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?

Most of us recognize the influence that corporate brands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, Zappos, Google, Microsoft, Nike or Starbucks have on our buying decisions. But how much focus do most of us put on the most important brand of all – our own?

Wikipedia defines personal branding “as the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands. It has been noted that while previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging.”

Just a few short years ago, personal branding wasn’t really such a big topic of discussion. These days, however, it has everything to do with succeeding, especially in the social selling space. According to William Arruda, a personal branding guru, personal branding is a revolution in the way we manage our careers or businesses. It’s a way of clarifying and communicating what makes you different and using those qualities to separate yourself from your competitors.

You are the CEO of Brand U

Some years ago, in a Fast Company article, business guru Tom Peters advises individuals to follow the lead of the corporate world and do what they have been doing for years: create your own personal brand. Peters says that no matter what your career title, you are really the CEO of your own personal service company: Me, Incorporated. He says each of us is “a free agent in an economy of free agents” and that we all must establish our own “micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh.”

How does this fit social media?

Your personal brand is the firm impression or image that comes to mind when people think about you. It’s a mental picture someone forms about you when your name is mentioned. Whether we like it or not, prospective buyers Google our name, check out our website and look us up on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. In addition to our actions, words, clothes and behavior making a statement about who we are and what we offer, our online presence does the same thing. When you have seconds to create a lasting impression, one that contributes to achieving your revenue goals, it is important to honestly evaluate how your personal brand stacks up. Once you do, you can develop strategies to minimize those things that are detracting from the message you mean to convey.

Consistent branding based on authenticity can help you improve partnering and cultivate loyalty. –David Cohen, Creative Start-Up Veteran and Brand Strategist at Equation Arts.

Starting today – YOU are a brand!

Social media provides everyone the chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of something remarkable and memorable. Take the time to ask yourself the same question that brand managers at top companies ask themselves: What is it that my product or service does that makes it different? Challenge yourself to shrink it down to 15-words-or-less. Write down your answer. Then take the time to read it – several times. Think about…

• The qualities or characteristics that make you distinctive from your competitors or your peers.
• How you have made yourself stand out today, this week or this month.
• What others would say is your greatest and clearest strength?

Shelve your biased thinking that a personal brand doesn’t matter when it comes to being successful selling your products or services. In today’s world, it is everything! If you want to achieve your goals, developing your brand is a must not a luxury.

Remember, even if you choose not to proactively define your personal brand, others are certain to do it for you. Will you like what they say?

Today, I spent lunchtime listening to a very informative webinar hosted by the folks at Marketing Profs. I signed up because I was intrigued by the title: How to Be a Social Media Strategist, Not the Social Help Desk. It was 90-minutes well spent. Jeremiah Owyang was the guest presenter, and I learned quite a lot from his session, as I always do.

Frankly, there was enough great information in today’s session to keep me busy blogging for several days, and what really caught my attention was when Jeremiah talked about a framework for social media measurement. I have often said that you can get started with tracking by setting specific and measureable objectives – upfront – as a component of your social media strategy. Truth be told, this works as a starting point, but the larger the organization the more important it is to have a measurement framework in place. In other words, companies need something more formal with which to evaluate their social media success.  In fact, Altimeter’s report on the Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist, notes that 48% of corporations said that their top priority is in creating a solid measurement process for evaluating social ROI.

Cool…how do you do it?

“The novice provide executives with engagement data –causing themselves to be stuck in the churn of obtaining more followers and fans –without a clear business goal.” –Jeremiah Owyang

While Altimeter’s research underscores the importance of measurement, the question businesses executives need to be asking is are you measuring the right things? Too much emphasis these days is placed on number of followers and fans and Altimeter’s own research discovered that some 65% of companies are measuring “engagement” with only 22% using “product revenue” as a metric. Hum. From a sales perspective it seems to me that you want to be tracking product and services sales and not just “engagement”.  Ironically, the focus on engagement means that it’s darn hard to tie the effects of “awareness” to physical sales, so it’s probably time to think about how to move beyond strictly looking at followers and fans and what nice (or not so nice) things they have to say about your brand.

The Social ROI Pyramid

“The seasoned professional provides executives with business metrics first. They know fans and followers aren’t a business goal, but what you do with them is.” –Jeremiah Owyang

5 Elements were referenced in Jeremiah’s presentation with respect to “standardizing” an approach for measuring social success across the organization. They are:

1. Start with a business goal in mind. No argument here, because it is something that I whole heartedly believe in and preach.
2. Provide the right data to the right people. Not everyone in your org needs the same information. Take the time to break it down and make it applicable to the respective roles within the company.
3. Vary the frequency and quantity of the data that you provide. As an example, top execs don’t need to be subjected to nauseating levels of detail that some social strategist’s feel compelled to provide. Similar to public speaking – know your audience and provide the information to them accordingly.
4. Customize your formulas. Industry standards don’t exist at this point and they might not for some time. You don’t need to wait though. Create the analytics that best support your business goals now and plan to adapt and refine them as you move forward.
5. Benchmark over time. According to Jeremiah, specific numbers are not as important as watching for the trend lines over time. In order to determine those monthly, quarterly and annual trends, you must start measuring now in order to gain the insight that you and your social media teams will need going forward.

