Networking

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.

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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!

Link Out to Build Trust and Build Your Business with Leslie Grossman

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this episode, I talked with Leslie Grossman, author of the book Link Out: How to Turn Your Network into a Chain of Lasting Connections.

So, I was curious. We all know LinkedIn but I started by asking Leslie what she meant by Link Out.

We also talked about:

When it comes to trust, the most effective ways to build trust with a customer or client.

How many people find typical networking ineffective in making sales, yet they force themselves to do it. Leslie tells me why she thinks that happens.

The most important communication skill you need to master to be successful in sales.

You will also learn how to build your own entourage, which Leslie delivered a TEDx talk about.

Finally, I closed by asking Leslie to share her advice to women looking to move into leadership roles.

Enjoy the interview!

About Leslie:

Leslie Grossman is an award-winning entrepreneur who advises, trains and speaks on business development, leadership, and marketing, Her most recent book Link Out: How To Turn Your Network into a Chain of Lasting Connectors (Wiley) puts a spotlight on building trusted relationships to achieve your goals.

She is the founder of Leslie Grossman Leadership and speaks throughout the world about how trusted relationships transform your business and career. After leading a marketing agency for 12 years, Leslie created the Women’s Leadership Exchange, the first national conference series to propel the businesses of women business owners and professionals reaching more than 65,000 women through more than 100 live events and online programs. Leslie is an executive coach and Chair for Vistage International, the largest peer advisory board organization in the world. She is on the adjunct faculty for The George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership and coaches entrepreneurs and women executives to break-through to the top by building relationships and transforming habits that dilute their leadership potential. Grossman’s previous book SELLsation! How Companies Can Capture Today’s Hottest Market: Women Business Owners and Executives made her a popular speaker on business development for companies like Aetna, Axa, NorthWestern Mutual, IBM, Best Buy, American Express, and IKEA.

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Your Brand | Your Career | Your Journey with Lindsay Zwart

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

I love this topic because it is a reminder that we are the owners of our plan for work and life! My guest in this segment was Lindsay Zwart, Microsoft General Manager of the US SM&SP National Sales Organization (NSO).
Lindsay is an advocate for women in leadership roles. She told me why that advocacy is so important to her.
We also talked about:
Why Lindsay believes women need to put more emphasis on building their brand and why she believes that it is important for career success.
To be successful, we certainly cannot go it alone. I asked Lindsay to share her advice for networking effectively – inside and outside of any organization where you work.
How Lindsay’s international experience has been of value to her working for Microsoft and how she leverages experience that in her career.
Lindsay also shared her suggestions for women to help them identify their next roles and once those roles are identified, how to create a plan to get there.
Finally, we talked about work/life balance because Lindsay is an extremely busy executive, as all the women in this leadership series are. Lindsay talked about how she maintains the balance between work and her home life. Good stuff!
Enjoy the interview!
This episode is sponsored by Hubspot.
HubSpot CRM makes it easy to organize, track, and grow your pipeline. And it’s free. Forever! You should give it a try right NOW!
About Lindsay:
Lindsay Zwart is General Manager of the US SM&SP National Sales Organization (NSO) at Microsoft. Lindsay’s team manages Corporate Accounts Licensing and in SMS&P, Software Asset Management, Sales Excellence and CTM Strategy. Lindsay previously led the U.S. Dynamics Partner, Industry and SMB Sales organization, the Dynamics Country Lead for New Zealand, and led the consulting team within the Microsoft Services organization. Lindsay worked for IBM before joining Microsoft. She enjoys working in a vibrant, collaborative environment, and is an advocate for supporting women in leadership roles and empowering people through trust and accountability. When not working, Lindsay enjoys time with her husband and two girls, ages 12 and 9, keeping busy with sporting activities and adventures.
Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn and Twitter

Your Brand | Your Career | Your Journey with Lindsay Zwart

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Lindsay is an advocate for women in leadership roles. She told me why that advocacy is so important to her.

We also talked about:

Why Lindsay believes women need to put more emphasis on building their brand and why she believes that it is important for career success.

To be successful, we certainly cannot go it alone. I asked Lindsay to share her advice for networking effectively – inside and outside of any organization where you work.

How Lindsay’s international experience has been of value to her working for Microsoft and how she leverages experience that in her career.

Lindsay also shared her suggestions for women to help them identify their next roles and once those roles are identified, how to create a plan to get there.

Finally, we talked about work/life balance because Lindsay is an extremely busy executive, as all the women in this leadership series are. Lindsay talked about how she maintains the balance between work and her home life. Good stuff!

Enjoy the interview!

This episode is sponsored by Hubspot.

HubSpot CRM makes it easy to organize, track, and grow your pipeline. And it’s free. Forever! You should give it a try right NOW!

