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.

My first very important announcement is: Focus.com, my employer, created the infographic below.

My second very important announcement is: I like it and I hope you do too. Mad props to Carlos Hidalgo, who helped curate the information. For me, following the marketing automation space has been the first time I have been able to watch a market from start to finish and really understand it. Yes, I have been alive in Silicon Valley during the rise of all the other technologies du jour, but this one I know. I love being a fan.

I hope you find the infographic interesting — we’ll have to see how much it changes next year!

I am currently trying to buy a couple pieces of technology (true story). I won’t tell you what kind of technology (to protect the innocent). But I will tell you that I am learning how much it sucks to be a b2b buyer. I wrote a little about my experiences and recommendations on the Savvy b2b marketing blog.

It’s really eye-opening to go through the process of trying to buy something in a comparable industry. As I live through my pain, I will chronicle our experiences. (I am including my partner-in-crime Lori Janjigian as she helps me in the buying process and is supplying me with her observations, aka complaints, about the process.)

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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.

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