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?

If you’re a salesperson, you probably understand the importance of having an online presence and building a valuable personal brand. Even if you aren’t doing a very good job of managing it, you still understand how important it is, right?

A big part of that brand includes your social media presence. Sure, Facebook is great for sharing cat videos with your old college buddies, but I’m talking about the professional side of social networks—for example, using Twitter to showcase your expertise and knowledge in a particular area and using LinkedIn to “meet” prospects long before you actually meet them in person. If you’re not yet using LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google+ effectively to interact and engage with prospects, customers, and other industry thought leaders, don’t worry… this post is written just for you.

Here are five easy ways salespeople can start using blogging and social media to increase your sales performance and grow your personal brand.

1. Share content from your personal or company blog. 

Do you or your company have a blog? This is the best source of content you could possibly have to share with your network and stand out against the competition. Share old and new blog posts, share links to landing pages to download ebooks, and invite others to subscribe. 

Take it one step further by including a personal takeaway. Don’t just share the link – add a line about why you think this article is important or useful or a quote from it that you found memorable. 

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.

“Keep it short,” they say, “because folks don’t have time to read anymore.” That’s good advice. The shorter, the better. When is brevity a virtue? When you have nothing to say.

Truth is, most of the advice we get telling us to keep it brief is based on the assumption that what we’re writing—be it a blog post, an email, a letter, a proposal, a report—is of little interest to the reader, anyway.

Therein lies the real issue: It’s not so much the length of what we write as it is the content and the layout.

Let’s get more specific, more real, about this notion that people don’t have time to read:

• They don’t have time to read things that are not interesting to them. When the subject is of interest, they’ll devour a 400-page book.

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."

We’ve all heard of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and most sales organizations are using CRM software of one kind or another. One intent of CRM is to make sure no clients or prospects “fall through the cracks.” It’s a neat piece of software that helps the sales team make sure they are calling on prospects with sufficient frequency, suggesting upsell opportunities, and learning the buying cycle of existing clients. Sometimes the CRM system can even automate the process of corresponding with the customer. 

And now, many of those customers are automating their vendor relationships.

Have you experienced “Vendor Relationship Management?” If you’ve been stung by any of the following practices, you’ve run into VRM: 

• The human gatekeeper who is paid, in part, to protect their executive from most “typical salespeople.”
• The habit of sorting quickly through traditional mail or email, swiftly discarding anything that is from an unfamiliar sender.

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."