A few weeks back at the Inbound Marketing Summit (#IMS10 on Twitter) in Boston, I had the pleasure of catching up with a sales and marketing professional who is doing things a little differently.
Catherine Blake is the Founder, President and only employee at Sales Protocol, which as described on their website is "a firm that offers coaching, training, and strategic consulting services." After nearly 20 years in various sales and marketing roles with EMC, GTE, IBM and various start-ups, Blake founded the company five years ago and bases her business model off providing a personal touch to companies. Her clients include everything from tiny shops to four Fortune 500 companies. In her free time, she teaches at the University of New Hampshire as an adjunct professor.
We talked about how social media has changed sales and marketing, what makes a marketing campaign a success or failure, and how to make sales and marketing teams one cohesive unit.
How have social channels altered sales and marketing strategies?
Aside from your preferred CRM software, LinkedIn is probably the best invention for anyone in sales. You can really find out so much about your prospects and customers and develop your own community. As a salesperson, it's no longer you just representing a brand. You need to be a brand yourself, show leaderships abilities and entice people to follow you. It will give you credibility and make people much more likely to do business with you, even if they've never worked with you before.
The biggest problem is that anyone can be a journalist, and have their own television show or their own radio show (for more on this topic, check out this great post from Peter Auditore titled "Everyone Is a Journalist"). It's really hard to tell who the real experts are, which voices have the authority or who is the most credible.
So to me, with all of the technology we have, it's usually the person that is screaming the loudest that is heard. That's not the way sales and marketing should work. It's all about relationships not transactions, getting to know people, understanding their credentials and then making a decision.
Why do some marketing campaigns succeed, and others fail?
I think the simplest answer to that is that it's people losing focus on what they're actually trying to achieve. What is your goal from the beginning? What are you looking to achieve? Are you bringing visibility to a new product or educating consumers? You need to stay focused throughout the process. Additionally, I think ego can often be a large pitfall in campaigns that don't do so well. People can get too wrapped up in a name that is associated with something than what it actually entails. And lastly, I think you need to knit everything together with this campaign and how it fits with your company. Don't think of it as a one-time opportunity to connect. It needs to link to the overarching strategy and endgame for your organization, and to steal a cliché, can't be a flash in the pan.
So what makes the good campaigns sticky, to steal a cliché?
I think it's all about telling the story effectively. Don't use technology for the sole sake of utilizing technology. Think of what you are doing to improve the consumer experience or state of the art. From there, let the technology figure itself out. Use it as a complement to your ideas and keep the focus.
What are some of the biggest issues in sales and marketing, in terms of internal development?
Well I don't think you can be effective in sales if you think of your organization as a silo. You could be doing a great job, and marketing could be doing a great job as well, but if you're not integrated and working together-not just letting everybody do their thing-it's going to be hard to succeed. There needs to be a holistic approach on both sides of the organization to work together, to make recommendations and to help the organization grow organically. There are so many great ideas in marketing, but unless they've been tested out by sales, there's no guarantee that will actually work. So working together is vital. But this is nothing new.
Lastly, what is it like running your own sales and marketing consultant business?
I think as the only employee, I can honestly say that what this venture has taught me is that large companies still value what an individual can bring to the table. If they believe in your abilities and trust you, which are a huge part of success in any transaction, you're going to succeed. I'm not looking to take on tons of companies, not looking to build an empire or even having a traditional brick-and-mortar shop. What I am interested in is finding a high-performance team of individuals that I can pull together to help out with a customer's challenge and simply deliver results. And that's what we'll do again and again. In our business, it's all about referrals if you want to succeed. And by providing that individual touch, you get a lot more referrals.
I'd like to thank Catherine for her time and insight here. Our discussion goes to show that relationships truly do trump transactions. The personal touch she provides to each individual client certainly goes a long way. To read more about Sales Protocol visit www.salesprotocol.com.
If you have comments, questions or thoughts, or if you would like to do a quick sales and marketing Q&A here on the site, drop a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter at @lou_dubois. Thanks for reading!!