The message that came through loud and clear today is that anyone responsible for social media strategy must have an organized process and measurement approach nailed down before they dive head first into that next glitzy Facebook campaign! To do otherwise means you’ll probably bomb out.

It’s common in the world of sales to talk about “calling high” in the organization. The idea being that getting to the higher levels means access to bigger budgets, as the execs at the top have the view from the top so to speak. At lower levels of the organization, budgets are smaller and competition can be tight for those dollars. But at the executive level, budgets can be moved around and combined for the right types of opportunities.

This is the new world of social sales where it should be much easier to get to the right decision makers at the right time. So I find it curious that most sales reps still tend to start their sales activities at the lower levels of the company versus getting to the relevant senior executive. I wondered why and decided to ask members of my favorite LinkedIn group - Sales Playbook – this question, “What are the top reasons that most sales people can’t seem to get a foot in the door to the C-Suite?” Reasons like fear, feeling “less than” and inexperience showed up. I happen to like how fellow Sales Playbook member @JerryVoltero summed it up. He said…

1. Lack of preparation to know who the true decision maker is that they should be talking to.

2. They do a lousy job of building rapport with the gatekeeper and don’t give them a strong enough argument for them to be the one who gets to come in and utilize some of that exec’s valuable time. Remember the gatekeeper’s job is to not waste the exec’s time.

3. If you are using a bottom up approach to get there, you have to get your champion to advocate with both the exec and the gatekeeper to get that proverbial foot in the door.

4. And once you get there, you better know what to ask them to figure out whether or not what you are selling will solve the business problem he/she has. Preparation is the key for sure.

And to Jerry’s point #4, preparation is not only key, it is critical! You may have a great product, perhaps even the best in your field, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore preparation. You may have the best product or service, but if you enter the sales process at the wrong time OR you don’t have the buy-in from the relevant senior executive, you have a big problem.

In today’s world of instantaneous access to information there is no excuse for lack of planning. Authors Nicholas Read and Stephen Bistritz remind us that…

“If you don’ take the time to stay current on your customers and prospects, the information won’t pop into your head by itself.” –Selling to the C-Suite.

I think that about sums it up!

You’ve decided to launch a blog. That’s terrific, congratulations. With roughly 200 million blogs out there, it is hard to ignore the power of blogging’s potential and power. In what remains one of my favorite social media videos, Erik Qualman’s Social Revolution 2, tells us that 35% of bloggers post “opinions” about products and brands. There are certainly huge benefits to using the power of a blog to create community with your clients and future buyers. If they are posting their opinions for others to read, don’t you want them talking favorably about you? That one’s easy…of course you do.

Right now, I’m making the assumption that you’ve…

• Determined your purpose? Check.
• Have your plan defined? You bet.
• Metrics for success established? Absolutely.
• Technology chosen? Yup, have that conquered.

So far, so good. You are moving in the right direction. Right about now it is probably tempting to assume that the tough work is behind you, right? Not so fast. What about that content?

Becoming an inbound marketer is critical to your social sales success these days say the folks over at Hubspot. They’re right by the way! Your job is to provide really great content that compels people to come back to your site again and again while encouraging them to bring their networks along with them. But as you may have considered – or maybe you haven’t but you need too – it’s not so easy deciding what to communicate moment to moment, day in and day out, much less putting it into execution, is it? Recognizing how important it is to create engaging, valuable content that people will benefit from that is consistently fresh, relevant and interesting is a tall order. So, your first order of business is to establish your Social Media Posting Schedule.

What’s a social media posting schedule?
Think of it as a tactical plan that keeps you focused on what you want to communicate (post/blog about) to each of the social channels that you engage in. Think blogs, social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook pages and more. You want to think about your messaging themes, topics, who will contribute the content, what date you’ll post your message, etc. Since we’re talking about blogs today, what you need to remember is that once you know WHEN you need to post information and WHAT you’ll be communicating, it makes the process of creating your blog posts less daunting. But to make the schedule work of course, you need gather content.

Since you might be asking…what do I say on my blog each day anyway? To help get you jumpstarted…here are 13 (my lucky number!) ideas for gathering great content:

1. Carry a notebook for blog post ideas…and for those moments of brilliance that pop up at inopportune times. You might have an experience at the local market that leads you to think…hum, that’s something I should talk about. I’m suggesting that you keep a separate notebook for your blog post ideas. That way they are all in one place. When you sit down to consider what you want to write, you want all your ideas front and center in one place.

