As more and more sales teams build strategies for selling through LinkedIn, a few bad examples remind us why to beware of sales etiquette when we use new social selling techniques. What does it look like when salespeople cross the etiquette line on LinkedIn, and how can you avoid doing so? 

LinkedIn is a big part of the Radius sales process. But because of its novelty as a sales technique, LinkedIn is, in some ways, the Wild West for salespeople. We don’t have spam filters for our LinkedIn Mail like we do for our e-Mail. Selling on LinkedIn is new territory for a lot of sales teams, and, inevitably, a few cross the line.

A month or so ago I attended a panel discussion with a number of sales managers at top Bay Area tech companies for a dialogue about LinkedIn etiquette. Every panelist had a very different idea about what counts as appropriate when it comes to social selling through LinkedIn.

How do you know what crosses the line?

I asked the sales reps at Radius how they answer that question when they’re building out an entire outbound campaign on LinkedIn, and through a few stories, the answer became clear.

Giving Endorsements to Get Endorsements

One of my colleagues recently received an endorsement for sales management from a potential partner who has 99+ endorsements for nearly 20 skills. The endorsement came unexpectedly after they connected following an introductory call. There was nothing deceptive about it. Perhaps an endorsement is a little presumptuous when you hardly know someone, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with giving endorsements.

However, can too many endorsements hurt your authenticity? The endorsement my colleague received didn’t come from a longtime professional connection; it came from a twenty minute conversation. Instead of a follow up email, my colleague got an endorsement. And why?

The LinkedIn member who awarded the endorsement is an endorsement troll. He likely endorses dozens of people every day so they endorse him in return. If his endorsements are less than authentic, how much can you trust him as a business partner?

Referencing “Connections” that You Don’t Actually Know

Another colleague received a LinkedIn message from a connection with the subject line: “reference for XXX?” XXX was a competitor that my colleague had connected with on LinkedIn at a previous job. XXX had used my colleague as reference with a prospect, claiming that the Radius rep had recommended they get in touch. Such a conversation never happened; sales reps are rarely enthusiastic to recommend their competitors’ products.

Luckily for Radius, the prospect was smart enough to check with the alleged referrer before trusting the competitor. However, because the Radius rep was connected to the competitor, he could have easily gotten away with it.

I don’t think I need to explain why this is a violation of LinkedIn etiquette.

Lying to your connections is a sure way to cross the line.

While social media adds a layer of personal insight to a cold sales touch, it’s still not completely transparent. Social selling can have a huge impact on your sales revenue, but if you deceive your prospects in any way while you try to reach them, you’ll only succeed in losing their trust and, therefore, their willingness to do business with you.

The post How Far is Too Far When You Social Sell on LinkedIn appeared first on Radius.

Radius Account Executive Aaron Diek handles both inbound and outbound pipeline, and is responsible for calling many of the leads that come from the Website. How did he curtail the struggle to get them on the phone? With a single simple – and free – sales trick. 

One of the biggest pains I face every day happens when an inbound lead comes down the pipeline from our website. They’ve expressed interest in our product, and I have to somehow hunt them down and get them on the phone.

As you can imagine, some people are just hard to get a hold of.

My job also requires a lot more than just calling website leads. I’m simultaneously reaching out to people, taking return phone calls, and scheduling appointments for follow ups.

A typical sales communication of mine looks like this:

1. I call someone and leave a message.

2. They call me back, and I’m on the phone.

3. I send them an email to suggest a few times that will work for me to have a meeting.

4. They respond a day or two later to take one of those appoitments.

5. I’ve already filled the slot I initially offered them with another sales call.

Rinse and repeat.

This happens all the time, and incredibly painful. Many leads drop right out of the bucket for no better reason than my inability to get them on the phone.

Thankfully, I’ve discovered a better way to do things.

Now, the one quality on which I pride myself more than anything is being an innovator. I’ve worked a variety of jobs in a variety of industries, and have consistently excelled because I’ve invented innovative tactics that allow me to find the best way to get things done.

Just last week, I invented another ingenious innovation to schedule phone calls with prospects.

How? I implemented Google calendar appointments into the signature line of every email I send out. Now, a prospect can pick a time they want to talk. I’ve eliminated all the scheduling back and forth.

Here’s what my signature looks like:

When you click, “schedule an appointment” you get to this page:

The page above is an actual view of my calendar, in real-time. All a prospect has to do is create an appointment. No more chasing people down. No more suggesting times on Monday that get filled before they respond to me on Tuesday. No more BS – let’s just get right to the call when it’s going to work for both of us.

