At a minimum, social media, email, and texting are the new phone. They’re both inbound and outbound marketing tools to contact and communicate with sales prospects. Are they always the best phone to use for all contacts? Certainly not, but they do allow you to call more prospects in a day than you’d likely be …
Getting and maintaining a sales prospect’s attention is often the single hardest yet most important step in any sales process — but especially a virtual selling process. Traditionally, salespeople have simply bought prospects’ attention with free lunches, dinners, or drinks. Or maybe an invite to a ballgame or other event helped them achieve access. But in …
Competitive differentiation is crucial to delivering compelling sales pitches that close quickly and generate higher margins. When sales prospects view you, your organization, and your product or service as something extraordinary—and not just a commodity — you can avoid price concessions as your primary tool to win more business. Suppose you’re lucky enough to have a …
Remember when you could pull out your IPhone, get on Facebook or Instagram, and see what your friends and family have been up to? Those were the days. Unfortunately, it seems those days are officially behind us, with Facebook releasing its plan to launch a redesign very similar to Tik Tok and Instagram already having done …
A few months ago, we published, How To Sell Your Agency’s Services Even When You Hate Selling, where I shared a 5-Step process to enable any advertising, public relations or digital agency owner or business development director to immediately sell more effectively AND actually enjoy it. Over the last few months I have had a ton …
Let’s face it. When you’re a solopreneur, every minute you spend chasing a new client, customer, or sale that doesn’t convert is wasted. You’ll never get that minute back, you can’t use it to chase down another sales prospect that will convert and you can’t sell that time to any existing customers or clients. I’ve spent …
Many moons ago, a friend of mine was watching the Super Bowl and along with millions of other folks around the world saw a Samsung commercial for a ground-breaking new phone. And like we all do (well all of us with smartphones) he immediately Googled the name of this new phone. Alas, he was greeted …
The Problem: Research shows that worldwide B2B buyers are increasingly moving towards DIY buying processes that eliminate the salesperson entirely. In a Gartner Research pre-pandemic survey of 750 B2B customer stakeholders involved in complex “solutions” purchases within their organization, customers reported spending only 17% of their total buying time interacting directly with supplier sales teams. …
Accurate prospective client intel, in the hands of a skilled business development team virtually guarantees a successful outcome. But clients today prefer to remain invisible, talking to Google instead of your agency directly. That’s why successful agencies are leveraging the power of Content Marketing, Marketing Automation/Website Tracking Software and 2nd-Click Content to focus their business …
With virtual selling becoming the norm vs the exception, it’s never been more important to understand how to leverage digital channels like email to nurture at scale. However, a quick Google search for “best sales nurturing email templates” quickly reveals a glaring issue in every nurturing template you’ll find — none of them are truly …
When recently asked, many B2B buyers of complex solutions strongly preferred a purchase experience free of sales rep interactions altogether. The nearly 1,000 Business-to-Business buyers survey revealed that 43% of surveyed respondents preferred a rep-free buying experience. When cut by generation, 29% of Baby Boomers wanted to remove sales reps entirely. A feeling shared by …
The problem with most posts sharing B2B Social Media Marketing best practices is they’re written by agencies and consultants that don’t employ paid sales teams. The B2B social media strategy that works for them likely doesn’t work for most small, mid-sized, or enterprise-level B2B companies. That’s why you see a lot of talk about thought …
Do you long for the old days — where all of your major pitch meetings were held face-to-face vs being forced to present your team’s pitch deck via a Zoom Call? I don’t blame you, since we all know research shows it’s easier to make a good first impression via a face-to-face presentation than a …
They say you only get one chance to make a first impression. And in the world of virtual sales prospecting, the punishment for failing to make a good first impression could just end up eliminating your ability to communicate with the person you’re trying to connect with forever. So, let’s talk about how to make …
