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How Content Curation Makes You a Smarter Social Seller with Stephen Walsh

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In this episode, my guest is Stephen Walsh, CEO of AndersPink.  We focused our discussion on the art of content curation. You probably already know that part of your social selling strategy includes using content to connect and engage with new buyers. Contrary to what many “experts” tell you though, you don’t have to create your own content. If you are able to do that at some point great but when you are first starting out, it just isn’t that easy. Your job is to sell, right? Plus, not everyone has the time, inclination or talent to write blog posts. There are other ways to create content like recording audio tips, hosting webinars, etc. but that takes time too. That’s why I like this topic. You can learn to curate content like a boss in ways that help you to engage with buyers and positions you as a thought leader in your field.

Stephen and I discussed:

What content curation is and what it has to do with social selling.

Why sharing other people’s content is a good idea. Learn how it helps you.

Learn tips for finding great content fast without losing your day to the internet.

How you can be more targeted in how/when you share content with more than just the folks in your network.

How you should think about social selling and content curation as a team sport. You don’t necessarily have to do it all on your own.

Finally, we talked about the FANTASTIC new ebook that Stephen and his team put out on this topic. More than theory, this is a “boots on the ground” field guide you will reference again and again. I’ve already read it twice! You’ll find specific strategies that you can put into practical application right now to improve your results when curating and sharing content.

Enjoy the interview!

About Stephen:

Stephen Walsh is the CEO and CoFounder of AndersPink. Stephen is passionate about helping sales teams stay smart, share better content, grow their business and keep learning every day. He’s has worked in learning, sales, and marketing for over 20 years. He co-founded Kineo, an elearning company, ran sales and marketing and grew it to a $20m business before selling it. He’s a co-founder of BuzzSumo, a leading content discovery tool and of Anders Pink, a new tool to help social sellers with content curation. He’s written 2 books on learning and selling and is a regular blogger and speaker.

Connect info:  twitter: @stephentwalsh  LinkedIn  m: stephen@anderspink.com  w: website

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Death by Meetings

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Wasted time in unproductive sales meetings is an all too familiar story. Meetings, especially for B2B salespeople, are part of doing business. By many estimates, however, salespeople waste some 25%-50% of their time engaged in meetings that go nowhere.

When meetings are done right, sellers significantly improve their ability to advance the sale. Unfortunately, trouble begins almost from the moment the words, “Let’s have a meeting to discuss it”, are uttered.

Five Ways that Salespeople Waste Time in Meetings

#1: Meeting with the wrong people.

Early in my sales career, I was told to “get into the account wherever you can.”

Back then we didn’t have the technology we do today. Talking to a number of people in order to get to the right decision maker was a necessary evil.

Today, if you aren’t using the Internet, social networks, business intelligence or relationship management systems to quickly find the right buyers to engage, you might as well find yourself a new career.

#2: Squishy agendas or none at all.

My rule #1 is that a successful meeting begins with a clear purpose. If the question, “What is the purpose and agenda of this meeting?” cannot be answered – don’t hold a meeting.

Salespeople are notorious for flying by the seat of their pants. They often don’t think through the purpose of the meeting from the prospects point of view. Their agenda is to get in and sell.

#3: Poor meeting facilitation skills.

Successful meetings rely on a careful balance of asking the right questions, listening and keeping conversations on track. Instead, a high percentage of salespeople roll right into their pitch – talking far more than listening – and then later wonder why a sale didn’t materialize.

#4: No clear plan of action to advance the opportunity.

Planning what you want to happen during the meeting – and after the meeting ends – is crucial to successful selling.

Time and again, I’ve seen sellers walk out of a meeting without securing the commitment for a specific next action, like locking in the next phone call. Everyone has their calendar in hand, on their phone. Don’t leave a meeting without a scheduled commitment to move forward. If you leave without a defined next action, you might spend weeks trying to rebuild any momentum you had.

#5: Failure to do their homework.

This is probably my all-time pet peeve. Back in the day, I went to the library to do my homework. The data available was largely out of date, but it was all we had to go on.

