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Your Networking Strategy Drive Sales Success with Ryann Dowdy, iFocus Marketing

In sales, networking never goes out of style. But are you getting the most from your efforts? In this interview I talk with Ryann Dowdy, Director of Sales at iFocus Marketing about the best approaches to achieving sales success through networking.

These are the topics that Ryann and I discussed.

Why networking is so important. In sales, and in career development.

The key to success in networking. Hint: it isn’t running around throwing out business cards!

Find out if networking with women is different than networking with men.

Tips for putting your own networking group together, if your community doesn’t have what you’re looking for.

Ways to utilize LinkedIn to build your network.

The best way to connect with someone you don’t know, but want to connect with?

Enjoy the interview!

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About Ryann

Ryann Dowdy is the Director of Sales at iFocus Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Overland Park, Kansas – part of the Kansas City metropolitan area. Ryann’s career has progressed from an individual contributor to sales trainer and coach, to sales leader. She’s passionate about developing sales talent and coaching her sales team by both in-field and in-office/class room coaching. Her experience as a sales rep turned leader helps her advocate for her team internally and position her reps to win! Ryann believes that building your own network is the key to sales success and long-term career development.

Connect on LinkedIn

Thanks to our Sponsors!

This podcast is presented by our Elite Sponsor, Microsoft. Corporate Vice President and Channel Chief Gavriella Schuster, along with other female leaders in the company, are driving for change, trying to bring more women into the technology industry. Gavriella and Microsoft are committed to giving “young women better role models and a stronger voice to all women.” You can hear more from Gavriella and other Microsoft leaders, on the Microsoft Partner Network podcast. Or visit partner.microsoft.com

Thanks to our Media Sponsor. Women Sales Pros has a vision for more women in B2B sales and sales leadership roles where there are currently male-majority sales teams. We help educate companies on how to do this, and we champion women on what a professional sales career can be. We also showcase the very top women sales experts who are speakers, authors, consultants, trainers and coaches. People can sign up to get updates HERE and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WomenSalesPros

Turning Relationships into Revenue with Christine Zmuda, Microsoft

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this episode, I talked with Christine Zmuda about Turning Relationships Into Revenue. Great topic and in fact, in my recent interview with Debbie Dunnam, we talked about how buyers – more than ever before – don’t want to be sold. They want to work with salespeople who they can trust and trust is developed when you make a point to focus on building relationships and doing for others first. Here I’ve summarized some of the nuggets of gold from the interview. Listen to it in full on iTunes or here on the blog.

Christine is a Sr. Sales Director in the Emerging Solutions Group at Microsoft. She got started in sales because she was looking for more options in her career. She started in marketing at Microsoft and eventually advanced into a sales role. The common thread for Christine was in taking on positions that were new businesses giving her the opportunity start something from scratch and build it from there.

In Christine’s current role in the emerging solutions group and their charter is to land new business acquisitions or launch first-party solutions from Microsoft. They test solutions to see what works, focus on how to scale and the team stays close to the customer experience.

Right now, Christine is almost exclusively focused on the Dynamics/LinkedIn partnership. In the first-year post-acquisition, performance is quite strong. Customer acquisition, renewal and customer experience has done well.

We talked about the importance of relationships in selling and Microsoft’s Relationship Sales solution that provides an integrated experience with LinkedIn, Office and CRM. The problems that LinkedIn and Microsoft wanted to solve for customers with this offering is to help sellers surface new connections, engage and nurture relationships with business insights and scale their sales outreach in a more personalized way. The other problem they wanted to help solve for sellers is to more easily broaden their reach inside an organization. The strategy of only calling “high” are less effective given the various stakeholders typically involved in buying decisions these days. One executive typically isn’t making the buying decision.

How do you know if you are hitting the mark on relationship sales? Listen to the interview to hear about some best practices that Christine shared.

And finally, we closed out the interview with Christine sharing her career advice for Women in Sales listeners.

Enjoy! Apple Podcasts – Please subscribe so that you never miss an episode! Write a review for the podcast if you like the interviews.