And the best part? It’s completely free. Timetrade offers a great service for Outlook, but you have to pay for it. As more companies choose Google as their email and calendar host, the more valuable this free service will become. I predict that you’ll see an appointment setting line in every sales email signature as soon as six months from now.

How to Implement Google Calendar into Your Signature Line

First of all, you need a Google Apps account, also known as “the thing that makes it possible to have a business account through Google.”

To create an appointment slot, you add an event to your calendar as normal, then you select, “Appointment slots”:

From here you go to the page where you can set the appointment parameters, including title, location and description, as well as how frequently you want your appointments to recur on your calendar.

I suggest spreading them out throughout the day and throughout the week so you have time both for meetings and for cool down periods in between them. It’s also a good idea to space them out so you don’t look too available to prospects. After all, you want them to think you are busy selling to their competitors.

After you make your appointment calendar, copy the link at the top of the page:

Add the link as a hyperlink into the signature line of your email so your prospects, clients, and co-workers can easily schedule time on your calendar without taking even more of your time to do so.

The post The Sales Trick that Saves Me Hours Every Week appeared first on Radius.

For the better half of the past year, the Radius engineering team has been working on a number of improvements into the Radius code. Launching this week, the new Radius is faster, easier to use, and more reliable than ever.

As Radius rounded the corner into the summer of 2012 (or, more accurately, the continuation of San Francisco’s endless spring), we had just dispatched the Fwix brand. What had once been a real-time index of hyper-local data was growing into a dynamic sales and marketing tool. Fwix created a revolutionary way to index local data; Radius packages that data so sellers and marketers can find actionable insights.

Since last September, we’ve completely rewritten the Fwix code to reflect the direction in which Radius is moving.

“I can’t even explain how much better this has made our data,” says Chris Trimble, Radius VP of Engineering.

What does this mean for our users?

A faster application.

We’ve updated the infrastructure on which we’re building Radius so users will see much better responsiveness while working in the application.

More reliable data.

“We’re no longer just shooting new data into old code,” Trimble continues. “The Fwix code was real-time, and we weren’t able to present a reliable, point-in-time view of data. Now, our technology compiles the entire set of data from scratch every time we make a change. This allows us to better measure the improvements we make, as we make them, and push that data set to customers when it has reached our bar for quality.”

Cross-browser compatibility.

Radius is now officially compatible with Google Chrome 25+, Firefox 19+, Internet Explorer 8+, and iPad.

Combined, these updates will make Radius an even better application, and they’ve set the stage for many great updates to come for Radius.

What areas are we focusing on to grow Radius?

Because of our updates, adding new features to Radius will be easier than ever before.

“We haven’t just built an awesome application,” Chris tells me. “We’ve built an application that’s awesome to build in.”

To continue updating our product, we’ve hired an entire front-end development team that’s dedicated to building new features.

“We’re also focusing on new data sources and improving the quality of our data, which have been and will always be major focuses for us.”

The new Radius will be here before you know it! If you have any questions about the changes we’ve made, please contact us at info@radius.com.

The post Radius Product Update: Coming Soon! appeared first on Radius.

Social selling is the most effective way for sales reps to reach decision makers. While many small businesses have reported social media successes, the large companies with the big marketing budgets have dominated the social selling conversations. But as more small businesses grow their online presence, it’s more crucial than ever to adapt your social sales technique to fit small business’ needs. Hear from Darren Waddell, VP of Marketing at Radius, about why social selling works best when you target the SMB space. 

To brush up on social media and small businesses, check out part 1 of this series, Why Small Businesses Beat Big Businesses on Social Media.

A few days before New Year’s 2011, Alex Cohen walked into a Southfork Kitchen in Bridgehampton, New York. His party of four didn’t have a reservation, and opted to wait until a table opened. They waited for over an hour, and when they finally sat down, the waiter regretfully informed them that the kitchen was unable to offer most menu items. They’d run out of food. Sourly disgruntled by his awful customer experience at Southfork kitchen, Alex Cohen turned to Yelp for his first and only review.

“NEVER RETURN TO THIS HORRIBLE PLACE,” he wrote in wrote in all caps. He awarded the restaurant a lone star, and advised all diners considering a visit to, “AVOID THIS RESTAURANT” (also in all caps).

Bruce Buschel remembers the night well. He’s the owner of Southfork Kitchen, and he reads the reviews they get on Yelp. In March of 2011, Mr. Buschel wrote an article for the New York Times about the night of December 30th, 2010, when Mr. Cohen visited his restaurant. Three months after Mr. Cohen’s biting review, Mr. Buschel recalled all the details, and asked the online audience, “how should I respond to this? What should I do?” He admits fault and defends his restaurant. At the end, I’m not sure what Mr. Buschel decided to do about the review. I’m also not sure who was more disgruntled by the experience: Mr. Cohen, or Mr. Buschel.

