Last Thursday was one superfantastic day! At Atlanta Women in Business, we held the 7th Annual “Results Count” award luncheon at one of my fave restaurants, Maggiano’s. What an amazingly good time! The room was packed and the networking took on a fever frenzy. It was clear that people were not only enjoying the opportunity to network with other like minded professionals, but they were in celebration mode. Think Oscars but smaller:).

And the winner is…

Eleanor Morgan, President/CEO of MD&E. An absolutely amazing business woman with grace, charm and humility to boot, Eleanor embodies the true spirit and meaning of the annual award. Congrats Eleanor!

While Eleanor was speaking, I was fondly remembering back to last year when I was honored with the award, and it occurred to me that as an entrepreneur, I don’t receive accolades like I used to back in my corporate sales days. I mean, who’s gonna pat me on the back and give me that sales award anyway? Me? During Eleanor’s comments, she also mentioned how nice it was to be recognized by her peers. I couldn’t agree more!

To all of you who own your own businesses, I am giving you the high 5 right now! If you came from the corporate world, you know what it really takes to make your own rain every single day. “Success is an inside job” takes on new meaning, doesn’t it? It isn’t always easy, but you do it day in and day out. For that, I salute you all!

By the way…that’s Eleanor on the left and Lya Sorano, Founder and CEO of Atlanta Women in Business on the right.

I’m a fan of David Bach’s financial books. In his masterpiece,Automatic Millionaire, he talks about the “latte factor”. The premise is that people will often say that they don’t make enough money to save, but if you look deeper it is because they are wasting money in other areas of their life. Like on latte’s at Starbucks.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that Starbucks is more than the coffee. It’s also about the experience. It’s a hip place to hold a meeting or perhaps work on planning for your next sales call. The question is have you considered the personal financial impact that your daily specialty coffee habit can have?  Bach shows people how a $4.00 a day cup of coffee could be a huge boost to their savings account over time. Do the math yourself.  It’s about $1,000 for coffee 5 days a week throughout the year. What if you put that money in a money market account with compound interest…well, you need to read David’s book to see where you’d be in 5, 10 and 20 years.

What does this have to do with sales?

The same “latte factor” analogy can be applied to evaluting the effectivesness of your lead generation efforts. Daily sales activities can be broken down and quantified into real dollars. Determine the “cost per sales hour” (CPSH) for all members of your sales team. You need to know exactly how much actual selling time is required to achieve revenue goals. Sales managers often overlook the importance of knowing the CPSH, but until they do, they won’t truly understand the impact of wasted time on the sales bottom line. It is expensive when sales people are not maximizing their lead generation time to the fullest.

Do a little digging

It can be easy to fall into a comfortable routine of simply networking at local business associations and chamber meetings. While these may be good, the best sales people do not assume. They also do not confuse activities with effectiveness. Attending a lot of “networking meetings” doesn’t necessarily mean that you are effectively generating leads and closing sales.

Here are a few of the questions that managers need to be asking their sales people:

• Where are you spending the most time and why?
• How many leads have come from your attendance?
• Have we closed any business as a direct result?
• What other networking opportunities could you be leveraging? Hint: social media, mastermind groups

Review sales networking activities carefully and often. Ironically the ROI of social media is often questioned; yet, these same sales professionals who question social media’s value waste time attending all the wrong networking events, but believe themselves to be successfully selling.

Determine your social sales latte factor. Figure out where your time needs to be invested elsewhere and watch those lead generation efforts start paying off!

At this point in the evolution of social media, small and mid-sized companies are recognizing the value and potential that social tools like LinkedIn, Twitter,Gist, Hootsuite, Facebook, YouTube and others bring to the table. Yet, when I ask business owners about their social sales and marketing strategy, they sheepishly admit that they really don’t have one. They know they need one, but…

Tic Toc

If you are not integrating social media into your sales and marketing plans, you are setting yourself up for decreasing sales and increased competitive pressure. Think of social media as the proverbial train that’s left the station. While you can’t hop on the train that’s already chugging on down the track, you can grab the next one coming along and catch up. The point is that the clock is ticking and you need to get moving!

I Don’t Have Time

Let’s face it, “I don’t have time.” is a pretty common excuse, because people can relate to it, right? Who can’t empathize with jam-packed schedules, lengthy to-do list’s and a cell phone that never stops ringing? “Tight schedule already and you want me to create a social sales and marketing plan, Barb?” Yes. I do. You need it. “Even if I have it, who has time for blog posting, tweets, status updates, answering questions in groups, Barb?” The answer is that you make the time. Or, you delegate the activity. We can talk about options in a future blog post.

What’s really behind the excuse?

1) These are smart business people and they know that they need to use social tools like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to drive their marketing and sales activities, but they don’t know where to start. It’s easier to avoid what feels a little overwhelming to tackle.

