social media for small business

LinkedIn Offers Powerful Tools for your Sales Team

January 12, 2012 by Barry Deutsch · 1 Comment

Are you training your sales professionals in how to use the advanced features of LinkedIn for marketing, introductions, and relationship building? If not, are you potentially ignoring a tool that could dramatically leverage your time and effort? If you have not gone down this path yet, what’s holding you back?

Here’s a few ideas:

Does everyone in your company have a LinkedIn Account?
Has each person input their entire contact list to check who they know is already on LinkedIn?
Have your sales professionals used their own contact list and that of everyone in the company to identify potential buyers at target companies who already know someone in your company – through which a warm introduction could be obtained?
Do your sales people use the profile manager and tagging to sort, manage, email, and nurture potential contacts?
Do your sales professionals all have impressive profiles fully filled out and an extensive LinkedIn Company Page?
Are your sales professionals using the advanced features of LinkedIn, such as blogging, presentations, video, reading lists, and others to engage with potential clients?
Have you brought in or hired a LinkedIn Sales Trainer to teach and train your team?
Have you sent your sales people to online e-courses/webinars to learn how to adapt LinkedIn to their unique selling approach?

Do you have a precise plan of how to bring your entire sales team up to speed on using LinkedIn to improve sales?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: networking for sales leads, sales growth, sales learning, sales management blogs, sales management mistakes, sales management resources, sales management tips, sales management tools, sales team development, social media for small business, social networking

Do Your Customers or Clients view you as a Trusted Source?

September 1, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · Leave a Comment

I was reminded how important it is for your potential customers to view you as a trusted source of information in re-reading this blog article in my archive from the Reputation-to-Revenue Blog.

Study after study has shown that a large percentage of buying decisions (both for products and services) are being done through web searches. On these web searches, your content, reputation, references, and recommendations all surface.

Are you establishing yourself as one of the top trusted sources of information for your customers/clients?

Are you producing enough content to establish yourself as the “authority” within your niche or marketplace?

Could you honestly say that for the service you provide – you’re one of the most trusted sources of reliable, non-biased, objective information within your industry or niche?

If you’re not in the top 3, you’re leaving money on the table. Social media – places like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other social networking venues – now give you the opportunity to build your own brand, become your own content publisher, and market precisely to your target audience on a very cost-efficient basis.

Are you taking advantage of these new tools and sites to establish yourself as a leading producer of good quality information about the products or services (which you provide) in your niche or market?

Here’s a good case study: My partner, Brad Remillard, and I have systematically developed our reputation as being one of the top voices in hiring and retaining top talent. We generate an abundance of referrals and leads for our executive search practice, speaking engagements, and hiring process improvement consulting business. We’ve put together one of the best collections of FREE content on the web for hiring and retaining top talent. We’re laser focused in distributing that content to our target audience – CEOs of small-to-medium size businesses. We generate a tremendous number of leads and referrals simply by publishing high quality content related to finding, interviewing, assessing, and keeping great talent.

Anyone can do this. There is no barrier to entry other than the time investment required to write and publish your content. Within a very short period of time, you could become one of the most trusted sources of information for your target audience-niche market. Our blogging and social media activity comprise approximately 1 hour per day of time including writing the blog articles, distributing the articles, projects, responding to our audience/connections, and networking on-line.

The future battle for the attention of the buyers of your services or products will be increasingly fought on the field of establishing yourself as a trusted source of information. This approach applies to Chairs, Consultants, Companies, Speakers, and Sales Professionals. How are you establishing your business as the most trusted within your niche?

To read the entire article, click the link below:

Marketing as media: Are you in the top five?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: B2B Marketing, networking for sales leads, social media for small business

Is Fear Holding You Back From Business Blogging?

August 30, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · Leave a Comment

Have you launched a corporate blog yet?

What’s holding you back?

We have a saying in our basketball program based on one of the most popular quotes ever issued by a coach: “You’ll miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

How many shots (opportunities) are you missing because you’re afraid to shoot (start blogging)?

I’m sure by now you’ve listened to, read, and seen numerous “experts” talk about social media. In all that information, I’ll bet every one of the experts has called on you to start a blog.

