t come naturally to me as a sales leader. I spend the first 10 years of my sales career on a phone, leaving voicemails or sending 3-sentence emails. I could have been comfortable with just doing that for the next 25 years. Except… the world has changed, and so have buyers.

Categories
Blog LinkedIn Social Selling

LinkedIn Signal – Your Source For Gathering Trigger Events

In this video learn how to use LinkedIn to help you identify prospect trigger events that will help you connect with your target audience when they are ready to talk to you.

Categories
Blog LinkedIn Social Selling

Sales War – Email Marketing is a Shotgun, LinkedIn is the Sniper Rifle

emails

One of the biggest challenges as a sales rep is having your message heard. When you fire your “sales gun” in the woods, does anyone hear it? Unfortunately for us sales leaders – the answer is increasingly no! Why is this?

Simple! Here’s a snapshot of how many emails I got on a Friday in the middle of the summer. 81 EMAILS! And I’m a sales guy, not the decision-maker of a Fortune 2000 company. The average decision-maker at a Fortune 2000 company receives over 200 emails a day! That’s an average of an email every 2-3 minutes. How can that decision-maker keep up?

Categories
Blog LinkedIn Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Timetrade Interviews Sales for Life – Social Selling

Social Selling Linkedin Webinar

You may remember our earlier blog, “Hot Sales 2.0 Tool Timetrade” by Jamie Shanks, that describes a hot new sales tool called Timetrade. Since that blog article, Jamie has had the opportunity to share our latest social selling tips with Timetrade’s audience. Check out the full interview (screen shots & audio) with with Mike Puglia from Timetrade.

Browse here for the ultimate guide to social selling that might help you to proceed with social selling.

Categories
Blog Demand Generation LinkedIn Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Are 20% of Your Emails Turning Into Next steps? LinkedIn Does!

email

Open your Outlook and count all the emails you sent to new prospects this week.Let me guess, you didn’t receive 1 of 5 emails returned back to you with next steps.

Why is that? Because email is the black hole! If your sales team still thinks emailing new prospects is going to stand-out – good luck. Your reps and 7 of your competitors thought emailing your prospect today was also a good idea.

Categories
Blog LinkedIn Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Hot New Sales 2.0 Tools – TimeTrade

We at Sales for Life enjoy coming across new Sales 2.0 Tools, and have recently fallen in love with TimeTrade.This tool absolutely SHORTENS the sales cycle. Clients and prospects can see your availability in real-time to drive a next step.

Categories
Blog Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

3 Takeaways From 2012 Sales 2.0 Conference – Boston

The Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston was fantastic. If you were unable to attend, here are the 3 items that are most prevalent right now.

Categories
Blog LinkedIn Sales 2.0 Sales Advice Social Selling

Adapt Before 2013 or Die a Slow Financial Embarrassment

Social Selling

2000 – 2007 “Smile & Dial”

I feel privileged to have joined the sales community at (what I believe) is the trifecta of sales styles. I started working during the tech bust of 2000 (leaving briefly for graduate school) and came back in 2004. This period of time in software sales was the height of “smiling & dialing”. I remember cold calling off printed lists of names/numbers with a telephone connected to a telephone line! There was no research, there were no “sales intelligence” – it was all General Benefit Statements & Feature, Advantage and Benefits.

Categories
Blog Sales 2.0 Social Selling

Forget Do’s and Don’ts of Social Selling – It’s All Fair Game!

Social Selling

Social Media “experts” love to retweet blog articles about the “5 must do’s” or the “No-No’s of social connecting” in hopes to create etiquette, order and rules. These articles add no value to Social Selling – this new evolution of sales is like the days of 1849 San Francisco (the Wild West gold rush). Creating rules and order in 1849 San Fran was the sheriff’s job, and we all saw enough westerns to realize that was an impossible and deadly task. Social Selling is too new, too powerful, too lucrative to be bound by others opinions of proper etiquette Do’s/Don’ts.