The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

The top three social channels being used most often by B2B marketers won’t surprise you, the ones they find most effective may. According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are still the top choices. YouTube and Google+ are also substantial for usage. Which channels on the top 10 list below are you using? 

You know the value of your investments. What is the value of your personal brand? It’s somewhat difficult to always control your investments due to outside forces, but controlling your brand is in your hands. As a salesperson, the value you garner from your personal brand is priceless. 

“Personal branding is the process of developing a 'mark' that is created around your personal name or your career. You use this 'mark' to express and communicate your skills, personality and values. The end goal is that the personal brand you develop will build your reputation and help you grow your network in a way that interests others. They will seek you out for your knowledge and expertise." — Laura Lake, Marketing Expert

It's Friday, and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. Why Your Sales Team Needs to Sit Next to Marketing — Salesforce

Sales and Marketing serve a shared purpose: to identify, attract, and close business for the company. But far too often, these teams find themselves acting out a typical “Dilbert” comic script of blame and frustration during slow sales cycles. Fortunately, it’s possible to bring these two groups to the same table to work off of the same script and dramatically improve performance across almost every worthwhile metric. Here's how.

There are many roads to reach annual billing of $1 million. It’s a milestone in many industries. Most account lists are some combination of client levels, but let’s look at three possible scenarios to reach $1 million in billing:

• 1,000 clients spending $1,000 each
• 100 clients spending $10,000 each
• 10 clients spending $100,000 each

The reason to stop and think about your client list this way is that it ends up determining how you spend your time each day and, ultimately, your sales career.

I recently attended an event sponsored by Startup Grind Asheville. Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. The speaker at this particular event was Josh Dorfman, from Venture Asheville (an initiative to support high growth business ventures).   

In response to a question, Josh gave the advice to look sideways. He was encouraging entrepreneurs to look sideways as they run hard straight ahead toward their goal (so they don’t miss an opportunity they were not really looking for). This is another way to express something I heard years ago from the consulting firm Innosight. A speaker I heard from Innosight said that the great majority of companies that successfully transitioned their business during an industry disruption did so by pursuing a path they didn’t see when they started to make their pivot. That struck me at the time. What Innosight had learned is that the plan you develop when you start in a new direction is almost certainly the wrong plan, but doing nothing is also a sure path to failure. What an interesting discovery.  

We are very excited to announce that LeadG2, The Center for Sales Strategy's inbound marketing division, has acquired Vitberg, LLC, a HubSpot Gold Partner. Vitberg, LLC specializes in serving the professional services industry, and they're bringing valuable expertise to LeadG2. Here is the official press release.

This acquisition is going to help us serve our current clients better and help expand our services as well. Traditionally, LeadG2 has been known as the expert in lead generation for the media industry, but with the addition of Vitberg, LLC we will be able to focus on a new industry—professional services.

Our knowledge and work on developing the 7 Step Lead Generation process can be modified and applied to professional services marketing, and we are excited to bring this expertise to a new industry.

Here we are at the end of another week (Where did it go??), and it's time for us to share what we've been reading online this week. Here are our "best" from around the web.

1. 7 Powerful Persuasion Techniques to Use In Your Next Sales Email — HubSpot

The sales email is a special breed of writing. You only have a very small window of opportunity to capture your reader’s attention and convince them to move one step closer toward a purchase. Use these writing techniques to ensure your emails have the best chance of success.

Undoubtedly it’s the question mark and should be the salesperson’s best friend. Understanding how to use the question mark can unlock the keys to the kingdom for a robust dialogue.