Now watch what happens when a few large companies get bad reviews on the Salesforce.com Appexchange:

I can’t even imagine how frustrated I’d be if I received one of this template customer service response. And to receive one more than a month after I’d left the complaint, no less. Some of the reviewers on Appexchange listings are even directed to find the company’s forum and leave their same complaint there. You’ll also notice that it’s not the CEOs of these companies responding to the complaints. They simply don’t have the time.

If you sell to small businesses, you know that their leaders manage their social media sites. If you sell to large businesses, you know that their leaders do not manage their social media sites.

This is a photo of the Social Media Command Center Salesforce.com builds to man the social comments during their annual conference, Dreamforce:

I’d bet a lot of money that you won’t find Marc Benioff wearing one of those blue t-shirts and sitting in front of the Hootsuite panel in between his keynote presentations.

The smaller the business, the thinner the membrane between you and the decision maker.

However, just because you can reach small businesses better than you can reach large businesses on social media doesn’t mean they’ll listen to your sales pitch.

Business owners pour their hearts and souls into their businesses, and they think their businesses are especially unique. A VP of Sales at a 5000 person company may care deeply about his or her business, but isn’t as tied to it as a small business owner. C level executives at big companies think about what their next career move will be. They have resumes saved on their hard drives.

To reach small business owners, you have to take a personal approach. When Groupon hired thousands of sales reps and threw them into cubicles to smile and dial all day long, they failed epically. Groupon’s prospects were small businesses. Smiling and dialing is an outdated practice, but enterprise companies that employ similar, such as Oracle, who hires thousands of inside sales reps to cold call, don’t fail as spectacularly. We learned very quickly from Groupon’s failure that when you reach out to small businesses with a generic message, they tune you out.

Social media offers salespeople a way to make meaningful connections with their prospects, but they have to make it personal to reach them.

How do you make it personal when you sell to the SMB space?

Reference Their Online Reviews

As tracked in the Radius database, nearly one and half million small and medium sized businesses in the US are actively reviewed online. If your prospects are among that list, make sure you know what’s being said about them online. I can guarantee that their ears will perk up the minute you mention a glowing or hostile review.

Interact with Them on Twitter and Facebook

Co-founder of LoudPixel, Allie Siarto (who we featured on our blog last month) does a lot of the social posting for her small digital consulting company. She’s not the only small business owner holding the Twitter reigns for her company. If the decision maker you’re looking for mans the company’s social media, engaging their brand on Twitter and Facebook is a great way to get in front of them. If you start an interesting conversation with them on Twitter, don’t you think they’re more willing to listen to a sales conversation than if you approach them out of the blue with a sales pitch?

Be Personal

Business owners are wholeheartedly invested in their businesses. When the business owner is also the decision maker, the lines between their work lives and personal lives are blurred. To them, business is personal. If you want to stand out, you have to connect with them on a personal level. If they think they’re unique, treating them like every other prospect will turn them off.

The post Why Social Selling Works Best When You Sell to SMBs appeared first on Radius.

For this month’s State of Small Business Report, originally published in Forbes, we evaluated the small and medium sized businesses that earn at least some of their revenue from gun-related business. We compared gun violence with gun business, determined the most gun-friendly small business state in the U.S., and calculated the social media savvy of gun-related businesses.

Gun violence and control are such hot button issues in the US today that even mentioning the topic stirs passion and welcomes debate. When I proposed the topic for this month’s special report for our monthly State of Small Business, a few people squirmed. “Do we really want to throw our hat in the ring of an intense political debate?” someone asked. “I hate guns,” someone else said.

But the data doesn’t have an opinion. It’s not subjective. We can draw whatever conclusions we want from data, but the data doesn’t lie.

When I dove into research about “the gun issue” in the US, I was surprised that nearly every opinion sites either the Constitution, or gun violence statistics. So many people make assumptions about why it’s so easy to buy guns here. “Gun retailers are greedy and don’t want to make guns illegal because they’ll go out of business” is a pretty common assertion.

But is it true? If the US were to crack down on businesses that earn revenue from guns, how many businesses would be affected? Which states would feel it the most? Would the states that have the worst problems with gun violence suffer economically if the federal government made it harder for their businesses to sell guns?

Thanks to our data, we can answer these questions.

Roughly .5% of businesses with under 1000 employees sell to, do business with, and organize around gun owners. To put that into perspective, .5% of US business specialize in farming supplies. Restaurants make up roughly 10% of US small and medium sized businesses.

