The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

It seems the push for individuals to have a personal brand is becoming the new black. It’s the cool thing to do. The message is that everyone, including salespeople, need a brand just like a big company or a pop star. Who’s got time for that? Sure, becoming the expert, the blogger, the “thought leader” in your industry sounds like a great idea. But it also sounds like an insurmountable goal. So why bother?

Does everyone need to become a thought leader?

First, don’t let me discourage you. Many of you, let’s say 2 in 10, are already running down the Personal Brand path, and it won’t be long before you are a thought leader in your field. If you are not one of those swimming in social media enthusiasm, what can you do to compete?  

First, focus just on your LinkedIn profile. Here’s why:

What a great week! There are some great gems from our writers here, and wonderful news from around the web. Read on!

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Monday, Jim Hopes asked when we'd be replaced by a computer. Sobering thought.

• Tuesday, Mike Anderson told us about the realities of prepping for a needs analysis conversation today.

"Who are you, and why should I care?" 

That simple question is at the crux of the challenge salespeople face when prospecting. The advice used to be to perfect your elevator pitch. Today we don’t meet prospects on elevators; we meet them online. And specifically, the great business-oriented platform for meeting people is LinkedIn. So what you need to perfect now is your online personal branding. That's your LinkedIn presence.

Truly professional salespeople have long known that it is foolish to squander valuable needs analysis time asking questions that could have been answered by scouring the target account’s website and other conveniently available sources. Years in business, origin of the company, number of locations—and other very fundamental information—can be easily found on most client websites. Spending any meeting time on these issues—aside from kindly acknowledging the organization’s heritage—is not only a waste of time, it can be taken as an insult by the prospect. It signals that you did not find this meeting worth diligent preparation.

If you read any of the advertising trades these days you are seeing strong evidence that programmatic buying is making significant strides in the media sector. Programmatic buying allows advertisers to have direct access to the publisher’s (and now the broadcaster’s) inventory, and transactions are completed in nanoseconds with very little human interaction. In the online display advertising sector, programmatic is already accounting for nearly half of all transactions and predictions are being made that over 83% of display advertising will be bought and sold programmatically by the year 2017. Advertisers and publishers are building out trading desks to accommodate this huge flow of business.

So far, those selling traditional media have felt some degree of insulation from this wave, but that is changing as well. Last week Media Post ran an article about the rise of “programmatic TV” and this week Inside Radio featured an article on how Strata has put together a platform and an agreement that allows advertisers direct access to inventory on a number of media platforms including radio. The future is now, folks.

What a great week! There are some great gems from our writers here, and wonderful news from around the web. Read on!

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up

• Monday, Steve Marx wrote about ways to get people to open your emails, and provided the best subject line of all time.

• Tuesday, Greg Giersch gave us a list of questions we should ask to build our personal brand, and make our LinkedIn profiles look better than they do.

It seems somehow intuitively appealing for a manager to spend more time with those salespeople who need more help. People are almost invariably amazed when we explain to them that the opposite is true. To really see ROI on your sales team, you must spend more time with your top performers.

Let’s face it: Colleges and universities are not accustomed to hiring salespeople. They hire educators, administrators, technicians of various sorts, and clerical staff of nearly every type. But they don’t hire great salespeople or what they call “Business Developers.”  And yet, increasingly these institutions find themselves hiring people who are setting appointments,  providing need assessments, solving problems and delivering customized solutions that are addressing the business challenges of rapidly changing technology, employee performance and customer satisfaction.

Hiring salespeople is different. Of course, they need the qualities you look for in every hire—integrity, intelligence, focus, energy, and readiness to execute. But business-to-business salespeople also need at least these four additional traits as well.

1. Empathy

Successful salespeople identify with their customers and pick up on their feelings. They understand their needs and pressures they’re under; they get how business works and can wrap their heads around the challenges faced by each prospect. Yes, they represent the college and its specific B2B offerings, and yes they want to drive revenue for the institution. But the best ones—the ones you want—are geniuses at balancing the interests of the college and the interests of the customer as they assemble a tailored solution.

Frustrated that your email open rates are so low? Or are you happy that your open rates are above average, but you want to boost them further?