I read recently on the Compedium Blog an interesting statistic:

According to a recent study by Experian-Hitwise, an Internet measurement data application provider, searchers’ use of eight-word keyword phrases grew 22% in just one year. In addition, 56% of all keyword queries are now three word phrases or more. So what does this mean for corporate bloggers? The longer the phrase, the more specific the searcher intent. Long tail searchers are hand raisers and know exactly what they’re looking for. It’s up to you to show up and solve their problems. How do you do this? By blogging.

There is no doubt among marketing gurus that blogging is the most effective method to drive search engine queries about your products/services, provide differentiation through thought-leadership, and engage with your community of potential buyers, prospects, and raving fans that are interested in your products and services.

So, we’ve now established that beyond a shadow of a doubt, blogging is a great low-cost and effective marketing strategy – especially one that can drive sales leads.

What are you waiting for?

What is holding you back from taking the step of establishing a blog targeted at your customer base of individuals who make decisions on whether to purchase your products and services?

Are you waiting for your competitors to take the lead and then you’ll follow – or would you rather be the leader among your competitors?

Common fear factors in setting up a blog include:

The fear of running out of blogging ideas
The fear of looking/sounding stupid
The fear of wasting time with no immediate results
The fear of employees/blog writers releasing confidential information
The fear of not knowing where to start
The fear of the unknown: “I don’t know what to expect”

Are you letting your fears about blogging consume you? Are you over-analyzing whether it makes sense to start a blog? You could have a blog up and running within a few hours. Yes – you will make initial mistakes, errors, and you’ll have a few regrets. What’s new? Doesn’t this sound like every other idea you’ve tried for the first time?

I sometimes have to remind the girls on my basketball team to shoot the ball. Take a risk. Do something different for once. I ask them what’s the worst thing that could happen? Of course, they tell me they might miss. So do all your teammates, but they don’t let that fear of doing something – like shooting – stop them. Remember the old adage: You’ll miss a 100% of the shots you don’t take.

By not trying to blog and testing the social media waters, are you missing the opportunity to engage more fully your customer base, are you leaving sales leads on the table, and are you providing a window for your competitors to dominate your market?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: blog information · Tagged: B2B Marketing, business blogging, social media for small business

Is Your Social Media Strategy Based on What Individuals in the Company Post On-line?

August 29, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · Leave a Comment

Carolyn Maul, writing a guest post on Kyle Lacy’s Blog, describes a number of key issues to think about in crafting an effective social media strategy.

I’m still very surprised by the number of entrepreneurial, small business, middle-market companies that have not yet crafted a strategy or evaluated the opportunity/potential to add social media to their marketing, sales, and lead generation mix. Here are a few questions I’d like to pose:

Do you think your business is the exception to the rule – that you are unique and social media cannot apply in your situation?
Have you done any type of research or benchmarking to prove/invalidate that social media might help your business?
Is the unknown of ROIs, comparable companies doing it, lack of quantitative research, questionable metrics holding you back?
Are you so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what can be done that it is easier to just be an ostrich?
Do you lack the expertise within your company to accurately judge the potential of using social media – and you don’t trust consultants?

In my executive search practice, social media has allowed us to communicate with our target audience beyond the obnoxious direct email approach that everyone hates. Social media has allowed us to communicate in the way our clients want to receive information – do they want it as an attachment, a slide deck, on Twitter, Facebook, or through a LinkedIn Group we host. Sometimes, presenting the same message in multiple media/formats helps to reinforce your brand, credibility, and expertise/capability. Social Media has provided the opportunity for us to establish our expertise, credibility, and through leadership far above our peer community in executive search by educating, teaching, and training through social media by using podcasting, blogging, and Q&A style forums. We give away all our trade secrets on how to hire more effectively through social media. The result has been the creation of one of the more popular sites on the Internet for information on how to hire top talent. Once CEOs and other executives begin to take information, their next step is to engage with us on their particular issue, and finally asking us to help solve their problems and issues.

Just telling others you make the best product or have the best service is not enough. Today, customers want to engage slowly, learn from you, have a chance to interact, and keep peeling back layers until the feel comfortable giving you money. The old days of simply having the best sales people calling on customers is NOT enough. Today, most studies reinforce that customers/clients are very selective in whom they will buy from. The Internet has given them transparent information about you and your products/services. Are you managing this communication channel with your customers and clients or are you letting your competitors dictate the dialogue?