These days there are many ways to gather information about a prospect and their company before a meeting takes place. The best sales meetings are the ones in which the salesperson makes it all about the buyer. They do that by clearly demonstrating that they’ve learned about the buyer’s business, have some idea of what’s important to them and then discuss potential solutions to help solve their business problem.

Meeting success relies on…

Meetings need clear objectives, the right people in the room and a clear plan for what comes next. Otherwise, like a hamster on a wheel, sellers will find themselves running from meeting to meeting with no sales deals to show for it.

Transform Sales Through Social Selling with Kurt Shaver

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Kurt is the Chief Sales Officer at Vengreso, and he has been an early evangelist of the use of LinkedIn and social selling strategies in the sales process. We started off talking about how Kurt defines social selling, which depending on who you talk too has different meanings.

During the interview, you’ll learn why salespeople need to be incorporating social selling approaches into their current sales process, and what happens if they don’t. Surprising there are still a lot of naysayers and fence sitters who haven’t begun integrating social networks into their selling strategy.

Kurt shared his perspective on how an organization successfully implements a social selling strategy. He also shared tips for the individual sales contributor.

Content is widely promoted as a key part of any social selling effort. But it is fiercely debated about whether salespeople should create their own content. Kurt shared with me where he stood in the debate.

Lately, the “this or that strategy is dead” crowd has been rising up to suggest that social selling dead and that it doesn’t work. I asked Kurt what he thought about this… do these people have a point or is it simply click bait to get people reading their posts?

Kurt recently teamed up with other businesses to form a new company – Vengreso – to provide an array of services related to digital sales transformation. He told me what was behind his decision and what is Vengreso bringing to the world of social selling?

Finally, Vengreso has a new social selling boot camp starting on Sept 19. Kurt told me what people can expect to learn when they participate in the program.

Peeps, I want you to know that I’m an affiliate partner of Vengreso because I often have individual sales contributors or small business owners looking for social selling help. Since I mostly work with larger teams, I wanted to be sure I had a great place to refer folks too that I’m unable to support. So, go to my blog or company website and you will find program details there. Use my link to get yourself registered for the program.

Thanks and enjoy the interview!

Kurt Shaver is a co-founder and Chief Sales Officer of Vengreso. Kurt is an expert at getting sales teams to adopt new sales tools and techniques. Through a successful career in technology sales, Kurt learned what it takes to reach B2B decision makers. In 2011, Kurt recognized that LinkedIn would be the next great sales technology and that it would require expert training. He pivoted his business and now has over 10,000 hours of experience training corporate sales teams like CenturyLink, Ericsson, and TelePacific Communications. Kurt is the creator of the Social Selling Boot Camp and he frequently speaks at corporate sales meetings and conferences like Dreamforce, Sales 2.0, and LinkedIn’s Sales Connect.

Connect on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Building a Career as a Lifelong Learner with Gavriella Schuster

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In this segment of the Women in Sales Leadership series, I talked with Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President in the One Commercial Partner team at Microsoft where she is responsible for global partner channel management and programs, with a focus on driving digital transformation for partners and customers.

I talked to Gavriella about what it means to build a career as a life long learner, and why you should too.

I asked Gavriella about her different roles with Microsoft, from sales to operations and now as Microsoft’s channel chief. Here’s what she told me is the most important thing for everyone to keep in mind as they build their own careers. It is all about ongoing learning to keep growing your skills and opportunities.

Gavriella shared with me the constants she has noticed throughout changes in her career.

You will love Gavriella’s story about how she took the stage at Microsoft Inspire with tens of thousands of people, both in the arena and watching online, for a keynote address. She shared her major learning from that opportunity.

You’ll also learn what Gavriella feels she has learned in the past year or so. Things like leading teams through ambiguity, start with won’t change, how to create clarity or yourself on how you, personally, can help achieve that outcome, why you should not work in a vacuum and more.

Finally, Gavriella shared her advice for women just getting started on this journey as a lifelong learner.

Enjoy the interview!