2. Follow top bloggers in your field. Find the real influencers not just the people with a lot of follower numbers. Regularly contribute to their community by commenting. For your own blog, build on the theme of their posts and the comments in the community. Quote these blogging influencers and link back to their blogs. And, and don’t forget to pay attention to who they talk about or recommend. More potential content for your posts.

3. Repurpose content. What have you previously written about that could be updated for current relevance? Not everything must be created from scratch, but the key is to be relevant. Don’t just “reprint” any outdated piece of work. Add a new spin based on learning’s since you first wrote the piece. I recently posted a post entitled Social Sales One Year Later. I started with a quote from what I had written one year earlier and then talked about what had happened since I first penned the words.

4. Record your brilliance. Most phones (unless your phone is from the dark ages) have software that lets your record your conversations. When that inspiration hits, record immediately. Trying to recall it later will be fruitless. Plus, if you are driving in your car, I don’t recommend digging for the notebook just then. Not in Atlanta anyway.

5. Ask questions, record the responses. Surveys, polls, starting group discussion…by virtue of the answers you receive, great blog posts can come. For example, you might ask your network what they think the traits of a superstar sales person are. Those responses are valuable far beyond having content for your blog posts. Its valuable research information that just may lead to the creation of a new product or maybe it will validate something that you already knew. Either way, it’s all good.

6. Use video. Have you read a book published in your field that inspired you? Create a 2-minute video book review. That becomes your blog post for the day. Or, search out topical videos on YouTube that you can share via blog posts. You simply add a few of your comments of your own to kick off the post, embed the video and let the video do the talking.

7. Webinars. Make it a point to sit in on a few webinars a month specific to your field. You may want to simply report on the webinar in a blog post. Tell people what you learned and why you thought the time you spent was valuable. Include a link back to the archived webinar if available. Or, you may take an idea or two from the session and expand upon it in a slightly different way. If your company hosted the webinar or you were speakers then similar to video, add a few comments about the webinar and include the link to let people listen from there. A word of caution…if the webinar is simply a “sales pitch” versus something topical and informational then ignore what I just said about promoting it. That will look self-serving.

8. Interview people. Thinking back to your social media posting schedule, let’s say that your theme for the week is social media ROI. You can develop a short list of people you’d like to interview. Once you’ve conducted the interview, you have material for your post and that of your guest. You can conduct your interview using the phone or posing your questions over email, but be sure to ask if the person you plan to interview has a preference. The interview gives you both great marketing content and should include links back to each other’s website.

9. Podcasts. Pretty much like the webinars. Listen, learn and leverage. Oh, and the great thing about podcasts is that you can take them on the go. Go to the park, listen to a podcast and either create your blog post on the spot or get the draft of it written by hand. The point is to be strategic; leverage your down time throughout the day.

10. Social media status updates. Scan what others are posting across the web. Is there anything interesting there that you can use for your blog post? Before you start complaining about the time this will take, I want you to sit yourself down – right now – and sign up for Netvibes. Netvibes lets you establish “dashboards” on topics, people, companies and more. Once you create the “search string” if you will, all you need to do is check your dashboards. Everything from Twittertweets to video posts to content all over the web, Netvibes grabs the content across the web and brings it to you. All you need to do is choose what to write about or respond to.

11. Invite guest bloggers. There are plenty of people out there looking for the opportunity to contribute content to the blogs of others. Who do you know in your industry? What about current colleagues? How about customers? You want to make sure that the message of your guests is in alignment with what you want to accomplish with your blog, but I think you get the idea. Don’t think you have to do the work all by yourself. Mix it up now and then. Makes it easier on you and readers like it.

12. Subscribe to news publications (online and print) that apply to your industry. Make a commitment to scan them immediately to look for writing ideas based on the current theme of the month. As an example, the November/December edition of Selling Power Magazine has provided me with content ideas for a number of blog posts for the next few weeks. Don’t forget that you might read about an individual or company that you would like to interview.

13. Join research communities that support your industry. The investment will pay off in the long run. As a premier member of Marketing Profs, I have access to current information, training, webinars, podcasts and a vast array of information to real time content that benefits me as a business owner. One client paid for my membership, so I consider the investment MORE than worth it. BTW, I’m not a partner nor do I receive any compensation from Marketing Profs. I thinkAnn Handley is great, and I highly recommend that you follow her on Twitter. I love the company’s work!

Delivering on the promise of a great blog is hard work, but the rewards are infinitely worth it. Aside from the 13 suggestions I’ve offered for gathering information, I hope you’ll embrace blogging as an opportunity to engage people like never before. Not to mention that you are creating great content for your next Amazonbest seller.