Before I get to the reason I’m writing today, I just have to take a moment to reflect on how incredible it is that I can be blogging at 30,000 feet. I’m “literally” in the cloud as I organize my thoughts. As a kid, I knew that I would be a frequent traveler, but never did I imagine that I would be doing my writing from a device the size of day planner. Amazing stuff.

OK, on to my topic for today.

Had the opportunity today to conduct a social media program with a sales organization looking to better leverage tools like LinkedIn and Inside View to supercharge their referral building, prospecting and lead generation activities. Though some in the audience were completely overwhelmed at times (there is so much to absorb it can make your head spin), they were a group eager to learn and stand apart from their competitors. Some of them may have walked into the room a little skeptical about how social can drive sales opportunities, but by the time I wrapped up…they got it.

Do you?

If you sell products and services and are reading this post, I want you to hear loudly and clearly what I’m about to share with you now.

Ready?

Here goes.

80% of buyers go online and start the sales process WITHOUT YOU! That’s right, they do their homework and may even be researching you right now. And you don’t even know it.

How’s that for a compelling reason to stop procrastinating and get that profile rockin’?

Buyer 2.0 is online looking for solutions that will solve their business problems and the people who will help them implement those solutions. Will they find you or your competitor first? If they find you, what message are you communicating? Is there enough compelling content to peak their interest so that they want to engage with you personally?

You likely have only one shot, and I’ve experienced firsthand how this works.

A recent client told me how they had been referred to me by a colleague. Rather than call me based on the recommendation, the very first thing that they did was go to my LinkedIn profile and website. They reviewed the content, watched my videos, checked out my background to validate that I did have the skills they wanted. It was at that point that they made the decision to connect with me about doing business together.

If I didn’t have the skills they needed, they would have kept looking for someone better suited to meet their needs. And, I would never have known it!!!!

I cannot emphasize enough that this happens all the time.

The tough part is you don’t even know how many times you are being passed over for a sales opportunity, because your LinkedIn profile is practically screaming at your prospect to move on to your competitor.

What can you do? Well, take a minute to read another post I wrote that talks about 29 ways that you can better leverage LinkedIn and put the suggestions into action. That will be a good starting point.

I’m about to close for today, so I want to leave you with a final thought.

If you really believe that actual revenue cannot be generated using tools like LinkedIn…you are wrong!

I would like to suggest that just because you do not understand how it all works doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. And that is a conversation for another day!

Yesterday I shared how sales professionals can optimize their LinkedIn profiles to become more “connectable” with prospects. Today I’ll share my tips for optimizing your Twitter profile so that it’s easy for people to get in touch with you. Remember: Buyers are impatient. The more barriers you put up, the more likely they are to move on to your competition.

Here are four changes you can make right now to your Twitter profile to capitalize on prospecting opportunities:

1) Add your phone number to your profile headline.

Some people might disagree with me on this one. The concern I’ve heard most often is that in doing so people leave themselves open to be stalked by salespeople with something to sell. Thinking as the salesperson that I am, I want you–my future customer–to call me if that’s your preference. Besides, you can use a service that lets you easily monitor incoming phone calls. I use Google Voice.

2) Arrange to have an email sent to you from Twitter whenever someone sends you a direct message (DM) on Twitter.

I don’t converse via DM often, so I find this particularly helpful in responding to people who choose to use DM to communicate. Heaven forbid that someone I’m connected to has an interest in purchasing my services and decides to use DM to reach me, but I don’t see the message for days or weeks.

3) Arrange to have an email sent to you from Twitter whenever you get a mention or an @reply in a Tweet.

It is likely that you’ll see the message more quickly via email and then you can quickly respond online or by reaching out to the individual directly.

4) Have an email notification sent to your inbox or your mobile device whenever you get a new Twitter follower.

Schedule time into your day to check out the profiles of people choosing to follow you. You never know when that might turn into a sales lead!

By the way, on November 15, I will present “Sales Meets Social: Identifying and Reaching High-Profile Prospects: at the Sales Strategies in a Social & Mobile World Conference. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

This week I had the opportunity to write a couple of guest posts for the Sales 2.0 Conference blog that offer salespeople tips for ensuring that prospects can easily contact them. The first focused on LinkedIn and the other focused on the things that you can do to enhance your Twitter profile and you can read both of them here on my site also.

Let’s start with LinkedIn…

When was the last time you viewed your social profiles through the eyes of your prospects? Although many salespeople have LinkedIn accounts precisely to network and build referrals, a high percentage of them unwittingly make it difficult for prospects to connect with them.

Buyers are impatient. Make it difficult for them to reach you, and guess what? They move on to your competitor.