Forget about marketing, sales, and lead generation for a moment. Are you using social media to recruit better talent, deeply engage with your employees, and strengthen existing customer relationships by using it in customer service?

What have you done so far to start creating a social media strategy for the various elements of your business in which you can see an immediate payoff?

To read the full article, click the link below:

Crafting a Winning Social Media Strategy

Are you missing leaving “money on the table” or missing opportunities by not crafting a strong social media strategy right now and using it for sales, marketing, lead generation, customer retention, and recruiting top talent.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: social media for small business

LinkedIn: You Can No Longer Ignore This Social Media Tool

May 18, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · 1 Comment

When LinkedIn surpassed 100 million members, the official LinkedIn Blog published an interesting set of fun statistics. All joking and funny statistics aside, LinkedIn is an extraordinary powerhouse of a site. If you’re not using it for recruiting top talent, business development, market research, prospecting for sales, lead generation and nurturing, branding, pr, and content delivery to your target market – then you’re leaving a pile of money and opportunity sitting on the table.

Here’s a couple of simple examples to illustrate how poorly most people and companies use LInkedIn:

We created a simple one-page self-assessment for executive job seekers to evaluate their LinkedIn Profile to determine whether it was effective in attracting the attention of recruiters, hr managers, and hiring executives. Over 1000 executive job seekers sent us back their completed profiles – less than 10% met a minimum standard.

In a recent survey of company hiring practices in the Vistage and TEC Community of companies in the $5-$50 million revenue size, less than 5% use LinkedIn as a proactive sourcing tool to find passive candidates.

In our Executive Search Practice for high level sales professionals and sales managers,we discovered through in-depth interviewing that less than 20% leverage LinkedIn effectively for referral networking – yet referral networking has proven to be the most viable method of generating sales for products/services which lend themselves to solution selling vs. transactional selling.

What’s wrong with this picture?

If LinkedIn is such an effective tool and resource, why do so many professionals and companies underutilize it?

Is it a training issue – most professionals and companies don’t know how to leverage LinkedIn? Then the question surfaces of why they are not getting training? Is it a unconsciously incompetent issue – we don’t what we don’t know. Is it that there is a steep learning curve and no one wants to take the time to come up the learning curve because they don’t yet buy into the value from using LinkedIn?

Help me out – I’m curious why you’re not rushing to start using this amazing tool. Even if you just use it for recruiting great talent and prospecting for ideal customers, are you still not convinced it could bring better people to your company, reduce sales costs, and improve lead generation?

Here’s a few fun statistics from LinkedIn about their membership:

1,091 profiles with chocolatier listed as a position

79+ million job transitions/changes tracked

46 profiles with beatboxer listed as a position

428%: Year-over-year membership growth rate in Brazil, one of our fastest-growing countries

Lee, Smith and Kumar have alternated over the last 8 years as the most common last name of newly registered users

951 years: duration of back-to-back 5-minute phone calls made by 100 million professionals

50%: year-over-year growth in our iPhone skill index

4 profiles with dog or cat psychologist / psychiatrist listed as a position

Some industries with the fastest year-over-year new member growth rates: Education (175%), Facilities Services (121%), and Ranching (112%)

100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn

1 profile has martini whisperer listed as a position

To see all the fun statistics, click the link below:

The LinkedIn Blog – 100 Million Gumballs

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: implementing social media, linkedin discussion group, social media for small business, social networking

Can Social Media Help You Improve Relationship Marketing?

May 15, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · Leave a Comment

Patti Stafford writing on the Blogging Tips website talked about how social media can improve relationship marketing. However, she made an important observation that you have to connect personally with your audience. Sending “form” emails and broadcasting where you had lunch on Twitter is NOT relationship marketing. Social Media can provide a great platform to improve relationship marketing and interactions on a large scale if done properly. Social Media provides leverage in marketing to many vs. the traditional “call – meeting – follow-up process” which is more direct sales than marketing and touches very few prospects. Relationship Marketing through Social Media is a blend of traditional direct selling and marketing/branding/pr/awareness building – all layered on top of tools that give you the opportunity for continuous conversations from the comfort of your computer chair. with very little time investment.

Obviously, you’ve got to eventually meet in person your best prospects to close them; however, imagine how much more successful you and your sales team could be by engaging hundreds of perfect prospects every week as compared to just a handful.