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About Christine

Christine’s passion and professional satisfaction come from identifying market opportunities before they are mainstream. Her most rewarding roles and accomplishments have centered around developing sales and market strategy for emerging businesses and scaling new acquisitions. She is always open to learning more about technology and happy to share her own experiences of leading sales, marketing, and channel teams if it’s helpful.

On a personal note, she enjoys golf, tennis, spending time with my family and embracing new experiences. Her new found love is abstract painting, the bigger the canvas the better.

Connect with Christine on Twitter and LinkedIn

Thanks to our Sponsors

We’d like to thank our Elite Sponsor, Microsoft. In particular, we thank Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President and Channel Chief at Microsoft, for her dedication to supporting women in technology, and making this podcast possible. Gavriella and Microsoft are committed to giving “young women better role models and a stronger voice to all women.” You can hear more from Gavriella and other Microsoft leaders, on the Microsoft Partner Network podcast. Visit the Microsoft Partner Network.

Thanks to our Media Sponsor. Women Sales Pros has a vision for more women in B2B sales and sales leadership roles where there are currently male-majority sales teams. We help educate companies on how to do this, and we champion women on what a professional sales career can be. We also showcase the very top women sales experts who are speakers, authors, consultants, trainers, and coaches. People can sign up to get updates HERE and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @WomenSalesPros

Trolls Not Welcome

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

When did it all become so personal? When did common courtesy fly right out the window?

A colleague of mine posted a LinkedIn video sharing his thoughts on why using LinkedIn to cold pitch was not an effective selling strategy. I happen to agree. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the same topic and the majority of the 65 LinkedIn commenters agreed with my belief that to invite someone to connect and then immediately pounce on them with a sales pitch once they accept is not welcome.

Yes, there were salespeople who didn’t agree with my point of view. That’s okay. To their way of thinking, that is exactly how you use the LinkedIn platform. There were similar comments on my friend’s post too. One gal commented that she is passionate about the products she sells and will pitch to anyone with a willing ear. But that’s exactly the point. When someone agrees to your connection request they are not indicating that they are interested in your pitch. In other words, connecting does not equal a willing ear.

I’ve written before that ultimately everyone needs to choose what works for them. If the cold pitch is working for you, fine. I don’t believe that it is working for you but I’m not going to argue about it. You will only dig your heels in deeper. But do be aware that in numerous research studies buyers say that they do not appreciate your self-serving sales pitch, regardless how “passionate” you are about your products. You are still making it about you. Choosing to ignore what buyers have said they don’t like about certain selling approaches comes with risk. If you refuse to adapt your selling style in the face of hard evidence that confirms you should, you just make your job harder.

Back to my original question.

I noticed that unlike the comments on my LinkedIn post, which were civil and professional even if the person disagreed with me, many comments on my colleague’s post, especially from one guy, were very personal attacks. Everything from criticizing how my friend dressed, the way in which he presented his message, that he goes by his last name only, and even criticizing the fact that he filmed his post from his mountain house. Seriously?

Disagreeing with someone’s point of view on an issue is one thing. Making it personal is another. The grand irony here is that the very people making their comments personal attacks versus adding value to the overall discussion have shown themselves to be about as unprofessional as you can get. I mean, you do realize that we see your name and picture attached to your comment, right? What if I was a potential customer for what you sell and I read your comments? Do you think I’d give you the time of day after seeing how you behave? Do you honestly think that any buyer would?

Trust me, my colleague is a big boy and handles himself just fine. Unlike the trolls, he responded to the critical comments with grace. He refuses to conform to what other people deem as professional. He has chosen his own path and by his own admission chooses to be himself even if others don’t agree. I have always admired that about him. I haven’t always been that gutsy. And for the record, he is darn successful, so there’s that!

Your brand is your bond. What you say and do online and offline frames a powerful message about who you are as a person and as a professional. Before you decide to troll someone in a public forum for all to see, you might do well to remember that being an A-hole is not a good look. It certainly won’t help win you any sales!