About Gavriella:

Gavriella Schuster is a Corporate Vice President in the One Commercial Partner team, Gavriella Schuster is responsible for global partner channel management and programs, with a focus on driving digital transformation for partners and customers. Gavriella’s team is responsible for the high-touch experiences of Managed Service Providers, Hosters, Resellers, Distributors and National/Local SIs. She is also responsible for connecting, enabling, investing in, and rewarding partners through high-touch and low-touch programmatic experiences. She has extensive experience in sales, marketing, product management, and partner development with a strong track record of managing customers, partners, and teams. Over the last 20 years at Microsoft,  she has managed sales and marketing teams across the Server and Cloud business, the Windows Client Commercial business, Enterprise Services, licensing sales and marketing, field business development, training initiative development, segment marketing, worldwide partner marketing and training strategies and worldwide operations.

Connect with Gavriella on LinkedIn and Twitter

 

 

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How Social Branding Intersects with Social Selling with Jasmine Sandler

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In this episode, I talked with Jasmine Sandler about The Importance of Social Branding and its intersection with Social Selling in Delivering Results. I asked Jasmine to start by giving me the deets on how she got to where she is in her career today.

We also discussed:

Jasmine’s perspective on the intersection between Social Branding and Social Selling, and what she means by that.

You’ll hear tips on how to build a successful social brand presence.

You learn why Social Branding is for everyone, and your social brand is useful for anyone from Entrepreneur to Executive.

Discover how the Social Branding of the Individual Executive supports a company’s brand strength.

Jasmine provides tips for executives branding themselves online.

Finally, Jasmine talks us through a client case study, so you can understand the process she uses to help people build their brand.

Enjoy the interview!

About Jasmine:

Jasmine Sandler is a Google awarded Author, Senior-level Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Online Branding for global organizations and C-level executives. She is the Founder and CEO of Agent-cy Online Marketing, a NYC-based Social Media and Search Agency serving global brands including: CitiBank,  Private Jet Card Comparisons, Fly Home Jets,  Tuescher Chocolates, Diamonds International, Almod Diamonds and The Shade Store.  She writes on SEO and Social Media Strategies for Fast Company, LinkedIn, Entrepreneur.com, SearchEngineJournal.com and ClickZ.com. She has a dual MBA in Marketing and CIS and is a former IBM Marketing executive. Her passions are Speaking, Singing and Hockey.

Connect on LinkedIn and Twitter  

 

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Treat Your Operations Like a Product with Ellen Kindley

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Today, in this segment of the Women in Sales Leadership podcast, I’m talking with Ellen Kindley is a dynamic revenue operations leader at QASymphony specializing in sales process, data management & analytics, strategy, and sales tech.

Ellen believes that sales operations leaders should think about internal operational improvements as if you are building a product with features. Your salespeople are essentially your customers, and everything done in revenue operations is geared to support them in success. Operations should act as a product owner – creating a road map where key stakeholders can collaborate on which projects (product features) to prioritize and why.

We discussed:

How revenue operations are different from traditional sales operations.

The overarching goals of a revenue operations team.

How to best organize the business initiatives you need to prioritize.

How to stay in tune with what’s happening on the sales floor and bring that back into your operational roadmap.

Ideas for cross collaboration with stakeholders across your business.

Some of the common operational challenges solved with the approach that Ellen advocates.

Enjoy the interview!

About Ellen:

Ellen Kindley is a dynamic revenue operations leader at QASymphony specializing in sales process, data management & analytics, strategy, and sales tech.

Ellen seeks to enable growth by facilitating strategic planning, infrastructure, and overall sales excellence. Ellen is passionate about laying the foundation on which SaaS startups can scale and grow – always striving to be the driving force for productivity improvement.

Starting at QASymphony in 2014, first as a consultant and then as a full-time employee in 2015, Ellen has successfully set the stage for hyper growth. Every step is data driven as she sets initiatives and priorities, evaluates gaps and executes improvements. Ellen’s goal every day is to allow sales management and individual contributors to focus solely on revenue generating activities.

QASymphony’s software testing and QA tools help companies create better software by improving speed, efficiency, and collaboration during the testing lifecycle.

Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn and Twitter 

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Less is More When It Comes to My Tech Stack: Why I Love HubSpot Sales

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I’m on a productivity quest. To focus on the most important revenue activities each day, I need the right processes in place to ensure maximum efficiency. For me, it is an ongoing evolution in how I work. Unlike many in the sales industry who are proud of their burgeoning tech stacks, I’m focused on reducing mine. As I wrote about in a recent blog post, more of anything isn’t necessarily the answer to solving challenges facing sales teams today. More technology doesn’t guarantee improved lead generation, an increase in qualified opportunities in the pipeline or shrink the time it takes to close deals. I believe it is the combination of the right technology, process and selling skills that lead to achieving quota objectives. So, for me, less is more. That’s where HubSpot Sales comes in.

Where I started.

I started with HubSpot CRM, which I’ve been using for over a year now. After testing just about every CRM out there, I settled on HubSpot for its power and ease of use. As much as I love technology, I feel that many CRM solutions being sold today are just too complicated. I want to know about deals in the pipeline, stages of the deal progression, why I won or lost deals, and I want tools that make it easy for me to reduce administrative time, capture sales conversations, track emails and follow a consistent cadence in my sales prospecting and follow up.

I love HubSpot Sales.

While HubSpot CRM is pretty awesome, knowing what I know now, I would have started with HubSpot Sales to capitalize on the advanced sales features from the start. I suggest you start there too. HubSpot Sales includes the free CRM. Since I wanted to create a more robust sales process, and I wanted to reduce the number of other technology tools I was using, moving to HubSpot Sales has helped me achieve that goal.

Check out the Email integration and tracking feature.

Since we all still live in email, I love that HubSpot Sales connects to your Inbox. The moment I start a new email and pop in a prospects email address, HubSpot Sales opens a dialog box to the right of my screen and instantly creates a contact record. The new record is populated with contact details, company information, revenue, social media profiles and more. I don’t have to hunt down the details and type them into the system. It works the same way if I receive an inbound email from a potential buyer too. Anything I need to quickly add, say the name of a referral source, I type that in and save the contact. The manual data entry is minimized, and I have saved so much time with just this one feature. You’ll love that apps you likely use today are supported, such as Office 365, Outlook, Gmail and GSuite.

Because every email interaction is then tracked, I can view a timeline in a prospect or customers contact record to keep up to date on how our conversations are progressing. I also know when someone opened the email, which helps me know that my messages are being not just received but read.

Save time with these additional HubSpot Sales features.

With the new Messages feature, I can see who visits my website in real time, how often they visit, what services they appear to be interested in, chat with them live or give them the ability to book time on my calendar to talk to me.

With the Meetings feature, I easily set up different meeting types based on meeting length and whether that meeting will be by phone or face to face. I can embed that code on my website or include the link in emails making it easy for people to schedule time with me. I love that both features are integrated with HubSpot CRM. In other words, if someone books a meeting using my meeting link, it is automatically added to their contact record. If this is someone who has come inbound to me and not in my CRM yet, once they schedule a meeting, a record is created without me having to do anything. My other tools didn’t integrate with CRM. Thanks to these two features of HubSpot Sales, I got rid of the other tools I was using. My sales process is better streamlined, and I saved money in the process.

Stay tuned for more.

In coming posts, I’m going to talk about other HubSpot Sales reporting capabilities, productivity tools and how they help me reduce wasted effort and improve my sales results. I’ll share with you how I’ve automated my outreach while not sacrificing personalization using Templates. In the past two weeks since setting up my custom templates, I have saved hours of time. You’ll also find out why I love the Sequences feature and how to turn your Documents into trackable links enabling trigger prospecting and follow up at its finest!

Get started with a FREE TRIAL Get yourself set up and come back and share your success stories with me!

 

Right Message, Right Support, Right Sales Content with Jim Burns

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I talked to Jim Burns of Avitage in this podcast about how to support B2B value selling sales teams with the right knowledge, communication support, and situation-ready content.

