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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 54 – An Interview with Gail Martin, author of 30 Days to Social Media Success

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StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 54 – An Interview with Gail Martin, author of 30 Days to Social Media Success explores approaches to effective business marketing using social media outlets such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging; marketing that drives traffic and ultimately results in increased sales. During our discussion, Gail Martin, author of 30 Days to Social Media Success: The 30 Day Results Guide to Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn, and Facebook, share with us her insights, approaches, and real-world experiences regarding:

  • what social media marketing is and several examples of this type of communication channel
  • quantifiable results businesses realize as a result of implementing an effective social media strategy
  • how social media marketing results can be quantifiably measured
  • costs associated with implementing a social media marketing strategy in terms of time and money
  • how Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogging can be effectively used as marketing tools

Additional Information

In addition to the incredible insights Gail shares in 30 Days to Social Media Success and this special edition podcast are the resources accessible from her website, www.GailMartinMarketing.com.   Gail’s book, 30 Days to Social Media Success, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Authors

Gail Martin, author of 30 Days to Social Media Success, is a marketing expert and international speaker, and the owner of DreamSpinner Communications. She is the ‘Get Results Resource’ for marketing that works; helping small and start-up businesses, consultants, coaches, authors, and solo professionals succeed through affordable publicity. To read Gail’s complete biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:36 — 43.4MB)

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Introducing the StrategyDriven Consultative Selling Knowledge Center

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StrategyDriven Knowledge CenterLearn how to increase sales and improve bottom line results with the StrategyDriven Consultative Selling Knowledge Center. Based on the considerable, hard-won business experience of one of our expert contributors, each Knowledge Center contains a collection of insightful perspectives and immediately implementable tools that can be used to improve performance in its respective mission critical area.

Without adequate sales, any organization will fail – yet even star sales persons experience low conversion rates and long sales cycles. And with today’s abundance of easily accessible product pricing and performance information these individuals face increasing pressure to lower product costs and increase value. With the company’s future on the line, the question becomes: How can sales professionals increase sales, protect margins, and avoid the race to the bargain basement?

StrategyDriven Consultative Selling Knowledge Center focuses on the consultative selling tools and techniques executives, managers and sales professionals can use to improve their organization’s sales effectiveness; helping them increase their product and service value and convert more potential customers into buying clients. During the five part podcast series comprising this knowledge center, we focus on:

  1. Action Selling examines the method for establishing and building business relationships; enabling sales professionals to better engage and understand their client’s needs in order to provide greater value and increase sales.
  2. Selling Your Price further explores how the Action Selling process is used to help clients understand they are not purchasing a commodity product but rather one that is highly differentiated by the value you and your company offer.
  3. Questions: The Answer to Sales explores how asking questions enables salespeople to better understand their client’s needs and align their product or service offerings to fulfill those needs; establishing the salesperson as a value-adding consultant rather than a commodity seller.
  4. Masters of Loyalty explores how professional salespeople can move customers beyond being merely satisfied to true loyalty such that they have stopped shopping and are highly resistant to competitors’ appeals.
  5. Sales Strategy from the Inside Out examines how businesses employing a consultative sales method realize dramatically increased revenues.

StrategyDriven Knowledge Centers provide executives and managers with a focused, deep-dive examination of a critical business performance area by one of our expert contributors. Each Knowledge Center contains a collection of insightful perspectives and immediately implementable tools that can be used to improve performance in its respective mission critical area. The StrategyDriven Consultative Selling Knowledge Center is co-presented by Duane Sparks, Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based strategic sales training company that has trained and certified more than 350,000 salespeople in more than 3,000 groups in the system and skills of Action Selling.

Win Loss Analysis: A Strategic Imperative

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The first question salespeople ask themselves when they lose in a new business situation is, “Why did I lose?” Salespeople often ask prospects why they lost a deal, but they don’t typically get a straight answer. In fact, according to sales research data, the complete truth from prospects is shared only 40 percent of the time. This means that on average, in 60% of new business situations, salespeople do not have a complete and accurate understanding of why they lost.

Understanding why a deal is won or lost is critical, yet most sales teams and companies have a limited understanding of the true reasons for winning and losing. Clearly there is a significant opportunity for many companies to improve their close rates by better understanding prospect perceptions.

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About the Author

Richard Schroder is president of Anova Consulting Group, a leading market research and consulting firm focused on Win Loss Analysis and Client Satisfaction Research. He is a sought-after speaker and a recognized thought leader in Win Loss Analysis. He is the author of a new book, From a Good Sales Call to a Great Sales Call (McGraw-Hill, 2011). To read Richard’s complete biography, click here.

Learn more about the Anova Consulting Group at www.TheAnovaGroup.com.

“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 2 of 2

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Lose control of your marketing messages. A Grateful Dead concert was about having fun, meeting friends, checking out great music, escaping the everyday, belonging. Each person defined the experience a little differently, and the group defined the whole. There were interesting subgroups wandering along as part of the larger odyssey that was the Grateful Dead experience.

In building a community, the Grateful Dead were willing to give up a large degree of control over how they were defined and instead hand it to their fans. While this approach is highly unusual, it is also often very successful. When organizations insist on operating in a command-and-control environment with mission statements, boilerplate descriptions, messaging processes, and PR campaigns, their strategies can both hamper growth and backfire in execution.

Let your community define you, rather than trying to dictate what’s said – and how – about your company. When you let others define and talk about you, it is more likely that a community will develop.

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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.

“Dead”-On Business Rules: Ten Tie-Dyed and True Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, part 1 of 2

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Viral marketing and social networking have arrived on the scene after a long, strange trip indeed. The Grateful Dead were much more than a bunch of rock-and-roll geniuses; they were pioneers of the digital age marketing landscape.

When you think marketing visionaries, what companies come to mind? Apple? Google? Maybe even Microsoft? It’s true that each of these companies in one way or another has come to define marketing in the digital age. But the practices they’ve been pushing – viral marketing, social networking, giving away products or services, asking for and acting on input from customers – have somewhat, well, groovier roots than you might imagine.

These marketing ploys were born on the road with one of the most iconic bands of all time – The Grateful Dead.

Everyone knows the Grateful Dead as rock legends and amazing musicians. But not as many realize they were marketing pioneers. In the 1960s the Grateful Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts that businesses across all industries use today. Every business can learn from what the Grateful Dead has done over a 45-year career.

The Grateful Dead is one huge case study in contrarian marketing. Most of the band’s many marketing innovations were based on doing the exact opposite of what other bands (and record labels) were doing at the time. The Dead pioneered a “freemium” business model, allowing concert attendees to record and trade concert tapes, building a powerful word-of-mouth fan network powered by free music. It’s a model that has influenced many of today’s very best marketers. For example:

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About the Authors

Since his first Grateful Dead show when he was a teenager in 1979, David Meerman Scott has seen the band perform over 40 times. David is a marketing strategist and a professional speaker. He is the author of the BusinessWeek bestselling book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and several other books. He speaks at conferences and corporate events around the world. He loves to surf (but isn’t very good at it), collects artifacts from the Apollo moon program, and maintains a database, with 308 entries at this writing, of every band he has seen in concert. He is a graduate of Kenyon College, where he listened to a heck of a lot of Grateful Dead in his dorm room.

Brian Halligan has seen the Grateful Dead perform more than 100 times. He is CEO & founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company that helps businesses transform the way they market products by “getting found” on the Internet. Brian is also coauthor of Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs and is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.