Because Montana is home to the most gun-related small and medium sized businesses in the US per capita, any gun legislation would affect their economy more than any other small business economy in country.

Small businesses in the states that have the worst gun violence, according to the 2010 US census, wouldn’t all feel gun legislation as acutely in their state economies, with the major exception of Missouri, Alaska, and Arkansas. Of the states with the ten highest rates of gun violence, only those three also rank as having the ten biggest gun business economies per capita.

Read the full report here:

  Radius Small Business Report May 2013

The data Radius exposed for this report confirms that there is a connection between state economies and state senators’ sentiments about gun control. It tells us that if we want to change peoples’ opinions about guns, we have to understand the complexity of the issue. If gun control lobbyists want to make it more difficult for Americans to access guns, then perhaps they should first make it easier for gun-related businesses to earn revenue.

The post The Small Business Gun Economy appeared first on Radius.

In 2011, Facebook app developers created the Facebook storefront to allow retailers to sell products through Facebook. Before anyone knew how to successfully monetize the Facebook ad platform, the option to turn Facebook fans into customers was a very attractive solution to marketers looking to justify expensive and experimental social media programs. But just a few short months after opening their Facebook storefronts, many large brands shut them down and admitted failure. What went wrong with the Facebook storefront, and what can it tell us about how companies succeed on social media?

Gamestop

By 2011, Gamestop had built up an enviable following of Facebook fans. They had the attention of an audience that had expressly admitted their interest in the brand, but no way to turn that interest into revenue. When word spread that Facebook aimed to turn the traditionally solitary experience of online shopping into a social activity, Gamestop saw a huge opportunity. Building a storefront on Facebook would make online shopping easy for customers because it would bring the store to them while they browsed friends’ photos and brushed up on their newsfeeds. They could target Facebook advertisements for their Facebook storefront to their fans, who could then share their purchases on their own Facebook Timelines and recommend products to friends.

“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

Shortly after the launch of their Facebook store, Gamestop shut it down because they were unable to generate enough sales throughout the storefront to justify the cost.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Ashley Sheetz, Gamestop’s Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, explained. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

Gamestop wasn’t alone. JC Penney, Nordstrom, and Gap all opened Facebook storefronts in 2011, and then shut them down only months after introducing them. Why?

There was no incentive to separate shopping on Facebook from shopping on a company’s website. A Facebook storefront drove traffic away from the corporate site, and didn’t offer any distinguishable service. It was just another store, and customers used to shopping online at their favorite sites weren’t going to change their behavior to start shopping on a social networking site. Facebook’s potential to become a new online destination – the launch of F-Commerce, as some analysts predicted – seemed as if it would never come to pass.

Where did Gamestop go wrong?

They tried to hard sell on social media.

They went straight for the sale. On social media, buyers aren’t transactional. People aren’t looking to buy on Facebook; they’re looking to socialize. We all go on Facebook to find out what our friends are doing and saying; we visit the site to stay up-to-date with individuals, not to read impersonal messages from brands.

They couldn’t reach their fans.

Edgerank is an algorithm that Facebook developed to govern what you see on the Facebook newsfeed, and how high a message is displayed. Because of Edgerank’s strict spam filters, only an estimated 16% of posts by businesses are actually seen by their own followers. Edgerank makes it very hard for brands to reach their own followers. Brands can get past Edgerank by specifically targeting friends of fans, but Edgerank is designed to prevent Facebook from becoming purely a platform for brands to sell to Facebook users.

They lacked authenticity.

Many big brands fail on social media because they run into what I refer to as “The Agency Problem.” Because large brands employ agencies or low-level, unempowered employees to run large social media campaigns to accommodate large follower bases and large budgets, achieving the personal touch is difficult. Large brands stand out on Facebook as large brands; their posts on your Newsfeed can’t possibly be personal – or even localized – because they have to appease fans from across the country. The same is true on Twitter, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn.

The Facebook storefront, because of its hard selling nature, doesn’t work for big brands that already have successful online storefronts.

Got What It Cakes

A year after Gamestop’s epic failure with Facebook Storefront, a very different story unfolded on the platform. Mandie Miller, who left her job to have her first child, was ready to rejoin the workforce. She had always loved baking, and after falling in love with her cakes, friends encouraged her to open a business. Got What It Cakes opened in Charlotte in April, 2009. That September, Mandie’s sister built a Facebook storefront for Got What It Cakes. Order volume tripled. Mandie Miller went from baking cakes for friends to running a $40,000 business in under two years. She owes the amplification of her business to the Facebook storefront.