If you want to shrink the sales cycle and improve your chances of being contacted by a prospect, here are four things you can do immediately:

1)     Add your phone number to your LinkedIn profile.

Select “Edit Profile” (under the “Profile” tab) and scroll down to the Personal Information section (all the way at the bottom). Although the section is titled “Personal,” add your business phone number and address. Because LinkedIn only makes your phone number visible to first-level connections, I also suggest that you include your phone number in your profile summary and specialties areas.

2)     Include your business email so that your first-level connections have another communication option beyond emailing through the social site.

Remember, not everyone visits LinkedIn on a daily basis.

3)     Set your email settings so that LinkedIn invitations and messages come directly into your email inbox.

View your inbox as your communications hub. Use inbox rules to automatically organize and forward your message to folders you designate for your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook messages. Be careful, though—don’t forget to check those folders regularly.

4)     Download the LinkedIn mobile app so your LinkedIn network is always with you.

This lets you respond quickly to connection requests and incoming messages; it also allows you to reach out to others when you have down time.

By the way, on November 15, I will present “Sales Meets Social: Identifying and Reaching High-Profile Prospects: at the Sales Strategies in a Social & Mobile World Conference. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Recently, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference. As a first-timer at the conference, I wasn’t completely sure what to expect, but I have to say that it was one of the best run, most  informative conferences that I’ve attended in some time.

The overall theme of the conference was sales and marketing alignment, in addition to social selling. What I find curious is all the time spent talking about the need for sales and marketing alignment (it has been a topic of conversation for years), but somehow the problem has yet to be resolved in most organizations. Now that social media has entered the scene, I believe that alignment between these two departments is even more critical.

Social marketing campaigns must be tied to current sales processes and CRM systems but I don’t see that happening in most instances. Case in point. I met a Marketing Manager recently from a sizable organization who became defensive when I asked if her company had a social media strategy. “Yes, of course, she huffily replied. I handle all of that.” I said, “Cool. How are you tying your marketing campaigns and social lead generation activities to your sales teams CRM system and sales process?” She didn’t even know what a CRM system was much less understand how social sales leads should be tied it. Folks, social media marketing success is more than putting up a Facebook fan page and it certainly requires more than hiring the young 20 or 30-something who knows how to tweet, but I digress.

Personally, I don’t think the sales and marketing alignment problem is that tough to solve. Am I just naive? Why doesn’t the CEO put both sales and marketing on the same revenue goals and bonus them on the same objectives; i.e. hitting quota. Don’t bonus marketing on cheap leads, bonus them on the right leads! On the flip side, tie a piece of every reps sales commission to following up on the “right leads” provided by marketing. To be fair, we all know that salespeople often ignore the leads handed off to them by their marketing team and that’s generally because the leads are not adequately qualified. Salespeople want to talk to qualified, motivated buyers. Give them the right leads and they will follow up! By the way, signing up for a free whitepaper – often called “raising your hand” – doesn’t mean that the lead is qualified or that the potential buyer even cares about what you sell. Maybe they just thought that the whitepaper sounded interesting.

Here are a few of my other thoughts as a result of attending the conference:

•  The right conferences are still an incredible way to expand your network. Yes, I love the power of social media, but let’s face it, people do not buy from companies, people buy from people. I went to learn, speak, to meet people and to make connections, but I didn’t go to “sell”. Take note sales folks…the best sales come from the investment in building relationships that lead to opportunity over time.

• Your online conversations can move offline. I had such fun meeting people like Joanne Black and Anneke Seley that I’ve been talking to or following online for quite some time. Joanne and I have connected again since the conference and have decided that we are twin sisters of different mothers. We both agree that there are lots of opportunities for us to support each other with referral business. And sometimes, you have to travel 2200 miles to meet a local colleague from your own community. That was the case with Judy Yi of Silverpop who works about 10 miles away from my office and wouldn’t you know…we are also members of the Atlanta Women in Social Facebook group. Small world! Online conversation is great, but taking it offline can be even better!

• Don’t forget the social in social selling. There were a handful of conference vendors who just couldn’t resist tweets full of selling. The me, me, me got a bit old. If you’ve been sharing valuable information with conference attendees and then mix in a pitch here and there..ok, but tweets simply focused on you and what you sell are a big turn off.

• Keep presentations focused on delivering value to your audience. This is a nice way of saying…don’t sell from the podium. One vendor in particular spent their entire presentation time selling, selling and more…well…selling. Not only nauseating, but they were the subject of numerous conversations throughout the conference and the comments were not positive. Honestly, is that really how you want your company to be remembered? Just sayin.

