The Funnelholic

July 25 through July 29 is Social Business week on Focus.com. If you’ve read my blog, you know that I’m a fan of the Social CRM movement, but I am not an expert - so I’m leaving that to the pros. I am sticking to my expertise, hosting a couple of events about social and sales and marketing. I am hosting a webinar with the master of content/inbound/social media marketing, Mike Volpe, on Friday, July 29, at 1 pm PT. Before that, I am hosting a social selling roundtable at 11 am PT with Nigel Edelshain, Miles Austin and Koka Sexton. It’s fun trading ideas for using social for a lot of things. Sales is definitely a favorite of mine.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from folks is not having enough time for social endeavors. I usually tell people I wouldn’t recommend it if it’s a time-suck. So I’ve compiled a list of easy things that salespeople can do, none of which seems too scary or daunting - and it can all be done right away. Let me know what you would add to the following list.

1. Create a LinkedIn profile.
2. Fill it out completely, including a picture.
3. Upgrade your account.
4. Watch every day from your upgraded LinkedIn account to see who clicked on your profile.
5. Connect with as many of your business and personal contacts as you can.
6. Move beyond business cards - get in the habit of connecting with people immediately after you meet them.
7. Spend some time seeing if your prospects are connected to any of your contacts and ask for a referral.
8. Join LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry. Not just so you can see the conversations happening in your space, but so you can join the same “clubs” that your prospects are in.
9. Figure out where your prospects are on the Internet (with only a few cases, everyone is). Is it Twitter, LinkedIn, focus.com, etc.? It could even be a message board somewhere.
10. Watch them. Remember the title of this post is “easy.” Don’t worry about doing much; you can just watch. You will gain insight into your prospects that you’ve never had before.
11. Recognize their good works. If they write an insightful blog post or answer a question really well, send them a note.
12. Find the top influencers in your space (they will be on Twitter or Google if they are influencers) and follow them.
13. Create a social relationship with the influencers. This is akin to being friends with the cool kids at school.
14. Before a sales call, look up your prospect’s or customer’s recent social “works” - posts, tweets, Q&A. Mention it to them; they will love it.

There - was that hard? Let’s just start with that. There’s more…but you gotta start somewhere.

From Monday, July 11, through Friday, July 15, Focus.com is presenting Focus B2B Marketing Week, rolling out a bunch of webinars and roundtable panels that will bring together the top experts in their fields to discuss the state of B2B marketing today.

Couple things to note:

• Wednesday at 10 am PT is a webinar with Ardath Albee and me. Everything else is a roundtable.
• You can catch all the action by clicking here.
• Ask questions before, during and after the event in the event interfaces.

For speaker details and to attend, click the event links below.

Monday July 11

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: How to Set Up an Effective Marketing Organization

Tuesday July 12

11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing Tactics That Work (And the Ones That Don’t)

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Modern B2B Marketing Strategies

Wednesday July 13

10 am PT/1 pm ET: The Four Types of Prospect Attention and How They Affect Demand Generation

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: B2B Lead Generation: How To Use the Phone to Drive High Quality Leads

Thursday July 14

9 am PT/12 pm ET: The Key to Sales and Marketing Alignment

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Expert Best Practices in Content Marketing

Friday July 15

11 am PT/2 pm ET: B2B Marketing 3.0: What’s Next for B2B Marketers?

1 pm PT/4 pm ET: Tips on Generating Leads for Yourself

Sign up to attend now — it should be awesome.

Today The Funnelholic is pleased to introduce Jesse Noyes, the in-house journalist at Eloqua, who covers the trends, surprises, events and the movers and shakers of the marketing industry. Guest posts don’t often appear here, but Jesse came to The Funnelholic saying he was dying to spit some “funnel” game, and he thought this would be the place to do it. Now, that is my kind of opportunity. He sent over what he wanted to post and it was great — far better than what I can do. So, now The Guestpost-aholic is lucky enough to have a great post from Jesse. I hope everyone enjoys it as well.

Quick question: How many different illustrations of a funnel are floating around in your sales and marketing departments? Two? Ten? Too many to count?

Continue Reading »

I just moderated the Focus Roundtable: How Important is the Phone to Growing Revenues, and it was off the hook. Lori Richardson put it together, and what was really cool is she brought people together from two camps: the “calling” camp (herself and Trish Bertuzzi), and the “content” camp (Ardath Albee and Kirsten Knipp). You should listen to the MP3 file when you get the chance; meanwhile, here are my top take-away messages:

HubSpot generated 40,000 inbound leads last month (via Kirsten Knipp). What the hell? Dude, when I heard that I fell to the floor. That is the definition of “eating your own dog food.” Here is your Funnelholic tip of the day: Copy them. Period. Whenever people ask me for advice, the one thing I always suggest is to find someone else (a competitor) who is performing exceptionally and copy them. For some reason, that concept is really hard for b2b folks. The b2c guys do it all the time. They copy landing pages, whatever. Why wouldn’t you? Oh and BTW, HubSpot tells you how they do it. Their content is their playbook. They want you to copy them. Those lead numbers are absurd.

Continue Reading »