The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

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."

Today is April Fool's day, which means you should not believe anything anyone tells you today. Get your guard up! We don't have any fake news for you today, but we do have stories of our best pranks from around the office.

Dani Buckley, Inbound Marketing Consultant:

One year, I spent the afternoon convincing my friend that I was having an affair with a colleague. I even convinced her to give me a ride to the motel before telling her it was all a joke.

Today, we're thinking about our brackets, and wondering why college basketball is so hard to predict. How's your tournament going?

The Center for Sales Strategy Weekly Wrap-Up:

Below are some takeaways found within this week's blog posts:

Sales Hunters, Sales Farmers, and… Sales Trappers?:

"Trappers do it differently; they entice the prey—er, prospects—to come to them. They set out the honeypot that brings the bears, the cheese that attracts the mice, the information and advice that pulls prospects in and prompts them to make the first move toward doing business.  In the epic battle between the Sales Hunters and the Sales Farmers, it just may be the Sales Trappers who win."

The writing process of a multi-author company blog follows a specific pattern (at least it does here at The Center for Sales Strategy). The author submits their blog post, it goes through an extensive editing process (which includes finding the right title, keywords, calls-to-action, image(s), and relevant links within the post), then it gets scheduled in the content calendar, and finally it gets published.

After a post gets published, it's time to track engagement. In fact, it’s a good idea to measure engagement on a monthly or quarterly basis. That way, you can continue discussing the topics that got a high level of engagement and stop talking about the things that people aren’t interested in reading (or perhaps you can repurpose the content to be more targeted to your target persona and their interests).

In some niches, blog commenting is the way to measure engagement. For example, a recipe with 4,341 comments always looks impressive. Business blogs do not get the comment volume that recipe blogs do, and that’s okay. With a business blog, we have different goals, and we know there's no direct correlation between blog comments and customers. So we measure engagement in a different way.

Below are four questions to answer to determine if your readers are engaged:

1. Are people sharing your posts?

The following is a post by our colleague Don Oylear. From time to time, we'll highlight great advice from our peers. Find out more about Don at the end of this piece, and contact us if you'd like to post something!

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You’ve hired top talent, and you’ve trained them up on best sales practices. They know your products inside and out. You’ve role-played until you can no longer stump them, but something is missing. What is that?

The answer is Field Coaching: Watching salespeople in action in front of real clients who hit back and fire live ammunition is the critical step in developing your salespeople. Your salespeople may not be the LeBron James or Tiger Woods of their field, but if they have the basic talent to succeed in the job, then with a little coaching, they could become great.

In the last few months, I have been involved in helping several clients refine job descriptions. Someone besides the sales managers usually created the rough drafts that have been sent to me. Sometimes they come from inside the organization and sometimes from outside, but in 100% of the cases I have found myself thinking that what I was reading was not very useful. Sales managers are in a better position to write these than anyone else, but they don’t want to do it.

For decades now, those of us in the B2B sales world have talked about two kinds of salespeople—Hunters and Farmers.  Some sales organizations are even formally divided into groups of Hunters and groups of Farmers, with different expectations set for each.  Here’s a summary of these two archetypes:

Sales Hunters

Hunters set out into the territory (literally or figuratively) looking for prey—er, prospects. They’re famous for their hyper-focus and the better ones are renowned for their skill with a variety of weapons (they call them approaches).  Nobody chases business and bags it better than a Hunter.  They’re motivated first and foremost by the thrill of the hunt; when the hunt is over, so is the thrill… until the next prospect comes into view.  Just as a pure hunter might not care if he ever eats his prey, the most extreme Sales Hunters are often not so effective at serving and maintaining that client long-term.

Today, we're celebrating the official beginning of Spring! We hope wherever you are, you see flowers blooming instead of a snow pack.

This Week at The Center for Sales Strategy

The old saying used to be, “You get out of it what you put into it.”  In the era of inbound marketing, you could almost reverse that phrase:  The quality of content you push out will directly correlate to the quality of leads you bring in through your company’s blog.

Much focus is placed on the quantity of material you publish through a corporate blog, and publishing consistently in is important. But quantity will never serve as a substitute for quality, and volume will never be a fair trade for substance.

It’s an interesting fact in business that the people at the top don’t always know best. In fact, most of the time, the person who has the skills and experience to offer a solution to a particular customer is the salesperson.

A few years ago, I was negotiating a very large sale that involved complex discussions and choices to be finalized in order to send out a proposal. The standard sales cycle at our company closed in about three months, on average, and I was working with a decision maker to finalize the proposal.