The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

This week was busy! We launched a new self-directed online course called Brand & Connect, which is a really powerful way to learn how to establish your profile online. People are searching for you as soon as they know your name -- you can guide them on what they find.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• On Monday, Brittany Ransonet asked us if our personal brand was keeping us from getting that first appointment. Then she offered to help whip our brands into shape. Thank goodness for that!

• On Tuesday, Steve Marx told us about the difference between product danglers and process danglers, and made a clear distinction as to which kind of dangler we should be.

Here at The Center for Sales Strategy we work remotely, which means our professional lives are contained on the internet. I was excited to find that my colleague (and crosstown neighbor!) Greg Giersch was working on launching a new self-directed online course we’ve just published called Brand & Connect, so I asked him to meet with me.

This new course is one of Greg’s important recent projects, so I came to lunch loaded with questions about Brand & Connect.

1. What was the impetus behind Brand & Connect? Why did you start it in the first place?

The short answer is that today potential clients are researching salespeople online before they ever agree to meet with them. Salespeople are being judged and graded before they ever meet a prospect.

The longer answer is that I've been building this product for years. In 2006 when Twitter first came out, I was an early adopter. Everyone in the office thought, "what is a sales manager doing on Twitter?" They thought I was just "playing online," but I was fascinated by how much you could learn from the early thought leaders and use social media to connect with other professionals around the world.

2. What will Brand & Connect teach us?

The first half of the course is about building your personal brand—figuring out who you are and what you have to offer. What benefit do you bring to your clients? The second half teaches you how to connect with people, especially prospects. There's an old saying that a good salesperson can sell anything to anyone, but that's not really true. A good salesperson provides the right solution to the right customer.

3. Doesn’t everyone already know his or her skill set?

Surprisingly, often they don't, so we help them consider their brand from three perspectives:

1. What people who don't know them think.
2. What people who do know them think about them.
3. What they think about themselves.

This week was a great one for us. I especially liked Matt's post about how to determine the ROI of your inbound marketing program. It can be hard to measure, especially if you can't easily connect your inbound efforts to your sales pipeline. The rest of the week had valuable information as well, both on our site, and around the web.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Matt Sunshine told us what to watch for when he wrote 7 Ways to Know if Your Company Blog is Giving You A Return on Your Investment

• Christi Cool discussed the world record holder in Girl Scout Cookie sales, and reminded us that age isn't necessarily a factor in The 8 Talents Every Salesperson Needs to Succeed

Happy Cinco de Mayo! We had another evenful week. How do you measure the success of your week? Do you look at your scratched-out to-do list and see how much you've accomplished? Do you reflect on your week? Do you plan next week on Friday afternoons?

Can you believe it's May already? At this rate, the year will be over before we know it. We're excited for the summer preview weather we've been having, but if you're in a part of the world where summer preview means tornado season, we hope you're staying safe.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Matt Sunshine wrote about The Center for Sales Strategy's recent conversion to HubSpot Platinum status and discussed how and when we got involved in inbound marketing in the first place.

• Steve Marx argues that brevity is only a virtue in some circumstances. He wrote this piece of advice 20 years ago, and noted that nothing has changed except the delivery channels.

Today, we're happy to have our taxes done. Do you wait until the last minute or do you file as soon as you get your return?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Mike Anderson wrote about Vendor Relationship Management, and said, "Just because you’re already the selected vendor and serving the customer, it doesn’t mean the customer is no longer interested in VRM—in managing their relationship with you."

• Dana Bojcic wrote about listening for talent when interviewing salespeople, and said, "If you don’t know the answer, ask more questions. Ask a lot of questions… and then really listen."

Today, we're happy to have our taxes done. Do you wait until the last minute or do you file as soon as you get your return?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

In Best Practices when Networking on LinkedIn, Brian Hasenbauer writes, "Don’t send LinkedIn requests to people you don’t know or don’t have a solid reason for knowing them."

Today, we're enjoying April showers, and working on many behind-the scenes projects. This week, we tried something different, and published a timeley piece on Sunday. What did you think? We'll be adding a weekend post here and there, especially if there's something newsworthy that just can't wait.

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

In Never Send an Email When You’re Angry: Otherwise, This Might Happen to You, Brian Hasenbauer described how there really is such a thing as bad press, and how an angry email sent in the heat of the moment caused a PR disaster for one professional.

In How to Increase Engagement on Your Company Blog, I wrote about how to look beyond comments to see which posts are really resonating with your target personas and write more content that appeals to them.

Last month, we discussed how to measure engagement on your company blog. Now, we'll talk about how to increase engagement. Take note of where you started, and implement the following strategies to get your content read by more people. Remember, though, more important than getting more shares/likes/retweets is your ability to attract and convert the right kind of people (your target personas). So take the following advice and increase the impact of your content!

Today, we're still laughing about all the pranks that we fell for this week (even though we told ourselves we wouldn't believe anything we were told, we fell for all the same silly lines just the same). We also can hardly believe that we're past the first quarter of 2014! Time flies when you're having fun, right?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Matt Sunshine got a terrible email, which prompted him to write How Not to Send a Follow-Up Email, and in it he noted, "Never forget that your potential customer owes you nothing."

• Mike Anderson, when he told us about the five things our sales collateral should include to ensure it doesn't get tossed wrote, "At the very least, your sales collateral should not send a message that’s in conflict with the tone and texture of the conversation you have begun."