The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

As a former Digital Sales Manager turned consultant, I am constantly asked How can I make sure this social media campaign will work? As with any campaign, there’s plenty a marketer needs to do to maximize success. But there’s one thing that’s enormously impactful and often overlooked:

If the headline doesn’t click in their head or their heart, there’s no way their finger will click.

The headline is the first thing a person sees—and too often the last. Social media are as cluttered today as are every other medium. People who are active in social media are often on several different platforms every day, and every one of those feeds is jammed with new information, new content, every time they check in. Do they carefully read it all? Ha. Do you? Of course not. 

"Shepherds ought to smell like sheep."

-Allan Taylor

That’s one of those quotations that slows you down and makes you think. It got me thinking about how important it is for sales managers to be in the field with their people. Sales managers ought to smell more like the funky field than the sterile office. 

It’s tempting to want to continually shut your door, block out distractions, and catch up on email and paperwork (it’s probably time to start calling this screen work, don’t you think?). Yes, there are times where you need to stop down and do some of that. But if you want to be a good leader and stay connected to your people and their work, to encourage best practices, and to spot opportunities for skill improvement, you need to get out there!

Get Out in The Field

A colleague was recently lamenting the proliferation of competition he was now facing. “Customers have so little loyalty anymore. They jump around from one new thing to another, and the result is that they have a much less cohesive operation and lack overall direction.” His business is sales and sales management for a digital and legacy media organization, but his problem is not unique. All kinds of businesses are facing all kinds of new competitors… and it is likely that you, too—whatever your business—are finding loyalty more difficult to come by.

When you find yourself in this “Squirrel!” sales environment, it’s important that your degree of objectivity prevails over your level of frustration. That new company you see as an emerging threat or competitor? Your customer sees it as a new option. When that option is attractive to your customer, the reasons are usually pretty simple. Some of these issues you absolutely can control, some of them you can’t. And sometimes, these sales challenges are found somewhere in the middle of the influence spectrum, meaning you are neither in control… or without it. So why do customers look past you, and beyond your product line?

This was another great week in terms of engaging content. We found a lot that made us think.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. 10 habits to completely eliminate in order to be more productive {Entrepreneur}

With the great religious holidays about redemption—Easter and Passover—both happening this weekend, we thought it would be fun to think about what redemption might be like for an earnest, hard-working sales manager. This is the manager who works his or her butt off to get it right, but life being what it is, still has plenty of near-misses and disappointing outcomes.

When that redemption day finally arrives at the sales manager’s office, it might look like this:

1. Staff turnover is reduced to zero for one full year. No one quit, and no one needed to be sacked.
2. An entire week goes by with no emergency emails after 6pm that “absolutely have to be dealt with right now.”
3. A year of bliss in which the sales team makes budget in every category and on every line the company measures.
   

A couple weeks ago, we were talking internally about the sales process. The topic of proposals came up, and the conversation became spirited.

I asked several colleagues,

What's the one thing you should always include in a winning proposal?

and they came back with amazing answers. These are tried and true solutions from winning sales consultants, so keep this list handy!

1. A Dotted Line

This one might sound obvious,

Too often, we define “new business” as the business a competitor once had until we stole it. Here’s the bad news: They often think of new business the same way. Thus, competitors engage in a constant war of churn, where quite often there really is no “new business” at all; just an exchange or recycling of clients as if sales was nothing more than a tennis match, and the client is the ball.

This was another great week in terms of engaging content. We found a lot that made us think.

Here are the five articles that piqued our interest:

1. Why arguing at work is okay, and the right way to to it {Inc.}

Don’t just inform. Organize. 

When was the last time you arrived at a sales appointment, and the decision maker said, “Glad you’re here! I know our appointment was scheduled for only 15 minutes, but as it turns out, I have an extra hour and a half today!” 

Doesn’t happen.

More likely is the meeting where you encounter this rushed greeting: “I know our appointment was for an hour, but something has come up so I only have about ten minutes.”

Happens all the time.

That’s why I want you to think of the daunting task of the Google mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Of course, Google has more than one singular focus, and serves more than just a user who wants to do a quick search to find a quick answer or fascinating fact. They serve consumers who are shopping, companies who are being shopped, and marketers who are into metrics. I get all that. But focus on that beautiful, simple idea: 

“To organize the world’s information… and make it useful.” 

Part of my job has me visiting different websites every day. I am always impressed with those organizations that have an active company blog and use it regularly to influence, educate, and build their brand and their thought leadership position. But so often I notice there are no comments left on any of the blog posts I read, or if there is a comment it’s usually just one—and then there is almost never a response from the writer to engage the person who took the trouble to comment.

Why would a blogger go through the entire writing, editing, designing, linking process to publish something they thought would provide value and then ignore the people who took time to visit the site, click through to the blog, read a post, and comment? I hope you’re not that someone.