I come from the sales world. I grew up professionally around salespeople. My friends are salespeople. At the core I'm a sales guy and proud of it. So salespeople, listen to me when I tell you this. Most of you are killing your credibility on social media instead of building it. And trust is a key ingredient in becoming a Sales Sherpa™ for your network. Don't Brag About Your Wins on Social One of the biggest mistakes that sales professionals make on social is being all about "me, me, me". If you only talked about yourself (your successes, your opinions, your needs) in the offline world, you wouldn't be very effective in creating … [Read more...]
Hyper-Connected Selling: How to Avoid Sales Obsolescence and Unemployment
updated June 2021 If you are in sales these days, there seems to be more questions than ever: When will we go back to in-person selling? Does cold calling still work? How does personal brand connect with my job as a seller? Where can sales professionals focus their attention to be successful? Can the selling profession remain the same in a post-pandemic world or is sales dying? And on and on. Every day it seems like even more questions are coming, but very few answers are popping up. Luckily, you don't need answers to surf the waves of change successfully. But you do need to wrap your head around the massive shift … [Read more...]
Sales is Dead, Social Selling is Bullshit, and Cold Calling is for Morons
I want to apologize to all the salespeople in the world. I want to apologize on behalf of all the sales trainers, speakers, influencers, writers, gurus, thought-leaders, and assorted muckity-mucks who have been filling your world with articles that have titles like the above. We're doing you a huge disservice, and we should stop it. But we probably won't. It's Easy to Mistake Volume for Quality You see, we're all trying to get your attention so that you'll think we're smart, and wise, and action-oriented. We want you to think that we have the magic pill that you've been missing. That we have the thing that can scratch your … [Read more...]
The New Rule In Sales: Evolve or Die
If you read Peter Theil's Zero to One (which you should, check out my reasons why here), you will come across a short section where he tells budding entrepreneurs how to market, sell, and distribute their new idea. He's trying to tell them why so many entrepreneurial products/services tend to fail: not because of a bad idea but because of inappropriate sales channels. Are You Selling in the Dead Zone? The book is focused on entrepreneurs, but there's one graph that stood out to me because it made all of my sales receptors tingle. While it's unintentional, it clearly lays out how sales has changed in the world of the internet, and why … [Read more...]
Social Selling is Here to Stay: Here are 7 Ways to Make LinkedIn Work for You Today
Updated December 2018 I often think about the sales meeting when a sales manager first suggested using the telephone to sell. I'm sure there were a bunch of reactions to the thought: One person probably yelled out that you have to talk to prospects face-to-face if you want to have success and the phone would never work in sales. A few people in the back of the room probably whispered to each other about how confusing phones were. And still another person probably stopped paying attention because they thought, "Well, none of my customers have telephones." I'm sure that there was a bunch of resistance and confusion. And then … [Read more...]
Why Now is the Time to Crush It! – Gary Vaynerchuk
This article originally ran at the RockStar Success Library a few years ago. Gary's gone on to become a major personality in the social media world. I'm still ambivalent about whether that's because of the validity of his ideas or the volume with which he shares them. Big Thought The ease of access to emerging social media platforms provides a vehicle that allows for individuals to create a personal brand that they can monetize. Ideas, Implications, and Questions Gary skirts the line between being descriptive and prescriptive. As a descriptive book, it’s an interesting story of what allowed him to be successful. When it tries to be … [Read more...]
The Engaged Leader – Charlene Li
At DellWorld 2015 I had a chance to participate in a panel discussion that was moderated by Charlene Li where we dove into the whys and hows of social selling. Afterwards, I got my hands on a signed copy of The Engaged Leader through a book swap with her (I think I got the better end of the deal). I finished it on the plane ride home and it's provided some fantastic illustrations and insights into social media in the C-suite. Big Thought I think Charlene says it as well as I could: "Engaged leadership means not chasing the latest apps and gadgets. Being an engaged leader in the digital era means knowing what your goals are and what tools … [Read more...]