The successes of small businesses on social media look very different from the successes of large enterprises on social media. Mandie Miller’s story is one amongst hundreds. Where big brands get lost in a sea of impersonal updates, small business owners with a passion and a local community stand out.

What did Got What It Cakes do right?

They engaged with their fans.

Take a look at this post from the Got What It Cakes Facebook page:

This is not the interaction of a PR agency and a customer. This looks very much like an interaction between friends, and this is why Got What It Cakes is a successful Facebook business.

They were authentic.

When you visit the Got What It Cakes Facebook page, you immediately see a photo of Mandie on the cover of the page. You can actually see who bakes the cakes and runs the business, and you immediately get a sense of the kind of experience you’ll have when you buy her cakes. She attaches personal messages to every cake photo that she posts. She’s a person, not a brand.

They were looking to grow.

When Got What It Cakes joined Facebook, they were selling a few cakes every weekend. They needed to be discovered. Facebook gave them a platform through which word of mouth could spread virally. With little maintenance on Mandie’s part, she could keep customers up-to-date on her business.

Got What It Cakes is one example of a growing number of small businesses that have reinvigorated the idea of F-Commerce in the last two years. Where bigger businesses failed, small businesses found success. Bigger businesses can offer better websites, but smaller businesses can offer personalities. One of the reasons customers choose small vendors over large ones is their ability to connect and offer more personal service, and the small businesses that make the most of this advantage will find great success on social media.

The post Why Small Businesses Beat Big Businesses on Social Media appeared first on Radius.

Monte Tareski is perhaps the biggest advocate for his small business community that you’ll find in Spokane, Washington. His life’s work is his network of professionals and friends, and over the years he’s been associated with a number of small businesses, including Merchant Circle, Grapevine Discounts, Marketpad.com, as well as his social media consulting service, Social Media 13.

Monte is one of those people that never leaves a public place without running into someone he knows or adding someone new to his network. Monte lives off his network, and has spent much of his life growing and advocating small business. Last week, I caught up with Monte to record his experience owning, working and consulting for small businesses in the US.

The Most Important Lesson for Small Business Owners to Remember

“Small business owners need to pay attention,” Monte explains. He’s seen – and run – a number of small businesses that have failed and succeeded, and has noticed one common trait amongst the ones that succeed: they know how – and when – to adapt for change.

“I was running a landscaping business right up until the economy tanked in 2008. I saw the writing on the wall; there’s no contest between putting food on the table and maintaining your yard. I had to start planning for a life outside of that business.”

The businesses that fail are the ones that close themselves off from the world and stay static. This is reason behind Monte’s enthusiasm for social media.

“I’d be willing to bet money that businesses that are on social media are more successful than those that aren’t.”

The businesses that have flocked to social media are the businesses that have stayed up to date with the latest market trends. They’ve adapted their businesses to accommodate shifting buyer demands, and that’s why they’ll be more successful than the businesses that shun social media.

Why Social Media Is Crucial for Every Business Owner

“People want to give money to someone they know,” Monte explains. Because social media gives business owners a channel through which they can reach more potential customers than ever before, they need to learn how to take advantage of it.

One of Monte’s ventures, Social Media 13, aims to “teach common sense in social media.” He believes social media is one of the easiest ways for small business owners to attract new customers and keep them loyal. Monte breaks the purchase process into three steps, and explains how social media can supplement each one.

1. Presence. You just need to be there. Whether in person or online. You need to be somewhere to catch someone’s attention.

2. Personality. Before any transaction, customers and business owners get to know each other and how the other party conducts business. Transparency is key. People want to buy from people they like. You have to get to know people online, and you have to have a personality to convey that you’re a real person – not a machine.

3. Purchase. If your customer already knows you when it’s time to buy, they’ll make a purchase. Consider a competitive battle between two companies that sell the exact same product. The only difference between the two competitors is that you know one of them personally. Basically everyone will buy from the person they know over the person they don’t.

“People have given me money just because they felt they knew me from reading my blog posts,” Monte explains. “You should spend less than 10% of your time on business selling. The other 90% of your time should be spent getting to know your audience, and engaging them.”

“If you can make someone smile, you have a friend. If you can make someone laugh, you have a friend for life.”

The Relationship Between Small Businesses and Their Communities

“Small businesses are inherently related to their communities. Supporting a small business means supporting your community. Small businesses are your neighbors. When you give your neighbors your business, they give their neighbors their business, and it eventually comes back to you; you’re their neighbor as much as they’re your neighbor. If you support your neighbors, your entire community will grow and flourish.”

Why Small Businesses Are So Important to the American Economy

The growth of a community depends on the growth of its businesses.

