Sales Prospecting Perspectives

As you may already know, AG Salesworks is an active user on Twitter. We share insights and posts from many sales and marketing thought leaders and tweet sales prospecting best practices every day. Today, we’re excited to be hosting our very own Twitter chat, #ProspectingChat, at 1:30 PM EST / 10:30 AM PST!

As social sellers, it is imperative that we constantly share valuable information and insights with our networks. This is essentially what separates us from the rest of the sales community. However, clearly there is not enough time in the day for us to be constantly creating brand new content from scratch, nor is it necessarily beneficial to do so.

A healthy content marketing mix involves a significant portion of 3^rd party content sharing in addition to original thought-leadership pieces. By sharing content from other sources, you are not only showing your network that you respect the opinions of others in your industry, you are also showing them that you’re well informed on topics that are important to them. For these reasons, it is important that you master some basic content curation skills to ensure you always have an ample amount of information to share with your community of prospective buyers.

Businesses consciously take great measures to create and sustain a positive online identity.  They want to be found, and once they are, they want to exude a good, lasting impression.  In the B2B world, the human behavior that precedes the act of evaluating and buying has changed drastically with the rise of social media and the availability of endless online intelligence. 

Over the past year, social selling has become one of the hottest topics. When combined with outbound prospecting, social selling can be a powerful selling method.  However, don't be fooled by the phrase "social selling." It is not a vehicle to get your sales pitch out into the world; that would completely shut you down.  It's a method of selling through listening and thought leadership.  We are in an era where prospects choose most of their buying path, as they have so much information (on products and services) readily available to them without having to consult sales professionals.  Understand that social networks are not to be used as sales megaphones, but rather a means of listening and offering consultative advice to help others. Here are a few pointers when it comes to social selling.

AG Salesworks is pleased to bring you a guest post from Anum Hussain, Inbound Marketing Manager for HubSpot. 

When I see a post on Facebook with an incredibly long, UTM riddled link ... I cringe. It only takes an extra minute to turn that into a shortened bit.ly link!

I get it. Updating and maintaining your business’ various social media accounts is a time suck. The fact that you’re even using Facebook is a blessing. But if you just invested a mere extra two minutes per update to optimize that post for success, over time you’ll see your Facebook metrics improve.

Editor's Note: This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. It was written by AG Salesworks' Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Richard April. 

The successful execution of a marketing strategy will require some specific set of skills to produce the content, a process to manage and monitor the appropriate social communities, and a strong set of tools to keep all the moving parts together.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Jamie Shanks, Social Selling Expert at Sales for Life.

We are about to close out an incredible year.  Whether my understanding of Social Selling’s capabilities has hit Dali Lama levels, or the buyer has changed that much… Social is now a force!

As a sales professional, you can’t deny the changes.  Whether or not you’ve embraced Social for sales, the world interacted at a staggering pace online in 2013.  What I want to share with you are tips, tidbits and insights I’ve learned from training thousands of sales reps around the world this year.

A company with a reputation for dependability, consistency and quality services or products will win consumers' business. Your company and the people within it should be seen as the leading experts in your industry, whether that be sales, marketing or, in AG Salesworks case, both. The faces of your company (for example, co-founders Pete Gracey or Paul Alves for AG), need to become thought leaders, challenging the status quo and writing books. However, claiming to be a thought leader doesn't make you one; others need to recognize you as the leading guru in your industry. Becoming a thought leader is harder than you think.  

There is an overwhelming amount of new marketing content online every day, whether it be delivered on a blog, social media, an infographic, in a newsletter, etc.  As a marketer today, you need to stay on top of the new trends and findings, and be in the know about new marketing tactics and softwares, and figure out how best to digest and deliver new content. Maybe you're also responsible for creating new content for your company, implementing new marketing strategies, monitoring 10 social feeds or more, replying to, commenting on and pushing out new updates, and then remembering to follow up on all of your efforts. Hey, what about that participant list from the last webinar? Clearly, marketers have many responsibilities and they are usually going 100 different directions at once.  I haven’t scientifically tested this but, I hypothesize that their heads would spin if they did not organize their efforts, and I know it's always easier said than done.  

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Christine Rochelle, Integrated Marketing Manager at lotus823.

Each and every work week at lotus823 is kicked off by a roundtable staff meeting and of course plenty of Diet Coke to go around.

Once our co-founder David Hernandez is able to bring the buzz of the room down, he walks us through each of our current business development opportunities for the agency.

Instead of jumping to discussing brand strategy or services, David always gears the conversation into a discussion about our personal relationship with the potential client contacts and what they would like to accomplish for their team and for the brand.