This is a guest post by Chad Levitt, author of the New Sales Economy blog that explores using social media, sales 2.0 and inbound marketing as a B2B sales strategy for the Web 2.0 world.
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Here are three realities in the B2B Sales profession:
- It is harder to reach your customers and prospects by phone and email
- Your customers and prospects are less willing to meet in person
- Your customers and prospects are busier and more distracted than ever
The hard truth is that customers are getting better at ignoring our sales efforts, they are less willing to meet, and they are more distracted than ever.
Despite these three realities, quotas are not going down, and you are paid to meet and exceed your number.
How do you do it?
There has been a shift in power from B2B sales reps to buyers. To take advantage of this shift, inbound marketing was born and is revolutionizing the way companies market in a Web 2.0 world. For those new to inbound marketing, it is a discipline that uses search engines, SEO, blogs, and social media to help customers find you.
Many of inbound marketing's strategies can be adapted to the Sales Reps role. The combination of outbound with inbound marketing strategies will help you create hyper levels of awareness with customers and prospects. You will get in the door more often so you can create the relationships that allow you to sell.
Get found by your customers and prospects.
The building block of getting found through adapting inbound marketing to your business is to create your own personal sales rep website. You should secure your name as the domain - http://www.yourname.com/. Keep in mind your website can just be a blog because many blogs functions as full-blown websites.
What should you include on your personal Sales Rep website?
- Post video clips of great customer references. Yes, you should ask to video your customers
- Post video clips of yourself detailing at a high level your most compelling solutions - use visuals, whiteboards, etc.
- Create a video clip that you will feature on the homepage that explains in under one minute why you and why your company. Make it sizzle.
- Write blog posts about satisfied customers, trends in the industry, common customer challenges, etc.
- Enable your site for both email and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) so your customers and prospects can be alerted automatically when you post new content.
- Post Slideshare presentations that your customers and prospects will find valuable.
- Have an About Me Page and Contact Me Page. Share your interests and get real.
- Use calls to action on your pages and content to have your customers opt into newsletters and future communications from you.
- Try free or paid analytics software so you can see who is visiting your website, from what company, and what pages they visited.
- Add a share this plugin that makes it easy to email and share your website though the popular social networks
Start sharing your personal sales rep website with your customers.
Send a personalized email to your customers and prospects letting them know about your personal sales rep website and why you created it (you created it because you know how busy they are). Put your website on your business card and spread the word as you speak to your customers and prospects. If your content is good, your customers will begin to respond and share with their colleagues. Your message will grow legs and get viral in your accounts.
The ultimate differentiator is you. Be a purple cow - a pink dinosaur - or a spotted zebra. Just be something different. Something that will get attention. You will be glad you did.
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(Trish here) Thanks Chad. Your viewpoint is interesting as always. To learn more about Chad's philosophies and how some of us old dogs can potentially learn new tricks, stay tuned for an upcoming webinar where we'll take a deeper dive on this very topic. Hope to see you there!
| Whose brand is it anyway? Managing social media sales strategies in 2010. Tuesday, March 16th - Register here Three sales strategists (and three generations) weigh in on the rules and ramifications of selling through social media. Join what's certain to be a lively discussion between Trish Bertuzzi, President of The Bridge Group, Chad Levitt, author of the New Sales Economy blog, and Brett Wallace, VP of sales at ZoomInfo. |