What do you know about Pinterest? Enough to decide whether your business needs to get involved? Here's a great source for detailed answers.
Today's guest post features Karen Leland, the bestselling author of 8 business books including the recently released Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest For Business, http://bit.ly/Amazonbook. Karen is the president of Sterling Marketing Group, and writes the Modern Marketing Blog at www.karenleland.com. Thanks, Karen!
Before you jump headlong into Pinterest it’s worth taking a step back to decide if a good match exists between you and the site’s users. Depending on which marketing expert you ask, defining your target market is best achieved by looking at either demographics or PsychoDemographics—customer lifestyles, attitudes, and behaviors—or both. Continue reading →
A version of this post was originally published at BlogWorld
Many large companies have rigid policies prohibiting employees from any business-related social media activity. If that’s your practice, I recommend you reconsider.
The Whale Hunters help B2B companies accelerate their growth by selling bigger deals to bigger customers. Most of our clients have a complex sale, such as a software solution, a technology, a marketing plan, a training program, a manufactured part of a larger item, for a few examples. When they are selling into a large company, they find many people involved in the decision of what to buy and from whom or whether to buy or do it themselves in house.
One or two people will make the final decision but many more will influence that decision. Whoever ultimately decides will only choose a solution or a service provider that is not acceptable to most internal influencers. The price of change is too high; the price of internal conflict is too painful.
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Posted in Business Development Strategy, business development tactics, Sales Management, Small Business Advice, Small Business Growth, Women in Business
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Tagged business development, business development tactics, LinkedIn, sales, sales tips, selling, social media
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I highly recommend Jill Konrath and Ardeth Albee's new eBook: Cracking the LinkedIn Sales Code.
When The Whale Hunters work with our clients, we always encourage the leadership team and subject matter experts to create and/or improve their LinkedIn profile and activities. Few are coming even close to capturing the value in the network.
That's where this book comes in. Based on a survey of 3094 sellers, the authors identify the
ways Top Sellers use LinkedIn to generate business. Finally some real, reliable data about this practice!
This short but idea-packed how-to book shows you what it takes to make LinkedIn a “strategic prospecting tool” for your business. Your company size, industry, location, product or services etc. have little to do with your success. Rather, you can learn to generate business with LinkedIn by following the eight action steps that these authors learned from their valuable research.
This is not hard or complicated. It only requires that you put some steps in place and get a little time regularly on your calendar.
The eBook is free–get yours today and make it available to your team!
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I did an EDGY Perspectives teleconference on this topic, which is essentially an overview of some of the key principles of Whale Hunting. There's also a discussion of how the RFP process fits into your overall whale hunting process.
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get=”_blank”>Here's a link to the audio recording.
And my thanks to Dan Waldschmidt for featuring me! I am excited to be a partner with Waldschmidt Partners International as well as heading up The Whale Hunters.
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I've recently completed writing a one-page strategic plan for The Whale Hunters. The program, designed and written by strategist Laura Posey,takes only about an hour to finish and leaves you with a single page to track your company's progress for an entire year. I don't know about you, but I've seen strategic planning processes that take months and cost thousands of dollars. Believe me, they are not bet
ter than this one.
When it's all on one page, you can look at it every day. Laura recommends having weekly metrics. That way, if you miss your target one week, you have 51 more weeks to hit it. If you only check once a month, you close your windows of opportunity much faster.
Laura and I just presented a webinar about this program, which I invite you to watch. You'll find it at The Simple Strategic Plan.
Laura Posey is Chief Instigator of Dancing Elephants Achievement Group
.
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I had a very happy phone call today–the kind that pleases me more than all others.
One of my clients called to report that on the previous night, the school board of his customer (a 50,000 student school district) had unanimously approved a five-year, $6.3 million contract for educational software that my client's company sells.
This sale is the third or fourth biggest single sale the company has ever made and by far the biggest sale that the salesperson whom I coach (we'll call him John) has ever made. And he will tell you “it was a whale hunt!”
Schools have no money, right? Schools are hard to sell to, right? Schools are bureaucracies, right? Right on all counts; nevertheless, schools do buy all sorts of things, all of the time.
So here's how we made this deal happen.
- Planning. John learned everything we could about the district and all the people who would be involved in decision-making–principals, curriculum coordinators, IT people, central office people and others. They were not looking for software and had no immediate plan to buy an educational software package. However, a few individual schools had purchased pieces of it and were showing good results. John decided that we should write a formal business plan–a case for support–and his company commissioned me to write it. We had it beautifully prepared and formatted. That was in April 2
012. Continue reading →
#10 is the most important in my list of Ten Ways to Lose . . . Even When You're the Best. Here goes: You underestimate the buyers’ fears.
Often you and the whole team are totally focused on the great advantages that you provide with your products and services. You consistently make a rational case for the sale of your products, unaware that 99% of buying decisions are made on irrational, emotional bases, led primarily by fear of making a bad decision.
Unless you develop powerful ways to address the fears, you will continually lose your bids and come in second on your proposals. And second is the worst place to finish–you stayed in too long and you paid too much but you still lost.
This isn't a new topic for me. See, for example, cheap propecia online
's All About Fear” href=”http://wp.me/p13kTk-BT” target=”_blank”>It's All About Fear and Holly Buchanan's guest post Wonder Woman and the B2B Sale. Nevertheless, many sellers have trouble coming at the sale from the perspective of what makes the buyers afraid.
You think the buyers are looking for the best solution–the most creative option or the solution that will get them where they want to go faster, better, or cheaper than the others. But in reality, they will go for a solution that will probably work and seems to be a safe choice. ”Safe” as in, “I won't get fired if it doesn't work” or “I'm not going to be alone on this” or “I'm not putting my career on the line.”
To overcome this problem, you will need a collection of what we call “fear busters,” tangible tools to allay the buyers' fears of change, work, internal conflict, and most important–making a mistake.
Assume that you scare them and introduce fear-busters throughout the sales process. Once they are no longer afraid, the buyers can appreciate the added value that your solution represents.
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