Transform Sales Through Social Selling with Kurt Shaver

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

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

Getting Linked Into Business with Viveka Von Rosen

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

One thing I love about social media, which naysayers will tell you can’t be done, is that I build friendships and relationships with people all over the world but may not have talked to them on the phone or met them in person yet. Such is the case with my guest Viveka Von Rosen. An admirer, I’ve followed Viveka for several years, we’ve communicated in social channels and developed a personal relationship. When we got on Skype to record the interview that was the first time we’d actually talked to each other personally. It was great fun!

In this interview, Viveka tells us about her latest book, and we talked about:

Personal branding and why it is important for anyone in sales but Viveka’s advice also applies to anyone in business.
Common mistakes people make when attempting to brand themselves on LinkedIn.
Tips from Viveka’s book that goes beyond simply personal branding

Another great conversation that I hope you enjoy!

About Viveka

Viveka is the author of best-selling: LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day (http://amazon.com/author/linkedinexpert) & contributing author (expert) to The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn. I help entrepreneurs, corporations, and small business owners use social media for better business and personal branding & more effective conversations with their prospects.

Connect with Viveka on LinkedIn

Another LinkedIn Feature Bites the Dust

By Barbara Giamanco 6 Comments

In what is starting to feel like an almost daily flurry of changes, LinkedIn is at it again. On April 14, say farewell to the Products and Services tab on your LinkedIn Company Page.

Image Courtesy of Sunil Kumar www.iconbug.com

As usual, LinkedIn’s official statement regarding the change suggests that it is all about making life “more simple and efficient for members”, but I’m betting that’s not how Company Page administrators (and that includes me) are feeling about this latest change.

“At LinkedIn, we aim to provide a simple and efficient experience for our members. To do this, we’re continuously evaluating how our current products and features are used, and seeking new ways to focus our resources on building the best products. This sometimes results in the retirement of certain features. So on April 14th, the Products & Services tab will be removed from all LinkedIn Company Pages.”

What This Means for Your Business

First, page administrators have spent countless hours building and keeping fresh the product and services pages for their company. Now they need to download/copy/paste that information to a document and save it. Do it before April 14 or your information is history!

Second, administrators will have to build “Showcase Pages”, which are essentially sub-pages of the main Company Page. This information isn’t automatically transferred over, you must manually rebuild them!

While the idea of a dedicated page – limited to 10 – for your product or service sounds nice, you have to do the work to recreate them, encourage people to follow the individual pages and dedicate more resources to posting status updates on each individual Showcase Page to drive engagement and traffic to your page. Before you go creating all those Showcase Pages, be sure you understand the ongoing support that will be involved.

Third, a key strategy for most of my clients was to secure recommendations from their customers about their products and services. Guess what – recommendations now go by the wayside. Yes, you can copy them and keep for later use but no longer will people see them associated with your Company Page. Ouch.

Here’s what LinkedIn has to say about Showcase Pages:

“While Products & Services is going away, companies can get more visibility for their products and services by using Showcase Pages and Company Updates as an alternative for sharing content:

Showcase Pages allow you to extend your Company Page presence by creating a dedicated page for prominent products and services. A Showcase Page should be used for building long-term relationships with members who want to follow specific aspects of your business, and not for short-term marketing campaigns.

Company Updates are key to building relationships with your page followers. When your followers engage with your updates, it spreads your message to their networks and provides you even greater reach. Updates can be seen by your followers not just on your Company Page, but also on their newsfeed (across all devices including mobile).”

When Does It End?

I’m all for innovation and change, but at what point will individuals and companies say enough? User adoption is tough enough even for platforms as popular with B2B sellers as LinkedIn. Constant changes – without warning – put a big burden on people to continually learn new features or recreate their work and time is tight as it is. It seems to me that LinkedIn is taking a big risk in assuming that their members will continue to go along with it all.

What do you think? At what point is good, good enough? Is a revolving door on feature changes a good thing? If so, when?