About Lindsay:

Lindsay Zwart is General Manager of the US SM&SP National Sales Organization (NSO) at Microsoft. Lindsay’s team manages Corporate Accounts Licensing and in SMS&P, Software Asset Management, Sales Excellence and CTM Strategy. Lindsay previously led the U.S. Dynamics Partner, Industry and SMB Sales organization, the Dynamics Country Lead for New Zealand, and led the consulting team within the Microsoft Services organization. Lindsay worked for IBM before joining Microsoft. She enjoys working in a vibrant, collaborative environment, and is an advocate for supporting women in leadership roles and empowering people through trust and accountability. When not working, Lindsay enjoys time with her husband and two girls, ages 12 and 9, keeping busy with sporting activities and adventures.

Connect with Lindsay on LinkedIn and Twitter

Go Fish! Turning Blah Blah Blah into Bling

By Barbara Giamanco 2 Comments

Convincing people to buy from you is sort of like fishing. To catch those fish you need a product or service that someone else needs, a process you work consistently, a hook with the right kind of bait, patience and great timing. When it gets right down to it, your ability to attract clients and close sales is not that much different.

Ditch the pitch.

If you stop and think about it for a minute, it’s pretty obvious that Mr. or Ms. Fish isn’t likely to swim right up to you and jump on that hook the moment you throw it in the water. Why then would you expect your potential client to pry open their wallet the moment you throw something at them? Call me old fashioned, but I do believe that you don’t get a second chance to make a great first impression. The quality of that first interaction, whether it is email, the phone or a social media conversation, matters.

And that’s the problem.

Blah Blah Blah

Salespeople and marketers continue to complain that decision makers are harder to reach. It’s true, they are. There is a reason why less than 10% of those emails and phone calls are ignored. Sellers and marketers only have themselves to blame. Don’t think so? In a Digital Marketing Digest released by Silverpop, they say that “Buyers, fed up with crowded inboxes and irrelevant advertising noise, are shutting out content that isn’t relevant to them and using search and social to control their own buyer journeys.”

Though I am a huge proponent of using social media as part of your sales game plan, I also don’t believe that email and email marketing is going away any time soon. To stand out, your message must be relevant to the person you are sending it too.

It is NOT about you.

Most sales messages (AKA sales spam) that I see or receive are overly “me” centric. It’s all about the company, the product or that last infusion of cash they received from a major investor. These messages are focused on your sales agenda when it should focus on the buyers agenda. If you don’t communicate your message from the buyers point of view, you lose. Buyers want answers to their business problems. If you can show them that you solve those problems, you have a shot at a customer for life. But a word of caution… when I say, “show them how you solve their problem”, I do not mean rolling into your pitch and demo.

Your potential customers do not care about the process of how you get things done. Nor do they really care about the technical details, at least not at the beginning of their decision making journey. Of course, at some point the technical details, or the process of how you get things done will matter, but that isn’t what you lead with in your early stage sales conversations. What buyers care about is the actual RESULT they receive when they buy from you. Demonstrate that you’ve done your homework, understand their business and the competitive challenges they are likely facing. Show them how, working together, you not only are positioned to help solve business problems, but that you can help them create an adoption roadmap that will ensure the success of their purchase and deliver the return on their investment.

Message matters.

In more ways than one. Whether you know it or not, the random, pitchy emails you are sending are either uplifting your brand or slowly killing it over time. If expanded networks (with the right targeted buyer) and more leads in the pipeline is the goal, now would be a good time to do a complete overhaul of the sales message strategy you are using.

Forget the process and all the jargon. Talk about the problems you solve and the tangible results you deliver. That’s how you turn blah blah blah into BLING!

Numbers Don’t Equal Influence

By Barbara Giamanco 3 Comments

A seller’s most important asset is her network. Prior to the internet and social networks, we cultivated our networks slowly, over time.

Salespeople certainly had larger than average networks, since knowing a lot of people opened more doors, which led to more deals, but unless you were a super connector, your network would mostly be comprised of people in your local geography. Typically where you lived and the sales territory you supported were often one and same.

The introduction of business networking sites like LinkedIn blew all that up.

Now our networks span the globe. Think “pen pal” on steroids. Using Skype, it is not uncommon for me to talk to four or five people each week who live outside the United States. As an example, last week I talked to people in London, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and Israel. The ability to be globally connected also presents us with unique opportunities to team up with others to conduct business. I personally think that’s incredibly cool.

There’s a dark side.

Early in the history of social media’s evolution, it was not uncommon for people to publicly brag about their number of Twitter followers, email subscribers or LinkedIn network connections. I imagine many still do. On the surface, large numbers sound impressive and certainly bolsters the braggart’s ego when people gasp or applaud admiringly. Me? I’m not impressed.

I’m not impressed because…

• If you find it necessary to blatantly self-promote at every opportunity, I have to wonder why.
• Numbers on their own do not drive ROI – Return on Influence, Impact and Investment.

