With the move will come more post about what gets me excited (outside of triathlon and endurance sports of course!) – social media, marketing and technology.

The blog title, Ahead of the Curve, reflects where I would place myself on the expertise scale of social media, marketing and technology. It’s also an accurate description of where I’m trying to stay.

As I heard at a recent conference, anyone that claims to be an expert in social media is a liar. Information is flowing so fast and so many things are changing in this space that the best any one of us can do is to stay Ahead of the Curve.

I’m looking forward to sharing ideas with you here, look around a while and let me know what you think.

Saw this advertising on an economic research site today and found it interesting. Microsoft’s new search service, Bing, being advertised via Google’s Adwords

Photo Credit - Stevewilliamsphotos

I’m in the process of training for Ironman Lake Placid. It’s my 2nd time doing the race and prior to my first race I did a training weekend to prepare. It was incredibly helpful last time, so I decided to do it again for this year’s race.

I made reservations at a reasonably priced hotel for $80/night and felt pretty good about it. Over the past several months I’ve been interacting through Twitter with individuals and business from Lake Placid as I tweeted about my race preparations.  More recently I saw some interesting posts from the High Peaks Resort and decided to follow them.  Their marketing guy, Bill, is pretty sharp and is using a great example of how a business can increase revenue using Twitter and other social media.

They are having a spring special called Elevate Your Rate. Here is the explanation from their website:

To celebrate Spring, the region and the High Peaks for 46 straight days beginning on April 22nd we will be “elevating” a special rate for 46 minutes each day based on the elevation of one of the 46 High Peaks. For example a rate based on the 4867 foot elevation of Whiteface Mountain will be $48.67.

How will you know which 46 minutes these rates will be available? Some time between 8am and 8pm EST each day we will alert friends, fans and followers through our Twitter Profile and Facebook Page. After the update is posted the “elevated” rate of the day will become available for 46 minutes! It used to be that you’d have to actually climb all 46 of the High Peaks to be considered a true 46’er; well now there’s another way to reach the top.

 So, I set my Twitter account to follow the High Peaks Resort via SMS.  Sure enough, that morning I got the text that the Elevate Your Rate was available and booked my room for $40/night, half of what my other reservation was going to be for a total savings of $80.  Thanks Bill.

What other examples have you seen Twitter make a real impact to the bottom line?

Please take a moment and check it out. Being a finance company in economically challenging times, I think that you’ll find worthwhile conversations and topics discussed there.  The blog is located at http://directcapital.wordpress.com.

Today I happened to see Bo Jackson was the number one hot topic.  I hadn’t seen his name in a while so I clicked on the link to see what the buzz was about. What was curious is that the top results were Bo’s wikipedia entry, some YouTube entries and an ESPN feature. Nothing that would indicate why Bo is a “Hot Topic”.  After scanning down a few entries, there it was, something about Bo Jackson starting a bank?!

I recently read a post on Mashable.com about using Twitter search as an alternative to Google for breaking news and events, so, I gave it a shot and here are the results:

And  there we go. The Twitter Search window shows the most recent mentions of the news that Bo has gotten into banking.  Does this mean I’m giving up Google? Not altogether but if I truly want to find the “Hot Trends” I’ll be starting my search on Twitter Search.

I see the overall concept I think this radio station was going for – use the January advertising campaign as a loss leader to interest people into then paying for radio advertising in the future.  There are some major issues I see with the concept:

• Radio ads are not easily trackable.  One of radio’s biggest deficiencies is the lack of being able to track it effectively. Sure you can use a specific phone number to respond to or website URL but it still doesn’t effectively measure the impact of the campaign. It is too prone to a prospect forgetting the number or just going to the company’s main website. This begs the question, how do you show the value in buying future advertising if you can’t track it’s effectiveness?

• It’s a form of interruption advertising that is becoming less effective. Radio ads rely on catching a prospect at the exact right time that they are interested in your product or service.  If your timing is off, they’ll switch the station (the same problem television advertising has).

• Who’s listening to the radio? Chris Anderson in his Long Tail blog cited a statistic from the Future of Music Coalition that radio listenership was at a 27 year low.  This was almost four years ago – who knows where that number is now.  This shouldn’t be a surprise with the rise in popularity of satellite radio and podcasts in which the listener can avoid advertising.

I continue to watch with interest how the radio, newspaper and television adveritising markets adapt to the changing marketplace.  Radio, however, seems to be lagging behind the other two.

What am I missing something about the future of radio advertising? I’d love to hear about it.

Taking it all in

I consider myself a sales professional, and a pretty good one.  Through formal study, self study and experience I’ve formed a belief system about how I approach the sales process.  I’ve taken in as much as possible when in comes to sales strategy from the Boiler Room philosophy of Always Be Closing (ABC), to Customer Centered Selling to Spin Selling to Solution Selling.  Some made complete sense and I picked up their key points easily, others I had to re-read to figure out what direction the process developer or author was going. Others I quickly found out were ineffective (ABC for example).