All B2B content falls into one of two content classes: there is 1st-Click Content (the kind you’re most familiar with) and 2nd-Click Content, the kind most B2B marketers are not yet producing but should be, to truly arm their Sales Teams for social selling success. But not all 2nd-Click content is created equally and today …
If you’re a solopreneur, freelancer, or independent consultant, every minute of every day that you spend chasing business that doesn’t convert is wasted. Regardless of how you actually bill for your services, at the end of the day, you sell your time. And those minutes you spent chasing business that didn’t convert into a new …
Every day I hear B2B Marketers, B2B Sales Directors, and a host of C-Level folks repeating the same old undisputed law of B2B Social Media Marketing — LinkedIn is THE B2B social media platform. 🤦♂️In some cases, their opinions are based on a simple fact: LinkedIn is the business social media platform, therefore, it’s the …
The Reality: Your advertising, public relations, or digital agency gets most of your new clients via participation in RFPs — you spend your time showing prospective clients that you’re interested versus spending your time becoming interesting. Heck, even the late, great Prince sang about your biz dev troubles and how to fix them. The Problems this …
What’s Happening: the Covid-19 Pandemic has fundamentally changed the world of sales prospecting — likely forever. A McKinsey survey found 70-80% of B2B decision-makers say they prefer remote interactions to in-person. Hence, video calls, emails, chats, and social media conversations are replacing lunches, dinners, drinks, and other forms of in-person entertainment as a salesperson’s primary relationship …
Is there anything worse than a boring PowerPoint presentation? Actually, yes, a poorly designed one. And according to Microsoft, it’s costing companies big.
...What do you think would happen if you gave your customers a seat at the table? What if instead of only caring about selling them something, you cared more about engaging with them in deep, insightful conversations? Maybe this would inspire THEM to tell others to give your product or service a look. Sound crazy? Take a look at what happened to one company who gave it a try.
...Do you hate selling but have no choice but to sell anyway? Are you responsible for finding new prospects for your agency? If you answered yes to both then you’re in luck, because this is the post for you.
...Wait a minute… Is flipping your customer the BiRD the missing link between branding and profit? Sounds crazy right?
But believe it or not, there’s a lot of money and profit in that middle finger.
...B2B Sales leaders need to rethink how they manage their sales organizations in terms of content, data, technology, processes and people to effectively compete in today’s social distanced, hybrid work; self-servicing world. Today and in the future, the best informed bird wins the sale. Why?70% or more of buyers are conducting pre-purchase research online50% or more …
Effective PowerPoint presentation deck design isn’t just about making your slides look great—you need to engage your buyers, hold their attention, and deliver a clear message they’ll remember and that motivates them to take action.Look over the last dozen presentation decks you’ve created or sat through and ask yourself: are your presentations up to the …
AdAge’s recently released 2021 Marketers of the Year Awards are a treasure trove of buzzy marketing trends—some worth emulating, others maybe less so. The list highlights some big brands doing bold things, and several industry fads and trends are evident throughout—Target’s innovative use of “shop-in-shops” to partner with loyalty driven brands like Ulta and Disney …
Every one of us—every person, company, organization and sales team—is surrounded by hidden forces that make it harder to convince others to adopt the new ideas or beliefs necessary to close more sales. So when your sales numbers aren’t meeting expectations, when you’re struggling to gain traction and achieve your sales goals, what do you or …
I’m a voracious reader. Always have been. In fact, I think the best Christmas gift I ever received was a Kindle Unlimited Subscription. I mean books are quite simply the cheapest, highest ROI investment you can make in your future and your career. So with that in mind… here is my Christmas gift to you …
The COVID-19 pandemic changed the public’s outlook on many aspects of life. More specifically, the outlook on remote work and the future of the workplace in general was altered dramatically. Employees alternating between working remotely and working in the office isn’t just a temporary pandemic blip, but according to most research, a cultural shift that …
Owning your own channels and content has never been more important. Last month, Meta (the social media goliath formerly known as Facebook) announced that they would be removing certain ad targeting options for “topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political …