When I was writing The New Handshake: Sales Meet Social Media in 2009, I believed then, as I have my entire career that it is the mashup of quality plus quantity that matters. Collecting numbers is not the same as developing the interpersonal relationships that lead to the influence you need to be a successful seller.

Yeah, I’m sure I’ll get some flak on this one, but it is my opinion based on my own experience.

Number collectors are why I’ve never been a fan of the LinkedIn LION (LinkedIn Open Networker) concept. These folks will connect with anyone that breathes. With rare exception, there is only one reason they do it. They want bragging rights.

Let’s set aside LinkedIn’s policy for a moment, which says that you connect only with people you actually know, how can you have a relationship with 20,000 individual or more people? Call me a cynic, but my answer is that you can’t.

Words are words and numbers are numbers.

When I think about the ROI of selling, I think a lot about whether or not I’m having a positive impact that influences someone in a good way. Having a large number of connections or followers, does not necessarily make anyone influential. It is easy to talk about “paying it forward” or “giving first”, but in the end, it is the action behind the words and numbers that tell the real story. The question is are you able to discern the difference?

LinkedIn Taking a Cue from Twitter?

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Interesting that LinkedIn is becoming more Twitter like every day. They are now rolling out the Mentions feature, which is a nifty way to engage people in viewing and contributing their comments to your updates. Think @barbaragiamanco on Twitter and now you can do something similar on LinkedIn.

The feature also lets you mention companies and when you do your message is then linked to their LinkedIn company page from your update or comment.

Here’s how it works:

Go to your homepage share box to post your update or click “comment” on someone else’s update.
Type “@” and then begin typing a name in the box. You’ll then see a list of potential people or companies you can mention.
Click a name you want from the list and continue typing your message.

Note: LinkedIn members outside your network can also be mentioned if they’ve commented on the same update.

After you select someone from the list and finish your update, that person will receive an email that lets them know that you’ve mentioned them. The name will also be linked to a profile or Company Page from your update.

Maria mentioned me in her Status Update, and I received an email notification. Not only is it clear she is giving me visibility with her network of connections, but I have the opportunity to respond and thank her for doing so.

LinkedIn has certainly progressed since back in the day. As one of the first 1 million members using LinkedIn – number 874,098 to be exact, much has changed. In case you weren’t aware of it, LinkedIn celebrated its 10^th anniversary on Cinco de Mayo (that’s May 5 for you gringo’s). In 10 years’ time, I’ve seen the platform evolve into a powerhouse sales tool. From the beginning, I believed that if LinkedIn could help someone secure that next career gig by harnessing the power of their LinkedIn network, it seemed obvious that the same principle would apply to sales.

Check out the new Mentions feature and keep me posted on how it is improving the engagement in your LinkedIn network. And remember that this feature is just the next in a wave of more to come. In an upcoming post, I’ll write about what’s coming with Contacts. You will be wowed!

P.S. Ask me how I know my LinkedIn member number. Do you know yours?

Sales Spam at a New Level

By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Wow, just when you thought that salespeople couldn’t get more desperate or sink any lower…along comes this spam mail through our website contact page. Forget how crazy time consuming this must be jumping around to people’s websites, but what is truly ironic is that this unenlightened salesperson (and I’m being nice here) apparently didn’t bother to notice that I had just written a blog post about the inappropriateness of sales spam. Talk about not knowing your audience!

So…here’s the message:

“Good Afternoon, I am getting in touch with training companies from a variety of backgrounds who all currently deliver face to face and material lead courses. My question is have you converted any of your training content to be served online and sold to your current client base? The reason for such a questions is simply that there are many training companies unaware of the additional revenue that can be achieved quickly and easily by converting present content and methods to an online version, this in turn can supplement or create a completely new revenue stream from clients both incumbent and previously unobtainable. In order to do this you need to source an appropriate learning management system (LMS) provider. The XYZ LMS platform is ideal for those who have developed or are looking to develop online training content and want to organize, distribute, track and report on all content across multiple user populations. We let clients focus on their core competencies and creation of quality content without worrying about the ongoing delivery to customers. We also provide industry advice on the most common tools and methods to use in the content development stage and would be happy to answer any questions and provide insight on this. I will follow up shortly but if you can advise on the above or indicate the correct person to speak to please get in touch. All the best, Sales Idiot (ok, not the real name but hey, it’s my post).”

Seriously, your thoughts? The truth is that I might have actually been interested in talking to this guy, but I won’t give him the time of day now, because he is clearly clueless. The message isn’t personalized…same message apparently to every other “training” company. He spent zero time understanding who we are and what we believe in, which is inexcusable given he was on our website. How could you miss it? And, follow up shortly? Does he plan to keep reaching out to us via our website contact form? Who knows how long it will take to get rid of him.

There are so many things I want to help change about the profession of sales, but for now, sales spam tops the list! What tops your list?

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