UPDATE:

This morning, LinkedIn connection Steve Jones directed me to the LinkedIn help forum where there are a lot of unhappy people voicing their opinion about this change. LinkedIn doesn’t seem to care. The decision most certainly is an arbitrary one to delete member data (yes, I know you can save it, not the point). Seems to me that won’t go far in terms of instilling trust that people should use their platform to share their content. Thoughts?

It’s More Complicated Than That

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

“Become disenchanted with anything that takes complex subjects and breaks them down into “Top 10” lists.” – Brian Solis

Social media has changed business. Today’s buyer looks nothing like the buyers I first met when I began selling 25 years ago. Technology allows them to evade us, block us and downright ignore us if they so choose. It’s a new world, and if you don’t think so, I’m worried for your future in selling.

Anyone who reads my blog posts or articles knows that I am unwavering in my belief that WHAT you sell is less important than HOW you sell. For the sales reps who have, to this point, made a pretty good living selling through feature dumps or demos, understanding that the “what” is less relevant now is a tough transition to make.

That I keep seeing questions or conversations about how to better “cold call” tells me that we have a lot of sellers stuck in the past. A member in one my LinkedIn sales groups asked if you should leave a voice mail when calling someone you don’t know. Group members actually debated techniques…yes, no, phone number in the beginning, compelling pitch in the beginning, phone number at the end… really? Instead of trying to improve upon an outdated mousetrap, get a new one.

Change is needed and it isn’t simple.

I follow a number of highly regarded leaders in sales. One of those leaders is Tamara Schenk, who writes an excellent blog that you should follow. Her recent post on the difference between simplification and simplicity is brilliant. It crystallized for me what the problem is related to the thundering din that is social selling. In their attempts to make social selling sound simple, the usual suspects have created a loud, confusing mass of noise that leaves sales leaders either completely confused – OR – they mistakenly assume, because that’s what they’ve been told, that if their sales people just follow a prescribed set of steps, their sales challenges will dissipate.

There is NO one size fits all.

Are there tactical elements that typically lead to success when using social for selling? Of course. Will they work for every seller, in every industry the same way? No. Should you even start with tactics in the first place? Absolutely not.

You see, that’s the biggest gripe I have regarding the chatter that largely surrounds social selling. It is surface at best. The message has become… just deck out your LinkedIn profile, send InMail to the prospects on your search lists, Tweet the content of industry influencers – so that they will one day reciprocate – and share a few blog posts… boom, you are now a social seller. The top of your funnel will magically fill up, decision makers will scramble to clear their calendars to see you, and deals will close in no time. You wish.

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and succeeding.

“As customers make their decisions differently, every time, because their situation is different – so do sales leaders. There are no silver bullets. Every sales organization’s challenges are specific. Every sales organization’s customers are different. The way that your specific customers want to engage with your sales organization is different as well.” –Tamara Schenk

Social selling is not simply about adopting a new set of “tools”. Success requires developing a new mindset related to selling entirely. A change is required in attitude, approach, process and skill set. Change is tough, it can be messy, and it is painful in the beginning. Leaders must think holistically about what needs to change, what they have to work with – people, tools, process – and what they need that is missing.

I’m not saying don’t give sales people LinkedIn training, but I am saying that isn’t the first place to start. And if that’s all you do, expect limited results.