High-performing content is your First Product and Currency with which you earn attention, interest, engagement — this is the way you create value for buyers. Unfortunately, many executives aren’t aware of strategic imperative of high-performing content and the impact on their business. Since most content tends not to be sales or situation ready, it generally performs poorly, often negatively, which does not reflect well on the salesperson or the company brand.

Jim and I discussed:

How to assess the current state of your current sales content assets.

What Jim believes to be the underlying causes of why content doesn’t perform well.

The primary cases for using sales content:

  • Knowledge, Shared Learning, Preparation support
  • Communication Support
  • Situation-ready

How an organization should go about producing content that is high-quality, high performing and sales-ready.

What Jim recommends in terms of deploying content, or making situation-ready content easier for salespeople to access and use?

And much more.

Enjoy the interview!

About Jim:

Jim Burns is a sales professional with a unique expertise in sales conversation and content. For over 20 years his company Avitage developed sales content and software that improved the way sales professionals differentiated themselves and created value for customers through the way they sold.

B2B selling organizations of all sizes have benefited from breakthrough approaches Avitage provided to capture and incorporate selling knowledge into daily activities. They’ve learned how to create effective communication support and situation-ready content that fuels value selling models.

Avitage no longer produces content. They help organizations capitalize on methodologies and practices that create high-performing content, at scale, without compromise.

Connect with Jim on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Connect the Dots to Improve Customer Experience with Erin Bush

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In this Women in Sales Leadership podcast episode, I talked with Erin Bush. She is the Director of Revenue Operations at SalesLoft, the platform for modern sales engagement. As we get into the conversation, you will hear how Erin’s career choices led her to where she is today.

Did you know?

A Walker 2020 report revealed that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as a key differentiator. There is no doubt that experience is a key priority for many organizations. Forrester reported that 72% of businesses say that improving the customer experience is their top priority. In a blog from NewVoiceMedia, their recent research indicates that companies lose more than $62 billion due to poor customer service. That’s a big problem!

I talked with Erin about how SalesLoft defines customer experience and who is involved in the experience process. From their point of view, it is a team effort between Marketing, Sales and their Customer Success team.

We talked about:

  • How the teams work together to create seamless experiences.
  • How they make sure that the team is well informed and hand-off points are clearly defined.
  • How technology and systems are key to a successful workflow.

Enjoy the interview!

About Erin:

Erin Bush is the Director of Revenue Operations at SalesLoft, the platform for modern sales engagement. In this role, she works with Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success to create systems to more efficiently prospect, win, onboard, and support customers.

Erin is a veteran sales leader in the Atlanta startup community. An innovator in sales operations, Erin specializes in building a connected sales practice utilizing modern sales technology.

Connect with Erin: LinkedIn   Twitter

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Leading Sales Teams with Katie Early

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I talked with Katie Early, a sales leader at HubSpot, about her strategies for leading SDR/BDR teams to consistent sales success. Katie first talked to me about how she got started in a career in sales and what she loves about the profession.

We then talked about:

How Katie made the transition from an individual contributor sales role into a sales leadership role and the surprises she encountered and the lessons she learned.

Katie then shared her guidance for women who’d like to make the same transition into a leadership position.

Successfully leading teams to exceed monthly and annual sales targets on a consistent basis isn’t always easy. Katie shared some of her strategies that help her lead her team to ongoing success.

We discussed the importance of hiring right, coaching, ongoing training.

How SDR/BDR roles are important in selling success and Katie’s thoughts on how those front-line roles are evolving.

Katie recently moved into a new leadership role and made a move to Dublin. She told me about her new role and what led her to tackle this new challenge.

Enjoy the interview!

This episode is sponsored by Hubspot.

HubSpot CRM makes it easy to organize, track, and grow your pipeline. And it’s free. Forever! I’m a Hubspot CRM user, and I love it. You should give it a try right NOW!

About Katie:

Katie Early leads the Corporate Sales Team for HubSpot in EMEA, focusing on growing the HubSpot’s presence with large scale organizations. She started her sales career with HubSpot 6 years ago, where she worked as an individual contributor before moving into Sales Management in North America, and then later moving to the Dublin office for her current role.

Connect with Katie on LinkedIn and Twitter

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