This blog post is about three things:

1. Smarketing Strategy #4
2. How to SELL WITHOUT DISCOUNTING
3. The Best iPhone App EVER!

In my last blog post I shared Smarketing Strategy #3 : Creating content that jumps out at those who are most likely to become your customer.

If you did not have time to read my last blog post below is a short video (1:39) that explains how to create content that jumps out and here is link to some resources by Doug Kessler and his team over at Velocity Partners that also talk about it.

Smarketing Strategy #4 – using the Situation, Target, Plan (STP) framework – is to take your content where your best prospects go.

One of the major challenges of marketing is to solve the ‘Here vs. There problem’ – Here is where your content is, There is where the prospect is.

So you need to figure out where online your target audience goes, what they read, who they listen to and then find a way to get your content there or get links to your content posted there.

One of my favorite strategies is to comment on blogs and leave behind a cookie crumb – that leads people to a resource on your website.

If you want to use that strategy, here is a web site that ranks all the tops blogs by category.

Using a Here vs. There strategy:

• One comment resulted in over 500 people filling in a form to access my Won Sales Analysis™ template
• My Won Sales Analysis™ landing page has been viewed almost 15,000 times in the last 12 months.

The next stage of this strategy is to make my comments a status update on LinkedIn and let it be automatically tweeted.

Join us on September 13^th as thought leaders Mark Hunter, Craig Elias, and Steve Connolly share 3 Ways to Eliminate the Price Objection. (See the bios below.)

You don’t want to miss this FREE Online Event at 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PDT | 2:00PM -3 :00PM EDT on Tuesday, September 13, 2011.

Register even if you can’t make the live event because all registrants will receive links to the recording and handout from the event.

Click the button or below to sign up now!

http://bit.ly/NoMoreDiscounting

Learn more about the 3 speakers below!

Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” helps B2B sales professionals close more high profit sales by identifying better prospects, building profitable long-term customer relationships, and negotiating mutually beneficial strategic partnerships.

Mark has conducted thousands of training programs to organizations like BP, Novartis, Northrop-Grumman, American Express, and Kawasaki. His book High Profit Selling is due out in December of this year

Steven Connolly is a 15 year veteran of B2B product management and is currently the Senior Product Manager responsible for the revolutionary new sales tool iSell.

Steven is a frequent presenter on sales topics such as using social media for increasing sales as well as best practices for prospecting and lead generation.

Craig Elias is the creator of Trigger Event Selling™ and author of the Bronze Medal winner of the Top Sales Books of 2010 “SHiFT!“

His knowledge of Trigger Events has resulted in a 20-year track record as a top sales performer, winning a $1,000,000 prize in a global billion dollar idea competition, having his last company chosen by Dow Jones as one of the 50 most promising companies in North America, and coverage on NBC, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

I’ve been an iPhone lover ever since I found one on eBay that was hacked so I could insert my SIM card from a Canadian cell phone provider and have the phone work in Canada.

Since then I have played with every sales / marketing / business development app I could find. At last count I have downloaded 217 apps.

My 10 favorites are:

1. CardMunch
2. Gist
3. LinkedIn
4. Salesforce.com
5. Google Apps
6. Twitter
7. SplashID – Keeps track of all my online and offline passwords
8. Skype 
9. GoToMeeting
10. Weather Eye

Nine of them allow me to do on my iPhone what I can also do on my laptop.

CardMunch on the other hand allows me to do what I have always wanted to do on my laptop but have never been able to:

• Enter all the business cards of the people I meet into my address book
• Send these people a LinkedIn connection request
• Send all of them follow-up email with my contact information.

CardMunch on the other had does all the above quickly, easily, AND IT’S FREE!

Here is how it works:

• Open the CardMunch and take a picture of a business card. This picture is then sent to a team of people who manually enter the data – If for some reason the data is not entered correctly simply push a button and it gets sent back to be re-entered.
• Once the data comes back to the application – which typically takes less than 10 minutes – all you have to do is touch a button on the screen to send a LinkedIn request and send a post meeting email
• I have mine configured so it automatically sends a custom LinkedIn message once the date comes back and adds that person to my list of contacts. All I have to do is then touch the button that sends my standard meeting follow-up email that includes my contact (.vcf) file.

This blog post is about three things:

• Smarketing strategy #1
• A new sales 2.0 tool called IKO-System
• Golden Sales Strategies of Top Performers

In my last blog post I talked about sharing a list of the top seven sales and marketing alignment (Smarketing) strategies and using a modified version of the Situation, Target, Plan (STP) process as a framework to help you and your team sell more by aligning it’s sales and marketing efforts.

This is my first of those blogs posts and it’s about understanding your current Situation – who are your best customers?

For me the first step in any sales and marketing alignment effort is to define who you want as customers.

I would argue that you want as customers those who purchases from you in the past where:

• The sales was relatively easy to make
• The customer is willing to be a reference
• You had a shorter than average sales cycle
• You encountered little or no price objection

These are the customers you want to replicate.

The easiest way to replicate them is to identify who they are and the way you do that is using this Window of Dissatisfaction™ worksheet to make a list of the new customers you’ve acquired in the last 12 months

Start with your newest customers (the ones you recently won) and work backward. If you have too many put on the worksheet, then pick the ones you think matter the most.

Once you’ve made that list, identify the ones where you had a shorter sales cycle by going down the list and putting a checkmark next to each of those customer names where you had a shorter than average sales cycle.

Next go down the list putting a checkmark next to each of those customers you feel were easy to sell to.

Next, put a check mark beside the ones where you encountered little or no price objection.