“The growth of a community is similar to the growth of a tree. When you nurture it, it grows, and branches grow off other branches and slowly the tree becomes larger. Eventually, the tree grows large enough to produce seeds that grow new trees. The American business economy is the forest. If every tree can grow on it’s own, the forest grows abundantly.”

How Small Business Owners Choose Vendors

“Relationships are everything in business. It’s not about the newest and best toy in the sandbox. It’s about how you play with it.”

After getting to know Monte, it comes as no surprise that the most rewarding aspect of his work with small businesses comes from the people he meets. “You can learn something from everyone you meet,” he says. That’s why getting to know people is his favorite part of working with small businesses. Monte believes that interpersonal relationships – not money and not value – are the most important factors when it comes to making purchase decisions.

He’s fiercely loyal to his network, and to get his attention, all anyone has to do is become a member of his network. It’s an incredibly important lesson about the differences between small and large enterprises. Where a Senior VP of Sales may constantly chase a sales quota, or a Marketing Manager may focus on lead generation, a small business owner will always make a decision based on what’s right for the company overall. “A small business owner’s profession is his or her life,” Monte says. “Of course price is a factor, but building a network of people that you trust is non negotiable for small business owners.”

The post An Interview with Small Business Evangelist Monte Tareski appeared first on Radius.

Reputation.com makes brands look good online. As small business owners flock to social media, Reputation.com steps in to help them promote authentic, positive reviews and suppress negative content. Of the 26 million small and medium sized businesses that Radius tracks, over four million maintain active Facebook pages and nearly six million have social reviews. Imagine the frustration of the sales reps at Reputation.com to know the scope of their target market, but have no way to find and reach their target businesses. That’s when they found Radius.

A few months ago, Reputation.com bought a data list of automotive dealerships in the San Francisco Bay Area. They were looking to grow into new markets, and had the customer intelligence to suggest that automotive dealerships might be good fits. Brandon Willey, Director of Consumer & SMB Sales, was given an excel spreadsheet. Lead lists these days can run anywhere between $2500 and $6000. The inside sales team set up a cold calling campaign to qualify the leads on the list, divided up the dealerships, and started calling. Two out of five so-called leads returned wrong information. And the other three? The sales reps had to call them to find out whether they’d be good fits for Reputation.com.

Most sales organizations have moved away from buying static data lists as a source of lead generation. Online databases and user-contributed sites, such as Dun & Bradstreet 360 and Salesforce’s Data.com are much better options because they include social media data, and are much more likely to contain real-time data than an excel spreadsheet full of names. But when Reputation.com tried to move away from buying lead lists, they weren’t able to find a high enough volume of leads.

Most online data and intelligence providers base their data on the assumption that larger companies make better sales prospects. But for Reputation.com, the larger a company gets, the less likely they are to need online reputation management solutions. Big companies already have ad agencies and social media teams to control their online reputations.

Discovering new markets was essentially guesswork. Thanks to customer evaluation and a team of smart sales reps, Reputation.com had discovered that businesses with one to three star review ratings that also maintain Facebook pages make the best prospects. The sales organization at Reputation.com had evolved to the modern era of selling, but their data was stuck in 1985.

Then, for a couple hundred dollars a month, they found Radius. In a manner of minutes, they could build lists of one to four star reviewed businesses with active online presence in any US territory. They could build a call campaign around an industry that contained the most high quality leads. They could change their lead criteria at any time. Their data used to control their sales process, but today, the sales reps control their sales process.

“When you buy a list of data, you get what you ask for: a spreadsheet of leads. With Radius, our data is dynamic, and we decide what’s considered a lead. Significantly better data. Super easy to use. Radius takes the guesswork out of prospecting.” Brandon Willey, Director of Consumer & SMB Sales, Reputation.com

Today, Brandon and his team only call qualified prospects.

The post How the Sales Reps at Reputation.com Generate Only Qualified Leads appeared first on Radius.

Aaron Diek, top sales rep at Radius, knows how to close a big fish. So why did he belly-flop when a famously wealthy prospect swam right up to him? 

Every day I spit-ball sales strategy with professionals at companies that target SMBs. It’s a passion of mine: working with people, helping them reach their sales goals, and learning about each business’ unique processes.

Not only that – I’m good at it. At the top of the new business leader board, in fact, and that’s because, under most circumstances, I follow the right procedures.

That said, we do all make mistakes. You see, aside from selling SaaS, I also manage my parents’ rental property near UC Berkeley. Today, I made the biggest mistake I’ve made in my history as a real estate manager. And I am writing this to proclaim: this will be the last time.

