Know When to Teach and When to Sell – Segment #8

Here’s today’s 2 minute tip for marketing-minded sales leaders and sales-minded marketing leaders, where we focus on just two things: productivity and making an impact.

Specifically, I picked up a great resource this week from my boy Jamie Shanks at Sales for Life, who I’ve never met personally but we’ve talked on social media (I hope to meet him someday.)

Anyway, here’s a great resource – “The Buyer’s Journey.” Where does social selling fit into the buyer’s journey? I want to call your attention to three specific parts of this:

1.) Reference page 14. Basically I was having a conversation with a client this week about social selling. I asked his opinion and he said “Well, I can’t do it because I don’t really have enough content to share, my team is not producing enough content.”

If that is a situation you are faced with, use curation! You can become an industry expert and a thought leader by also curating other people’s content, as long as you give the appropriate sourcing, but then extending that content and curating industry information and publications, by giving your opinion and your 2-cents on the interpretation. So good piece there.

2. Page 15 specifically got into marketing automation, or otherwise known as “capturing signals from your buyers as they progress on the buyer’s journey. So if you are using marketing automation technology like Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, they are a wonderful opportunity to capture their signals.

I personally view this as knowing when to teach and when to sell. That’s the line I always want to take a look at, because if you’re looking at the buyer’s journey and the upper phases of research phase, possible early reconsideration phase, you approach them (if you do) in teaching mode. In the later stages of the buyer’s journey, when they’re close to committing, and they’re downloading pricing guides and spec sheets, it’s sales mode. So really gracefully navigate and use data to help you know when to teach and when to sell. That’s the way I look at this component.

3. And then lastly, I loved the point of view about “socially surrounding” your prospect. On page 18, Shanks briefly mentions LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is a tool I also use. Buying is often done by committee these days, and so for you to engage with not only your buyer, but then their colleagues, and sharing information, curating content that will help not only your buyer but also your buyer express the opinion and express a possible solution in terms of their committee members and possibly the CFO who wants to see a hard line and possibly investment returns.

Great resource – check it out! Hope you have a great weekend and…think like a publisher and go build your business!

 

 

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