To Sell Greatly, a salesperson has to be relationship first. And the most important skill in building strong, enduring relationships is the ability to be a good listener. Ironically, most of us are terrible listeners. It’s like we completely understand the importance of listening well, but we just can’t bring ourselves to actually do it …
How does the Millennial style of communication hold up in the world of sales, which depends so much on interpersonal relationships and the soft skills that make sales happen? More on that here.
...Every year the Content Marketing Institute publishes a seminal report on the state of the Content Marketing Industry. This year, we thought we’d share it but through the lens of sales prospecting and using content to Sell Greatly. Content Marketing Still Focused on The Top of The Funnel. Few content marketers report they use it …
Today’s post is inspired by the KSHMR, Nevve song Do Bad Well. It got me to thinking about how salespeople approach sales training today. So often, instead of trying to learn how to do good, the training just reinforces how to do bad well. Stick with me here… it will all come together. Doing Bad …
Let’s face it. Every second you spend sales prospecting that doesn’t result in a sale or the creation of a long-term Social Agent relationship is basically wasted time. So today, let’s talk about the four things you can do immediately to improve your sales prospecting success rate. Never Talk To a Stranger As a salesperson, …
What Are The Advantages of Face-to-Face Meetings? While everyone loves the ability of technology to scale our sales efforts, save time and my personal favorite, call on sales prospects all around the globe while sleeping in my own bed each night, the simple truth is, nothing closes a deal like a great face-to-face meeting with …
Prince wasn’t just a great singer, he was also a great sales prospecting philosopher. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at two of his songs and how he contrasts the painful traditional ad agency business development process vs a painless prospecting process preferred by agencies like Converse Digital. Traditional RFP Based Business Development Are you familiar …
Getting and maintaining a consumers’ or sales prospects’ attention. It’s the single hardest and most important step in any sales process. So how, in a digitally centric, content overload world do you actually do it? Getting A Sales Prospect’s Attention People will take interesting calls. – David Droga Getting A Consumer’s Attention Attention spans are …
For people that wish they could Sell Greatly, here is a a simple process for quickly creating empathy-based connections with sales prospects that creates conversations that turn into customers.
...Three things that you should NEVER do in sales prospecting and three sales prospecting gems you should live daily.
...If you hate sales prospecting… making cold calls… sending cold emails… and interrupting folks in their social media inboxes… then you should read this post.
...Our 14-day Social Selling course. Each day you’ll receive a single email with one simple idea, hack, thought or insight that will transform your sales prospecting from painful to painless.
...In a world of marketing automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and mass personalization, human beings are craving connection. But you can’t mass produce connection.
But the good news is… it doesn’t have to for you to succeed in sales. Read On….
...PODCAST: Sales Prospecting Technique for people that hate sales prospecting with Tom Martin and John Jantsch.
...What if you woke up in a world without ANY sales prospects? What would you do? How would you proceed? A real life success story of a man that survived that in this post.
...When salespeople face a constant series of objections from multiple sales prospects, they can become frustrated and lost.
This post offers five simple steps to overcome that feeling and get back on track for sales success.
...Entrepreneurial success hinges on your ability to form connections – not in the opportunity networking sense but in the real human common ground and purpose sense. Here’s more on that subject today.
...WARNING: If you are of the mindset that all prospects are leads, you’ll probably disagree with what I’m about to say.  I’m a huge fan of online product demos and webinars because they let me easily self-educate about a product or service I’m considering. And as a business, you should love these tools as …
Today I had the honor of presenting at ContentTech. To a packed room of senior level marketers and a few sales people, we talked about the gulf between Marketing and Sales. Specifically, what causes it and how to fix it. For most marketing teams today, their role in the sales prospecting process is all about …
What do you do when you’re in the car, or on the treadmill? Maybe you make phone calls or listen to the radio. These days, a lot of people are finding new audio entertainment in the form of podcasts. In fact, podcasting has exploded. The latest stats report over 600,000 podcasts are available and over …
Over the last 10 years, content marketing has emerged as a powerful driver for effective social selling and inbound sales lead generation programs. And while largely heralded as a way to drive inbound leads there is another, even more powerful reason that ad and PR agencies should develop a consistent content marketing program. Let’s talk about …
Recently I participated in an interesting discussion on the #Digital360Chat Twitter Chat hosted by Bernie Fussenegger around the idea of sales & marketing automation, specifically about automating the connection process on social media. It’s hard to really go deep on a subtopic in a Twitter Chat, so today I thought we could explore this key …
Whenever you read about Social Selling, everyone spends a lot of time talking about creating content. It makes sense, because content is at the core of a successful social selling program. But you shouldn’t be paying your salespeople to create content. Instead, teach them how to properly curate content (maybe even give them the proper …
Have you ever received a LinkedIn Cold or Warm Message like the one above? You know, where someone makes a sales ask via LinkedIn’s Messaging system either as a first or second touch? Arggg. I hate those. Folks just don’t realize that you only get one chance to make a LinkedIn impression. But beyond that, …
So what do you do for a living? We’ve all heard it. The question. The simplest question that every one of us should be able to quickly, easily and succinctly answer. But how many times have you been asked and then recited back some long-winded, mumbo jumbo answer that really didn’t answer the question asked? …
Companies today live and die by the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) metric of their choosing. They become slaves to the data based sales & marketing approach. And there is nothing wrong with that until there is, especially with consumer engagement KPI’s. Because what at first, seems to be a positive, could actually hide a huge …
I read Gary’s missive this week and to be fair, I love the tactic he suggests but hate everything else about his recommendation because if you blindly follow it, you’ll fail. Let me explain. Conversations Become Customers I couldn’t agree more with Gary’s recommendation to create proximity with your sales prospects using events as a tool …
Everyone loves digital advertising for its tracking capability vs traditional advertising. It’s easier to prove digital marketing ROI vs traditional advertising because digital makes the invisible buyer visible. But is this focus on clicks causing you to miss conversions? Let’s talk about that today. You Can’t Sell To Invisible Buyers In our zeal to prove …
Are you asking yourself, WTH is he talking about with that headline? Well today’s post is all about making a point that in my not so humble opinion needs making – success today is more about conversations than content. This post is an effort to provide a bit of context so that you can evaluate …
A few weeks ago Tom had a chance to sit down with Luke over at Toucan Advertising to talk about how ad agencies, pr agencies and frankly anyone in the consulting world, can turn conversations into customers. The podcast, Briefly, is about 30 minutes long and they covered a number of topics including: How …