I was looking at my blogs over the last few months hoping for some inspiration for this week’s post and realized that I’ve been at this for just about a year. At least once a week I’ve “attempted” to come up with some original and compelling content to discuss, and I’m not gonna lie there certainly have been some weeks that I’ve struggled.
My first thought when I was tasked with writing my blog last year was- Isn’t this something that the Marketing team should be handling? I mean what value can a sales guy or sales ops guy add to the process? My second thought was, is it possible for me to come up with a unique topic to discuss after a few months of doing this? But as my VP of Marketing pointed out at the time - “You’d be surprised at the variety of topics you can come up with the experience you have gained helping to run this business for the past 5 years”
Well, I can honestly say that as much of a challenge as this has been on occasion, I cannot deny how valuable the process has been for me. What I’ve discovered is that blogging should not just be reserved for your marketing team. Our president, directors, sales team, sales ops, training team on down to our business development reps have all been included in the process.
What I’ve recognized, along with my fellow bloggers here at AG, is there is so much we can discuss when it comes to teleprospecting and cold calling. Hell, we talk about it in theory all day long with our management team and employees so why not use this as a collaboration tool for our organization along with all of the other sales teams out there trying to accomplish the same thing. Not only that but if you truly take the time to sit down to think of a topic, you can come up with unique content or at the very least take another spin on a topic you’ve already covered. By having to put these ideas on paper, this process has forced me to methodically think about what I do on a daily basis.
As I was looking back at all of the AG blogs over the past year, there were a few concepts discussed that are not always being put into action as regularly as I would like. This process, I’ve discovered, has also been a great way to self police myself and others I work with. Again, it’s great to talk about all of this in theory but if you are not putting it to practice then what’s the point? Practice what you preach baby!
Another fortunate benefit of this entire process is all of the great content I've been exposed to from other folks who understand what it takes to effectively cold call and to motivate inside sales teams. It has also provided me food for thought on the variety of ways I can manage my group. Here are a few blogs I would highly recommend reading - Paul Castain's Sales Playbook and Smashmouth B2B Blog: Sales & Marketing Demand Gen
If you, or your team are not active contributors to the blogosphere, consider giving it a try. At the very least it can get you thinking about best practices as it relates to your business and can expose you to other great content out there that could inspire you to become a better manager/employee/colleague/ Dance instructor…you name it.
I'll be honest, writing a blog wasn't my idea. I have pretty simple philosophy that governs my day once I step into the office. "Do the things that lead to closed business, anything else is a waste of time." So when my Marketing VP approached me and asked me to write a blog once a week, I sarcastically told him I would try to squeeze it in after my samurai practice but before my mime lessons. He then told me that in addition to a blog he wanted me to follow AG's foray into social media and establish a presence on LinkedIn, start Tweeting, and use Facebook for work (rather my usual purpose of using it to see people I graduated with and determine who has aged better).
Fewer than one-half (45%) of B2B companies have only the basics of a social media presence-such as a Twitter and Facebook account, or a company blog-and only 32% are engaged in social media on a day-to-day basis, according to a survey from White Horse.
- MarketingProfs
"B2B Less Engaged in Social Media Than B2C"
Published June 2, 2010
I can honestly say I thought the idea was a waste of time, sharing the same opinion as many of my sales peers in thinking that all I need to do to close a deal is to get in front of a good prospect. From there my product knowledge, cheery demeanor and quick wit would win me the deal. Regardless of what I thought at the time, I followed the plan my VP had put in front of me to become involved in the marketing and sales community, answering questions, commenting on blogs, and Tweeting. I did my best to take the sales edge off of my comments and stopped trying to sell someone on every post. My goal was to share my knowledge and experience.
About 4 months into it, I noticed a couple of changes. I would go to my normal networking events and people would know who I am and actually approach me with questions. This deviated from my normal technique of stalking someone like a cheetah and pouncing when I thought they were at their most vulnerable. My emails were opened and replied to more often. People began calling me back after I left them a voicemail. All of this was nice, but like any sales person, if it doesn't result in closed business, it is not a good use of my time. My performance is evaluated by how much business I close. My CEO doesn't high-five me for the awesome response I put on a message board and he certainly doesn't pay me based on the insight of my blog posts (I'd be broke). So I took a look at my win/loss ratio on proposals sent out. It was going up. It went up more and more every month. I didn't change anything else throughout that time. The number of discovery calls I had was about the same, the number of proposals I sent out was the same, the message was the same, but I closed more business.
To find out why my close ratio went up, I looked at all my notes from my deals that closed. I found that about half of them had heard of me or AG Salesworks first hand or from a friend, colleague, etc... If you look at the 2008 notes, less than 30% of the people that received proposals from me had heard of AG Salesworks before someone from my team had reached out to them directly. Again, I didn't go to more events and my company didn't make any major changes in its marketing strategy that would rapidly increase our market awareness, well except for one - we initiated a strong social media campaign about a year ago.
It is tough to make a direct correlation from the AG social media push to closed business, but it appears the writing is on the wall. While, I have yet to receive a call from someone saying that they read my LinkedIn comment and would like to sign up for our services. The people I talk to, now know about AG. They are also becoming familiar with me and it is resulting in much better discovery calls with my prospects. Good discovery calls lead to next step meetings and next step meetings lead to proposals and proposals, well you get the point.
I think one of the reasons there is push back on social media campaigns comes down to effectively tracking and gauging their results. Many companies still have trouble determining the ROI from traditional marketing campaigns that have been used for decades, so the receptiveness to run a program that is potentially vaguer in its deliverable is low. That being said, just because you do not have the tools to quantify it, does it mean it cannot be quantified, nor does it mean it's not effective. Companies can't continue to do the same thing and expect different results. More and more of your prospects are leveraging social media. Take the time to work with your marketing team to figure out how you can effectively leverage social media. I am confident that once you experience the benefits I have, you too will be Tweeting, LinkingIn, Facebooking and even blogging!