My parents own a three bedroom unit on the top floor of a building right across the street from the UC Berkeley campus. It was built in 1929, and has the charm of a classic San Francisco apartment. We refinished the wood floors before the last tenant moved in, and the vintage-inspired black and white tiles in the kitchen and both of the bathrooms still sparkle when they’re clean. Every two years, it’s my job to clean up the apartment and rent it out to a new tenant. Well, it’s that time again.

I place an ad on craigslist that features our upscale condominium with a note that I’d make the apartment available for showing on Sunday.

Thursday night at 6pm a woman calls to tell me she can meet at 3pm the following day. I tell her it is customary to give the tenants 24 hours notice, and that I have already done so – for Sunday, as I clearly stated in the ad.

She insists she represents someone rich and powerful.

I ask, “Who?” In her words:

Turns out, she represents Alexander Soros, who George Soros calls, “Son,” and Wikipedia calls,  “Philanthropist.”

So he can afford $4400 a month to live by himself, I think. She convinces me to ask my tenants to let us in for a tour, despite the fact that I haven’t given them the customary 24 hours notice.

I’ve now stretched my condo-renters etiquette, but I’m very excited at the opportunity to rent the place to Alexander Soros. Business is a passion of mine, and the man I am set to meet with really has business in his blood. I read up on the great work he does for the world, and get even more excited about the opportunity.

I tell Soros’ assistant that I will leave work early to meet them. I race through rush hour traffic on my humble Honda scooter, via the Bay Bridge, and up University Avenue toward the property, which has me rolling in five minutes early.

Thirty minutes later, they arrive.

Apparently time isn’t money when money is in your blood.

Now, if this were a sales call, I would have already told them we need to reschedule for a time when they can make the appointment that they set. But I haven’t because I am convinced I have a big fish on the line.

The billion-heir gets out of the car looking like a scrubby late-twenties Radiohead fan.  An older woman – frank, friendly and neatly dressed – had driven him there in a safe-and-sound sedan.

Someone has a Work Mom, I think.

She puts herself between Alex and me, and extends her hand for a firm shake.

His handshake is floppy and lackluster.

When we walk into the flat, he asks, “How much does he want for it?”

I start to answer before I realize he is speaking about me to his assistant.

Nevertheless, we continue the tour. I point out the window through which they might catch glimpses of the Golden Gate bridge, note the beautiful wood floors, take them into the black-and-white-tiled kitchen and point out the Viking Range, and give a tour of the three bedrooms.

They seem underwhelmed, perhaps by the layout, the proximity of the neighbors, or the inconvenient fact that our current tenants had left the smell of reheated broccoli and hot pockets in the kitchen.

It is obvious that Soros is not impressed when he scrunches his face, looks towards his assistant, turns away, and leaves.

She politely tells me it is not what they were looking for.

Where did I go wrong? I ask myself, feeling a bit duped. They saw the pictures. They knew the location. I gave her the honest truth over the phone. I had even gone out of my way to accommodate their schedule.

And then I realized exactly where I went wrong:

I tried to do business with someone that would not give me respect.

As a professional cold caller, sales strategist, and trainer, I know that giving people respect is the first and most important priority when building business relationships – no matter on which side of the phone you find yourself. I know from experience that when I work with someone who will not return the favor – someone who will not give me the same respect that I give them – the outcome will always be unfavorable, regardless of how the sale goes.

When a big lead lands in my queue, it’s always tempting to drop everything to get them on a demo. The potential of a windfall deal can be so enticing that you miss the warning signs of a bad lead. You may mistake budget for fit, or invent an interest out of your desire to win them as a customer. You may make excuses for them that you wouldn’t make for any other prospect. They’re such a big company that they have a hard time scheduling meetings with all the stakeholders, you may say when they ask to reschedule for the third time. They have a lot of complex needs, you may justify after they turn down your third revision of a proposal because they no longer need the custom criteria you fought to get into the contract.

But in reality, they’re just being disrespectful. Plain and simple.

The minimum that all human beings deserve is respect. You would think a philanthropist might understand this. And condoning anyone that shows me a lack of respect is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, inside of business, and out of it. Thus, I write to remind myself and all salespeople:

Do not waste time on anyone that refuses to give you the respect you deserve. [Tweet This Quote]

And we all deserve respect.

The post My Biggest Career Mistake: Waiting on Alexander Soros appeared first on Radius.

Last week, Radius sponsored The Funnelholic’s Demand Generation Summit, a series of four Webinars featuring leaders in the social, marketing, and sales space. From the summit, we put together a handbook that contains everything you need to know about building an effective demand generation program. These are the four most important lessons from the entire book.

First, I’d like to introduce you to our four demand generation experts:

• Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing Inc.