Maybe the challenge starts with the company and trickles down to the sales person.  David Meerman Scott recently posted a few “Gobbledygook” customer statements  and with product descriptions like these, it’s no wonder so many complicated selling strategies have been developed!

Putting it all together

I pulled from what I found useful to me and dropped the rest, trying to put into practice, taking what I believe will be the most effective approach.  My latest challenge is taking this belief system and trying to share it with those sales professionals that I train and coach every day.  Most of those I train have not been in the sales profession for very long, which is probably both a blessing and a curse, and are trying to form their own belief system that guides how they approach the sales process.

The mistakes I see them making are pretty consistent and ones most new sales people make.  Because most don’t have a sales process yet they spew product features and benefits without having an understanding of what the customer needs are.  Product features are what they know, so that’s what they talk about. 

The challenge I face is giving these relatively inexperienced sales people an easy set of beliefs to follow that can then guide their actions, questions and behavior on a daily basis.  That chance tweet I saw on will be my new strategy to give these salespeople what I hope is the guidance they need.

Listen, add value…can’t get much more simple and straight forward than that.

Photo Credit: dotolearn.com

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life involved in the sales profession, primarily on smaller sales teams without the backing of a marketing department.  In most cases the sales teams I’ve been involved with have acted like a team and worked together well, however, at the end of the day it is the efforts and smarts of the individual salesperson that is going to dictate their paycheck.  My more recent experience is with a larger sales team, first as an account executive and now as the team’s sales trainer. It is also my first experience having the support of a marketing department.  This experience got me thinking about how and when the individual salesperson should with engage the prospect, customer and client, whether there is the support of a marketing department or not.

In a perfect world there would be a synchronized set of events between sales and marketing in which marketing attracted inbound prospects that sales follows up on.  Both sales and marketing would use social media tools to help foster a stronger connection with the customer throughout the entire sales cycle. I’ve only seen a few examples of a system working in harmony like this.  What happens in most cases if a company is utilizing social media, it is typically the marketing department utilizing those tools.  Generated leads are then distributed to individual salespeople to move the sales process forward.  I see two potential inconsistencies happening at this point.

First, the connection with the prospect initiated through social media is lost because the salesperson isn’t engaging the prospect in that way.  Most salespeople leave this role to the marketing department and as a result, even though the prospect has shown a propensity to communicate through social media tools, the sales person is likely to not take full advantage of the relationship.

This brings up a more basic question – should a salesperson brand themselves outside of company sponsored marketing efforts?  If so, what does this look like?  Paul McCord recently posted his opinion on his blog and I agree with him to an extent.  Paul suggested that if a salesperson pays for their own marketing, they should take top billing over the company on marketing pieces.   The idea of personal branding for the salesperson is on the right track. However, I believe it would be a waste of time for the salesperson to spend time using traditional marketing methods mentioned in this post (i.e. – ad, the flier, the brochure, etc).

The salesperson would be much better off to engage the customer through some non-interruption based method such as social media or opt-in permission based marketing.  The salesperson has an opportunity to create real differentiation from their competitor by making a connection with the customer through the exchange of information and ideas that will be helpful to their customer, rather than trying to interrupt them with a message they think their customer wants to hear.

For those salespeople without the support of a marketing department, social media tools could be a great differentiator in attracting more qualified prospects and fostering a higher quality relationship.

The second challenge this situation creates centers around the fact that an inbound generated lead is likely to be more familiar with the company at the first point of salesperson contact.  This requires that the salesperson understand where the prospect is at in the sales process. In my experience, salespeople don’t spend enough time doing this and as a result try to present a solution before really having a solid understanding of the customer’s problem.  In addition, is the style of interaction by the salesperson congruent with the prospect’s desired way of doing business?  For example, an inbound generated lead is likely to be turned off very quickly by a high pressure sales person.

What do you think? Should the salesperson be proactive about engaging the customer through social media?

Photo credit: ineedmotivation.com

It was a rare find when one could find big business taking hold of social tools and using them in an effective way.  So rare in fact that I co-authored a post on the Hubspot blog with Peter Caputa on the subject. Tonight I was able to see how Comcast is ahead of the curve is using social media to connect with their customers.

After experiencing several power blips throughout the day, I returned home to find no Internet.  So I gotComcast on the phone to help me figure out the problem.  While I was on hold I sent a tweet that I was on hold with Comcast.  Soon thereafter I see an @reply from @comcast cares on Twitter asking if I needed any help!

It turns out that I the tech was able to help me out and I didn’t need the assist of @comcastcares, but Comcast just gained huge points in my book by proactively reaching out to me.  In the big picture, social media is in it’s infancy but I think it is companies like Comcast, who are jumping into the game early, that will create a deeper connection with the customer and yield the greatest returns from their early adoption.

Any time I felt like my business really mattered to a company it has been from a small company and never with a company the size of Comcast. Thanks @comcastcares.

What other big companies are early adopters of social media?