LinkedIn has made the Company section more robust. It is now even easier to research companies and keep up with the people changes happening with those companies.

The Improvement

You can now “follow” companies. Okay, STOP right there! Before you close your mind to it, because images of nonsensical conversation on Twitter just popped into your head, please hear me when I say that “the concept” is similar, but definitely different. This is the kind of follow that you want to engage in, because…

Sales Benefit

You will hear about key developments such as who’s joined, left or been promoted at the companies you follow, business opportunities and job openings. This moves your ability to research target companies you want to work with to another level.

Once you elect to follow a company… when you log into the Company Home Page on LinkedIn, you will see a list of updates for the companies that you follow. You will also see a “company updates” section now showing up on your LinkedIn Home Page.

This is so much easier than tracking the individual movements of people within in a company. LinkedIn aggregates the list of changes for you. You can easily scan the list to keep up with what’s changed. Here’s a quick screen shot of the company I set up to follow today to check out how this works.

How To

Find Companies under the “More” menu. Click on Companies. Search companies you want to track. Once you’ve pulled up their company page…look to the upper right and click on “follow company”. Scan the updates once a day or once a week.

Definitely check it out! Share your success stories.

Since the early days of John Patterson and his NCR sales playbook, “cold calling” seems to be ingrained in the collective sales consciousness as an expected part of the sales process. I still wonder why. Come on. Cold calling doesn’t work (it never has, and I don’t care what that last sales trainer told you).

This ridiculous notion of “dialing for dollars” is so yesterday. Sales people resist cold calling like the plague and with good reason. At some level, they know it doesn’t make any sense to call a stranger and expect them to buy within seconds of receiving their call no matter how charming they may be. Old school sales thinking is that you just call enough numbers and eventually somebody buys. What a waste of time and energy! Not to mention how potential buyers detest this approach. They don’t appreciate your rambling, inarticulate, blathering feature dumps and the evident randomness of the call. As a business owner, I can relate. Maybe I’ll create an audio book one of these days with the “best of the worst” phone calls that I’ve ever received. I save them. Hilarious and painfully sad at the same time. Hint: if you have to cold call then at least do some remedial homework. Make sure I’m in the market for what you sell. Everyone is NOT your customer!

Get over the notion of cold calling. Nobody likes it, it doesn’t work. Instead, what about using social media/social networks, email, Twitter, Facebook, referrals and the like to start paving the way for a great relationship? There is just NO excuse anymore for sales management to think that “dialing for dollars” has much chance at success. Instead, invest time in learning to use social media to augment and extend your sales reach. Insist that your sales people use social tools and social networks to begin conversations that will lead to finding common ground and getting to know each other. Then, when you do reach out to secure that sales appointment there will be nothing cold about it!

Last week was a busy week, and WOW, was it ever productive.

When is the last time you felt that your networking efforts were truly productive?

Networking is an essential element of your overall sales strategy. It is so important to your sales success that it requires some thought as to what you want to accomplish when you are out there. Where most networking approaches tend to fall flat is that people almost always confuse activity with effectiveness. If your goal is to acquire new customers and increase sales (almost always is) then making the time to ruthlessly evaluate where you are spending your networking time is essential.

Better to attend 3 of the right networking events than 10 of the wrong ones.

Time is money, and I have certainly wasted my fair share of it. How well are you tracking your own time? Do you know if you are generating a positive or negative ROI a for the time you’ve invested? Have you enrolled enough clients to make it worth it?

I met 35 great people last week at the very targeted events I chose to attend. Thinking carefully about my business strategy and goals, I asked myself a few questions before saying yes. You should too:

-Is my client likely to be in the room? Seems pretty obvious, but so many people that I’ve met haven’t actually stopped to consider the question. You need to network with groups of people who are qualified to buy your product or service. Everyone is NOT your client. Target your efforts by reaching out to the meeting organizers to ask who typically attends and how many. Ask people in your network if they’ve attended. If so, what was their experience? Do some homework to be sure this is the right place to invest your time. You might find instead that using the time to make phone calls or participate in a few online groups garners better results.

-What will it cost me to attend? Use this formula: determine your total time to attend, which includes drive time. Multiply this number x your hourly rate + event fee = your cost to attend. Let’s say I’m considering an event that runs from 1-4pm and costs $250. I need to add an hour of drive time on each end just in case. That’s 5 total hours from my day. If I bill at $225 per hour that works out to $1,125 + $250 for the event fee = $1,375. For this event to generate a positive return on my investment (time & money), I must close at least 1 new coaching client @ $1,500 per month in order to break even and make a small profit. But the real goal would be to secure enough clients to more than pay for the investment. Be sure to do a little analysis before saying yes.

-Does attending have other business benefits for me? Maybe you are like me and look for speaking opportunities. Perhaps you want to volunteer with a business group that would help to build your network while you supported someting important to you. It’s OK to attend events when sales isn’t the specific goal, but you do need to be clear that this is your purpose. If you are responsible for business development – sales – you really have to think carefully about where you spend your time.

Whether you network online or off…define your purpose, frame out a plan, focus on the right activities and measure your results. Ask yourself and others tough questions before saying yes to requests for your time. Your ruthless commitment to scheduling only top priorities will get you faster results with less effort. Isn’t that how it ought to be?

Social bookmarking is a popular part of the social media movement. For the tech dweebs that is:) I say that lovingly of course, because I’m part dweeb myself. Though social bookmarking hasn’t quite caught on with the mainstream user, I’m confident that it will be soon. Most of the folks I meet are still grappling with what Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and LinkedIn are all about…but, hey, one thing at a time.

Even though I love technology, it took me a while to connect how I could use social bookmarking in a meaningful way. Once I got it though…it was like the parting of the Red Sea. The possibilities of how you can use social bookmarking as a customer retention tool are endless.

Whenever I speak on the topic of social media and social networking, I notice that people seem to be the most confused about how social bookmarking fits in. Even more confused than they are about Twitter, so that’s saying something. In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers talk about how to help people understand a concept that confuses them by tying it back to something that they can relate too. An analogy. In pretty simple terms, I tell people that social bookmarking is like having one gigantic, personal file cabinet on the Internet. You “tag” the web address of articles, video’s, blogs or websites that you like for easy reference later. Instead of file folders, you use an informal tagging system that lets you create categories that you’ll remember later on and can access quickly. AND…what I think is the coolest part of social bookmarking is that you can “share” your tags with others.

From a sales perspective, you could create categories that represent a particular clients’ interest. If for example, I’m your customer and you know that I love social media technologies (as everyone who knows me, knows that I do!), you would watch for interesting information that you would tag for Barb and share with me. I don’t have to rip an article out of Fortune Magazine and then send it to you manually with a personal note, although I still do a lot of that. Instead, I can tag articles that I think my clients and prospective buyers will find interesting and share them with everyone at once, or I can choose just to share with people in my private network. Either way…it’s a great connection point. Now, if you get your contacts to sign up and engaged in your bookmarking community, they can tag information that they then share with everyone in the community too. Very cool stuff indeed!

So, Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are 3 of the biggies…each having a slightly unique twist to their approach, which I’ll cover in more detail in subsequent posts.

Stick around…you really do want to know about how to integrate the use of social bookmarking into your customer relationship management approach, because THIS IS a key way to not only provide value but to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Can you dig it?