Here’s one of the key points Patti made from the blog article:

One key point to remember and the reason for relationship marketing is that people buy from people they like and trust. If you aren’t taking care of people and getting them to like you, they will never buy your product or a product you recommend. It’s that simple. You may get a few initial sales but if you don’t get up close and personal with your audience they won’t spread the word about you, sales and traffic will drop off and your business will die.

To read the full article on relationship marketing, click the link below:

What is Relationship Marketing?

Here’s a few questions to get the conversation started:
Do you have a specific strategy for executing on a plan for relationship marketing with your key prospects?
Where do you stand on leveraging Social Media as part of your relationship marketing plan?
Is your sales team still stuck in sales engagement, prospecting, and networking that is stuck in a 1970s sales model?
What research, tools, and consultants/coaches have you sought out to begin moving down this path of relationship marketing that leads to more effective lead generation and nurturing?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: B2B Marketing, business blogging, social media for small business

Can Social Media Improve Your Sales Lead Generation?

February 21, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · 2 Comments

Umberto Milletti, in his post on the Social Media B2B Blog, describes the value that using social media tools in the sales process can bring to improving or enhancing lead generation activities for your sales team. He describes some of the key benefits as:

If they are not the decision maker, identify decision makers within the prospect’s company
Leverage your social connections to identify a common SENIOR connection between you and the decision makers
Tap into social intelligence to listen to what the decision makers care about or talk about
Learn enough about your prospect’s current business challenges and needs to convince the common senior connection to agree to an introduction
Discover which other executives might be involved in the decision making process

I wrote a comment back to Umberto’s post and below is a summary of my response to how he indicates/perceives that social media can improve the sales lead generation process. I have a few major concerns – especially among entrepreneurial-to-middle market companies:

It seems that many senior executive decision makers are NOT using social media. They are not on Faceback or Twitter. They are not actively using LinkedIn. Forget for a moment senior executive decision makers. Most senior sales professionals are not using social media tools in their own sales efforts. We’re still very much in the early adopter phase for most social media practical B2B uses – outside of very young professionals and those in the tech sector.

Has this been your experience? How much are you using social media in your sales function? Are all your sales professionals trained in the latest techniques of using Umberto’s ideas to improve lead generation?

To read the full article on improving B2B lead generation, please click the link below.

Can Social Media Be Used to Improve Lead Qualification

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Is it time to take our Social Media in Sales Self-Assessment to determine if your sales team is leveraging social media and networking to the fullest potential in your company?

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: networking for sales leads, sales management resources, sales management tips, sales management tools, social media for small business

Do You Have Powerpoint Presentations on Your LinkedIn Profile?

February 19, 2011 by Barry Deutsch · 1 Comment

Jason Alba of “I’m on LinkedIn – Now What” fame wrote a blog post raising the question of whether you should have one choice, two choices, or many choices for the readers of your LinkedIn Profile to view your SlideShare Presentations (Powerpoints).

His recommendation is to guide your readers to one presentation – or direct them down a specific path. He gives examples of well-know internet luminaries using two presentations and forcing their viewers to “choose” one or the other.

Like Jason, up until now I’ve always felt more is better. My slideshare account is “linked” to my LinkedIn profile.

Should you have a separate slideshare account for your LinkedIn Profile in which there are only one or two presentations. You can always have a separate account with all your presentations.

Here’s how Jason summed it up on his blog post:

I think providing fewer choices to the viewer to go to where you want them to go to is better than showing a portfolio. You can easily send them to your slideshare account to see all of them if you want to… but from your LinkedIn Profile, point people to where you really want them to go to without adding too many choices, confusion or noise.

To read the full article on Jason Alba’s Blog regarding How many Slideshare presentations should you display on your LinkedIn Profile, please click the following link:

Optimizing Slideshare on Your LinkedIn Profile

Barry Deutsch

We’re about to launch our two brand new separate courses on Advanced Leveraging of LinkedIn. For Speakers, Consultants, Coaches, and Trusted Advisers the focus is on personal branding, networking, and nurturing your network for leads and opportunities. For CEOs, the focus is on using LinkedIn personally and through-out your company for recruiting, business development, sales, marketing, branding, and customer engagement. If you’re interested in joining our next e-Course class, please send a note to us through the contact form off the top menu.

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: linkedin, social media for small business, social networking

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