The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Last month, we discussed how to measure engagement on your company blog. Now, we'll talk about how to increase engagement. Take note of where you started, and implement the following strategies to get your content read by more people. Remember, though, more important than getting more shares/likes/retweets is your ability to attract and convert the right kind of people (your target personas). So take the following advice and increase the impact of your content!

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?

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.

We're bringing back a popular feature -- our weekly wrap-up along with the best posts we've read around from around the web this week. Today is pi day (get it, 3.14?) and we're celebrating by eating pi(e) -- how will you celebrate?

This Week at The Center for Sales Strategy

Below are some key pieces of wisdom found within this week's blog posts:

• From The Remediation Myth: Why You Can't fix Weaknesses:
  "We can get ten times better in an area of natural talent, but only ten percent better when we try to improve in area not supported by natural talent."

What I Have Learned as a CEO About Engaging Prospects

I have spent nearly all of my adult life as a top-producing salesperson, sales manager, or consultant. For years, I have taught many organizations how to find and engage prospects, and they do very well. But there is one undeniable truth that changes outcomes more than any other when it comes to new business development: having prospects who already know a thing or two about your company.

A prospect who already knows something about your company and how you do business, a prospect who already has genuine interest in buying from you, is much more profitable than the one where you work to create a need for your product. Many of us have seen the now-classic movie, Glengarry Glen Ross where the good leads were allegedly locked in the safe and created much angst among the pressured salespeople.