• Bold moves sometimes backfire. During one of the presentations, I applauded the move to do a “live demo” of the sales approach being sold. At the same time, I felt like I was witnessing a car wreck in slow motion. The approach was slightly better than cold calling and the techniques used to get things like email nomenclature from the receptionist were a bit lame. Not to mention the rep went back to her several times asking the same questions she had just answered. Listening skills were lacking. As for the voicemail message being left for the targeted prospect…what a waste. It was focused only on what the vendor wanted – an appointment. Nothing in it for the exec at all!  If I was the exec on the receiving end of that message I would have hit the delete button in 2 seconds flat. Lesson… do  your homework before picking up the phone, so that when you need to leave your voicemail message, you’ll be able to leave one that is compelling enough for your prospect to want to call you back.

I’ll close by saying that aside from a few presentation missteps; I was inspired and energized by the sheer number of smart people with great ideas and approaches to their business. I engaged in many great conversations and appreciated the willingness of so many pros to share best practices.  It can be easy to coast along comfortably in our day-to-day lives without remembering the importance of investing in our professional development. I say thank you to all the people that I talked with who so generously shared their perspectives.

Hats off to the entire Sales 2.0 conference team for creating and delivering a conference experience that raised the bar and puts other conference organizers on notice! Seriously, Selling Power, you rock!

p.s. I’m attending the Sales Strategies in a Social and Mobile World. Why don’t you join me for a meet-up?

In a forum on Focus, the question was asked, “Why don’t more sales organizations invest in sales training courses?”  It is the million dollar question and one that I’m sure has been asked countless times before.

In a nutshell, my thoughts are…

Whatever is going south in your sales organization today will not be resolved with a short-term emphasis on training.

Revenue in steep decline won’t be back on track with a day’s worth of training. Mediocre sales reps will not magically become superstars.

If you want to change your sales situation, you need to start with taking a hard look at what’s really going wrong in your business. Do you have the right people with the right skills (uh, that includes management)? Do you have the right processes in place? Is your messaging clear? Having you been evolving with today’s Internet savvy executive or do you keep hoping that what used to work will work once again?

Until companies are really willing to ask the tough questions, throwing money at training really makes no sense at all.

While I certainly don’t have all the answers, I do have 6 thoughts on what can be done to better leverage the investment made in a training program:

1. View sales development programs as a process NOT an event. At a prior company, we were given lots of great training, but the programs were all different. That meant that none of the methodology was carried forward over the long haul. I’ve been through Solution Selling, SPIN Selling, Precision Questioning, Situational Leadership, Covey’s 7 Habits, ropes courses, coaching programs – you name it. They were great, but they’ve weren’t tied together and they were not aligned with our sales goals and strategies.
2. Stop forcing your salespeople to drink from a fire hose. Yes, it is important to minimize the time that a sales person is out of the field, but stop trying to cram what amounts to a week’s worth of information into a half-day or full-day program. In today’s wired world, there are infinitely more ways to deliver training programs and not all of them need to be face-to-face.
3. Build accountability into the learning process. The physical training event is only the first step. People are creatures of habit. Without reinforcement on an ongoing basis, people will revert to their old habits. People need to put what they’ve learning action; otherwise, there is no point. Accountability can be in the form of webinars, coaching or creating accountability buddies and teams. Bottom line, if you don’t plan to reinforce the learning, it will disappear in a few short weeks and you’ll be back to where you started.
4. Make sure that the content is current and fits your specific needs. Though the guts of the sales training methodology may be the same for consistency sake, whoever you’ve chosen to deliver your training program should darn well learn enough about your business to truly apply the principles to your unique situation. If they aren’t willing to do that…seek out someone else.
5. Make sure the content is sexy and the delivery appeals to different learning styles. Content must be relevant first and foremost, but what about integrating new technology into the mix. If it’s just PowerPoint…boring. I recently read a great article about a company that created sales management training that utilized the iPad during the course. The fact that an iPad was on each table when these managers walked in was enough to start the positive buzz. During the course, managers completed exercises and sent them to the instructor real-time during the program.
6. Make sure the trainer has cred and has great facilitation skills. Yes, we can learn something from everyone. On the other hand, sales people are finicky. If you have never lived life by a quota, how can you possibly tell me what to do to increase my sales? Fair or not, if you’ve never carried a bag and the audience knows it, it undermines credibility. And whatever you do, vet the facilitation skills of the person you hire. Talk to their references, ask to monitor one of their upcoming programs or request a video clip demonstrating their work. It will mean the difference between audience engagement or not.

Contrary to popular belief, I believe training programs DO work when you take a long-term view and make the financial investment to support your vision. Quick fixes do not exist. They never have and they never will!