• Koka Sexton, Social Marketing Manager, LinkedIn

• Scott Albro, Founder & CEO, TOPO

• Matt Childs, VP Sales & Strategy, Vidcaster

While all four are experts in very different fields, one philosophy ties them together: their modern approach to sales and marketing. As Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan preaches,

“People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.”

Halligan, and all of the influencers Craig and Paul Rosenberg pulled together for the summit are kings in the world of inbound marketing. They’ve figured out how to achieve the results of a multi-million dollar advertising campaign for nought but the costs of their salaries and a few cheap google ads and promoted Tweets.

Today’s buyers subscribe to an entirely different set of behaviors than they did even two and three years ago, and these are the four most important lessons we learned when it comes to reaching them:

1. 30% of all LinkedIn traffic comes from social media.

This statistic makes sense intuitively because LinkedIn is a social network. LinkedIn users, by nature, are probably more likely to adopt other social networks as well. Take a look at this MarketingSherpa report from their 2012 Lead Generation Benchmark Report:

Organic search and email marketing campaigns drive 65% of website traffic for the nearly 2000 websites that MarketingSherpa surveyed. Social media drove less traffic than any other channel: 7%. LinkedIn’s social traffic is far from the norm.

Also consider that LinkedIn didn’t hire a corporate social media manager until 2013. They’ve essentially been driving organic social traffic – which is free – to account for nearly a third of their site views. Why does LinkedIn get so much traffic from social media, and what does that mean for the future of marketing?

Since their initial public offering in 2011, LinkedIn has become much more than “Facebook for business people.” They’ve launched marketing and sales solutions, and they’ve also become a content hub. During his presentation, Koka Sexton cited a report of CMO trends. The number one challenge that CMOs in 2013 face? Creating enough content. LinkedIn has cracked this challenge by enlisting the help of an army of influencers who write articles that get published on LinkedIn every day. LinkedIn customers can select which influencers peak their interest, and see only articles from those influencers, or from the people in their networks. LinkedIn has created a personalized business journal for every member of their site. LinkedIn draws visitors to their site to read interesting articles, and can sell or market to them however they choose once visitors hit the site.

LinkedIn could probably generate just as much traffic from ads and emails as they could from social media, but with one drawback: ads and emails are much more self-serving than articles. The influencer posts in LinkedIn draw so much traffic because they provide what users want when they’re in the market for new solutions: expert advice on how to solve their greatest challenges.

2. Marketers are only responsible for generating 30% of the leads for their organizations.

The reality for most organizations dictates that marketers control one third of the responsibility for lead generation and outbound prospecting and customer renewals control the other two thirds. This leaves sales reps with a lot of pipeline growth to shoulder. Great content is just as important for salespeople as it is for marketers. Salespeople need to build knowledge bases around their personal brands, and they can do so by writing articles for trade publications, sharing content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and maintaining active social profiles.

3. Host videos on your website, not on Youtube.

Every social marketing discussion I’ve heard recently reminds marketers and salespeople to maintain their Youtube profiles, so my ears perked up when Matt Childs went over the pitfalls of a Youtube marketing strategy.

When you host content on a Youtube channel, or even when you embed a Youtube video in your site and include an option for viewers to “view the video on Youtube,” you surrender control on your video. Youtube analytics are not the same as your website analytics, and while Youtube is a source of Web traffic, you can’t count it as such in your site evaluation because it’s a completely different website. You can – and should – place your videos on Youtube because it’s a huge source of search traffic, but hosting on your site gives you the flexibility to control the user experience from first site click to next video up. Do you really want your competitors videos in the side panel while they’re watching your videos?

4. Create a very specific lead scoring model before you begin marketing.

This one may seem obvious, but consider how a marketing organization may go about a new campaign: the content marketers come up with brilliant ideas for the latest and greatest ebooks, writers, designers, and influencers build their creative opus, and then the lead generation specialist builds out a promotion and lead scoring plan. Many organizations operate under this model, and it always leads to backend delays. In more unfortunate situations, this model leads to poor lead quality. Content marketers need to stay up-to-date on lead goals with lead generation specialists, and lead generation specialists need to stay on top of goals during the content creation process.

Before content gets created, the content marketers need to understand the specific customer profile for which each piece is being created.

We learned a lot of other great tips during the Demand Generation Summit, and we summed them up in a slideshare presentation:

We learned a lot about process and measuring from all the presenters, but we’d like to leave you with a quote from Scott Albro:

“Sometimes the best innovation happens when you set content into the wild without any measurement criteria and just watch what happens.”

The post The Four Top Lessons from The Demand Generation Summit appeared first on Radius.