It's More Complicated Than That

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

“Become disenchanted with anything that takes complex subjects and breaks them down into “Top 10” lists.” – Brian Solis
Social media has changed business. Today’s buyer looks nothing like the buyers I first met when I began selling 25 years ago. Technology allows them to evade us, block us and downright ignore us if they so choose. It’s a new world, and if you don’t think so, I’m worried for your future in selling.
Anyone who reads my blog posts or articles knows that I am unwavering in my belief that WHAT you sell is less important than HOW you sell. For the sales reps who have, to this point, made a pretty good living selling through feature dumps or demos, understanding that the “what” is less relevant now is a tough transition to make.
That I keep seeing questions or conversations about how to better “cold call” tells me that we have a lot of sellers stuck in the past. A member in one my LinkedIn sales groups asked if you should leave a voice mail when calling someone you don’t know. Group members actually debated techniques…yes, no, phone number in the beginning, compelling pitch in the beginning, phone number at the end… really? Instead of trying to improve upon an outdated mousetrap, get a new one.
Change is needed and it isn’t simple.
I follow a number of highly regarded leaders in sales. One of those leaders is Tamara Schenk, who writes an excellent blog that you should follow. Her recent post on the difference between simplification and simplicity is brilliant. It crystallized for me what the problem is related to the thundering din that is social selling. In their attempts to make social selling sound simple, the usual suspects have created a loud, confusing mass of noise that leaves sales leaders either completely confused – OR – they mistakenly assume, because that’s what they’ve been told, that if their sales people just follow a prescribed set of steps, their sales challenges will dissipate.
There is NO one size fits all.
Are there tactical elements that typically lead to success when using social for selling? Of course. Will they work for every seller, in every industry the same way? No. Should you even start with tactics in the first place? Absolutely not.
You see, that’s the biggest gripe I have regarding the chatter that largely surrounds social selling. It is surface at best. The message has become… just deck out your LinkedIn profile, send InMail to the prospects on your search lists, Tweet the content of industry influencers – so that they will one day reciprocate – and share a few blog posts… boom, you are now a social seller. The top of your funnel will magically fill up, decision makers will scramble to clear their calendars to see you, and deals will close in no time. You wish.
If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and succeeding.
“As customers make their decisions differently, every time, because their situation is different – so do sales leaders. There are no silver bullets. Every sales organization’s challenges are specific. Every sales organization’s customers are different. The way that your specific customers want to engage with your sales organization is different as well.” –Tamara Schenk
Social selling is not simply about adopting a new set of “tools”. Success requires developing a new mindset related to selling entirely. A change is required in attitude, approach, process and skill set. Change is tough, it can be messy, and it is painful in the beginning. Leaders must think holistically about what needs to change, what they have to work with – people, tools, process – and what they need that is missing.
I’m not saying don’t give sales people LinkedIn training, but I am saying that isn’t the first place to start. And if that’s all you do, expect limited results.

LinkedIn Keeps Changing it Up

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

You’ve probably noticed that LinkedIn continues to make changes to the platform. There are so many rolling out – and at various times with no real warning (except if you read their blog) – that you might be having trouble keeping up.

In an earlier post, I talked about changes to the navigation structure, which you can read about here.

In this brief guide to what’s changed, learn about these feature changes and additions:

Who’s Viewed Your Updates
Unified Search
Groups
Company Page Analystics
Sponsored Updates
Education

Who’s Viewed Your Updates

The sharing of content is a core component of today’s social selling strategy. Visibility counts, as does being able to demonstrate that you are a thought leader in your field. But how do you know if anyone is actually paying attention to what you are sharing? Well, now you can.

LinkedIn provides you with the ability to monitor how well the content you share resonates with your audience. On the home page, you find the feature in the right sidebar beneath Who’s Viewed Your Profile. Quickly, you will be able to see the number of people who Viewed what you shared, who Liked the content or who added their Comment. Pretty cool insights to help you determine quickly what content works and what doesn’t. You can also scroll back through prior updates to compare numbers against prior topics.

Search

Unified search is the term used for a streamlined way to search the information on LinkedIn whether it is People, Companies, Groups, Jobs or your Inbox. You don’t even need to select the drop down arrow to the left to select your topic. As you can see in the picture, I typed in the word “sales” and those things that are related to sales pop up in an ordered list.

As happens when changes are made, some features are gone that you may have liked. If you were a fan of searching Updates AKA Signal to find content that others were sharing quickly, you’ll be disappointed to know that – for now anyway – that feature is gone. I’ll keep you posted if that changes.

To see more details on the rest of the changes – CLICK HERE!

About Viveka

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