Hint: You begin with a strategy and tactical plan. This requires slowing down long enough to think through what you need and how you’ll use the technology. Hire help! Jumping on Twitter without having a clear idea how micro-blogging fits into your sales and marketing strategy will no doubt cause frustration. As Covey said, success begins with the end in mind. If you don’t know where you are going, I can pretty much guarantee it’ll be tough to get there.

2) Taking time to answer questions on LinkedIn, post a tweet, contribute to a blog post or respond to Facebook fan comments is seen as an ”add-on” to an already jammed packed calendar.

Hint: Some of the activities you and your people spend time on today will never net you sales. That’s the truth and you know it. An honest appraisal of your calendar will no doubt reveal time wasters – people, places, events – that can be eliminated. Once those wasters are eliminated you can put that “found” time toward social sales activities instead.

3) Won’t my employees just waste time all day yakking with their friends on Facebook?

Hint: You need to establish social media usage communication policies and invest in training your people from the beginning. Most businesses already have a communication policy, so you can augment what you currently have to address social media usage. Invest in training your people to use the technology correctly and make sure that they understand the rules of netiquette in the online space. Your investment in training will minimize wasted time and pay dividends down the road.

All aboard!

If you read posts 1 and 2 on the topic of busting your brand, you know that I didn’t take kindly to the dimwit who decided it was okay to send me spam, because we were members of the same LinkedIn group. You also know that he didn’t care for me making the suggestion that spamming people wasn’t the way to go about driving successful sales. His response said it all.

But, that wasn’t the end of it, because as you know I felt compelled to let him know for the second time that he’d now taken rude to another level. I figured that would be the end of it. Ah, but not for this guy. Here is his final response. There are soooo many things that I wanted to say in return, but what would be the point? He considers me “sanctimonious”, perhaps because I was the first one to tell him his approach might be losing him sales. As for the rest of his logic…one can only wonder.

“You were never going to buy from me to begin with. Just because you wrote just another book on sales doesn’t mean your way is the only way to get new business. (Hey I have a book published too. 5 stars on Amazon.com – which is really great, but I don’t consider my book to be the definitive answer to anything). There is still plenty of room for cold calling in the market today – and you are wrong if you think otherwise. There is rude, and there is sanctimonious. Besides, those in your network, who like you, believe that there is no room for Cold Calling were never going to buy from me anyway, so be sure to let them know. Actually, I am sure that some sales professionals will be interested to speak with me just because you tell them not too.”

By the way, some of my colleagues suggested that I was only wasting my precious time responding to this guy and then blogging about the situation. My feeling is that every now and then you’ve got to take a stand. I’m getting far to many of these cheezy sales pitches thrown at me via LinkedIn, as are many others, and I felt that I needed to speak up. Whether he hears the message or not is really not the point. Oh, and if you are one of the sales professionals who want to talk to this guy just because I suggest you look elsewhere, please let me know. I’ll happily pass along his contact information:)

Well, clearly some folks just do not understand that the way people want to buy products and services has changed. Imagine my surprise…well, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised…when dumb & dumber sent me a LinkedIn email in response to my suggestion that his sales spam was not appreciated.

On 11/17/10 9:52 PM, XYZ wrote:

If you don’t want to receive messages from other group members you can go to your group settings and check a box that says you don’t want to receive messages from other members of the group.  Its that simple.  Nothing wrong with Cold Calling either by the way.

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Really? Instead of considering the feedback you decide to school me on how to use LinkedIn?

Here is the response that I sent this morning…

Well, XYZ thanks for taking rude to another level. You’ve certainly convinced me that I would never buy from you, and I’ll be happy to share that news with my network. I’m well aware that I can turn off messages. If you had bothered to read my profile, you would know that I’m quite experienced in the areas of social media and sales. In fact, my book was just published on the topic. I do not turn off messages because I like connecting with others, and I trust that professionals will not abuse the privilege. Sending me unsolicited sales spam is not connecting. You are simply pushing your own agenda. And, yes, there is something wrong with cold calling. Clearly, you do not understand the buyers of today. –B

SALES HAS CHANGED

Folks, this type of mentality is exactly what today’s buyers HATE about sales people. Frankly, that ticks me off, because the majority of us are very professional and understand the social rules of engagement online. What this person fails to realize is that he is doing more harm to his brand than good. But I’m not that shocked actually. He sells a sales dialing service AKA automated cold calling and in reviewing his LinkedIn profile, it’s clear he doesn’t have much of a network. It appears he’s only using LinkedIn for his own self serving agenda. That’s unfortunate, because in the long run, it will never serve him.

Should we all take bets on whether or not he’ll be dumb enough to reply again? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.