Birthdays, Social Marketing...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Tue, Mar 18, 2014

birthdays resized 600Last week I celebrated my xx birthday.   No magic number.  No big celebration.  But, as a friend of mine from my daily high school email posse remarked... "Having birthdays is a whole lot better than not having them".  James Geshwiler and Maia Heymann began our 8:00 Monday morning  status call at Common Angels by singing "Happy Birthday".  Mike Schumann, VP of Sales at Salsify, asked through Linked In how it felt to be 49? I responded, of course, that "I wouldn't know...yet." 70 of my FaceBook friends chimed in with best wishes and another couple of hundred through Linked In. And, yes, I did get two actual paper birthday cards...from the cats.  And, oh yeah, I bought myself a car as a birthday gift.

Cards, email groups, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all contribute to the fun of staying in touch, or just simply expressing a "Hi" or two, and reaching out to express an emotion for the good and the bad times of both our business and personal lives.  Communication today is just a wonderful process of consistent new and exciting exploration.  It's easy, efficient, highly effective and, most importantly, lots of fun.

So, what's the connection to sales?  It's social marketing!

  • Are you using Facebook and Linked In to acknowledge your customers' events?  You should be!
  • Are you using social marketing to plan out your conferences, golf outings and company summer events?  Now is the time to do this!
  • Do you use social for your general communication with customers? You need to!

If you think that social doesn't belong in your business day-to-day, check out Jack McCollough of KPMG on Facebook and Linked In.  He's got all the experience and all of the MIT degrees that you would expect from someone in his position, but the reason that I and most people recommend him and his firm is that Jack is a real guy.  Someone you would trust. And one of the reasons that sense of reality and trust comes across is through his persona on Facebook. 

A couple of questions for your next sales meeting:

  • Do you all use the same social sales process?
  • Do you all use the same policies?
  • Do you need to bring in a social expert for a day of training?

My experience is that these few simple questions will prompt a lot of discussion and additional questions. What you want to do is to have everyone aligned in their use of social the same way that they're aligned in your selling process and the use of their sales tools.

Good Selling for the next couple of weeks as you crunch down to the end of the quarter!
 Jack Derby 

No better way to learn about how to create, train and deliver effective use of your social marketing while improving your own sales management skills than from speakers such as Greg Flynn, the President of Brainshark , Mike Volpe, the SVP of Marketing from HubSpot and Zorian Rotenberg, VP of Sales & Marketing from Insight Squared who will be part of our upcoming Sales Management Boot Camp.  To learn more...

  1. Click on the icon below for an outline of what takes place.  
  2. You can also click HERE for a more detailed agenda
  3. Or just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com, for a 10 minute call

Sales Management Boot Camp

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales effectiveness, sales management training, sales training, sales boot camp, sales management boot camps