Finally, put a checkmark next to those you feel are more than willing to be a reference for you.

Now look at all the customers who have three or more check marks next to their name. In all likelihood they were in the Window of Dissatisfactionâ„¢ when you first connected with them.

A blank version of the Window of Dissatisfaction™ worksheet shown at the top of this page can be downloaded by completing the form found at the bottom of this page  http://www.shiftselling.com/window-of-dissatisfaction/

In my next blog post I will show you how to analyze the list of customers with three or more check marks so sales and marketing can work together to replicate these highly desirable customers.

A brand new sales 2.0 tool that I recently started using is called IKO-System – the brainchild of Nicolas Woirhaye.

I’m a huge fan of harnessing the Trigger Event of job changes (promotions within a company and moves to a new company) as opportunities to engage a decision maker in a conversation.

When a new decision maker is put in place there are several factors that make this one of the best times to reach out.

• They have been brought in to make change happen
• They want to make change happen fast
• They have little or no attachment to current solutions or vendors

There are two dynamics that make these the single best events to be notified of:

1. A decision maker has money (aka budget), the authority to spend it, and influence. As a result they seldom need to experience all three trigger events (want, afford, justify) before making a purchase
2. What I call the Domino Effect – A change in one decision maker leads to three opportunities:

• The person who left – where did they go?
• The person who left – who took their place?
• The person who took their place – where did they come from?

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn because I can use it to learn when any of my 1^st degree connection change jobs. I’m also a big fan of using Gist because it allows me to learn more about my LinkedIn connections so I can establish rapport and have a conversation that is more relevant to them.

The only challenge with using LinkedIn is that I can only see these job changes for my 1^st degree connections – today about 10,700 connections. What IKO-System allows me to do is see all the job changes in my 2^nd degree connections – today that’s over 4 million people.

With about 3% of people changing jobs every month I now have access to over 120,000 job change notifications every month and with each job change creating 3 opporutnities I just found myself 360,000 different people I can call to see if what I sell is now more important, more relevant, or more affordable.

Now all I have to do is put in place my secret 3 step process to engage these individuals in a conversation. If you want to know what this secret 3 step process is you’ll have to phone me (+1.403.874.2998) because right now I don’t have time to write about it and I only want to share it with those who will take the initiative to call and learn how it works.

P.S. If you want to learn more about Gist see the recording of the webinar I did with THE networking guru -Keith Ferrazzi – and the founder and CEO of GIST – T.A. McCann.

The recording and handout from my webinar with Art Sobczak are now available for downloading.

This is one of my all time favorite webinars. Art Sobczak and I share a specialized form of cold calling (what Art calls Smartcalling) strategies that get the attention of decision makers.

We share unique and compelling cold calling strategies and then, using Onesource’s iSell, product we look at real-time Trigger Events that happened during the webinar and show how you could use these real time Trigger Events to reach decision makers.

Have an eventful week!

Craig

This blog post is about three things:

• The #1 Sales 2.0 tool – iSell by OneSource
• April’s Webinar – How to Generate the HIGHEST QUALITY LEADS
• May’s Webinar – Prospecting Strategies That GET THE CUSTOMERS YOU WANT

My pick for the #1 Sales 2.0 tool is iSell by OneSource. iSell is also the Gold medal winner of the Top Sales 2.0 Solution of 2010. I picked OneSource’s Trigger Alert tool iSell over every other type of sales 2.0 tool because:

• It’s the perfect companion to Salesforce.com
• It allows me to be proactive in going after the accounts I want
• I don’t have to rely on someone to filling in a form on my web site before I start my sales process

It is different from its competitors in three main ways:

1. It shows you all the relevant contacts in LinkedIn – even those that are more than 3 degrees away from you
2. It actively monitors over 300,000 corporate web sites so you learn of Trigger Events before they make the news – this way you’ll get a head start because you know when a decision maker has left the company and you don’t have to wait months until their replacement is announced
3. It contains sales primers that allows any sales person to quickly understand what is going on in any industry, the key concerns of  executives in each department, and the best questions to ask.

My May webinar “Prospecting Strategies that GET THE CUSTOMERS YOU WANT“  is with Art Sobczak & OneSource – see the info below on for more information.

Win $1,500 worth of Trigger Event services by suggesting which types of Trigger Event you think are best to be notified of and why. To win the $1,500 prize you must get the most votes for your answer.

Answers are submitted by commenting on this blog post. Answers are voted on by clicking on the  button that appears at the end of each answer/comment. Winners are announced the last Tuesday of the month – April 26^th – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday April 25^th.

Answers/comments need to be approved – to avoid spam – which typically takes just a few minutes. Contact me by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), or this contact form, if you don’t see your comment approved within a few minutes of posting it.

Use the “Share” button below to Tweet , Stumble!, Digg, and email your friends so you get the most votes, because the voting system I use does not allow you to vote for your own answers.

Join Ivana Taylor (a contributor to AMEX Open Forum, writer for Small Business Trends, and #21 out of over 30,000 internet professionals on the 2010 Fast Company Influencers Project) and myself (Craig Elias) as we join forces to give you a fresh perspective on sales and marketing alignment and show you:

• Which digital assets attract the most profitable prospects
• Where to place content so it drives the best prospects to your website
• When are the three best times to pass a web-based lead to your sales team
• How to get sales to give marketing the data they need so sales get the leads they want
• How to create a simple seven step system that aligns your sales and marketing efforts
• Which sales and marketing research results in the greatest payoff for you and your sales team

Date: Tuesday April 12^th – 9:00AM PST | 12:00PM EST

Register even if you can’t make the live event because registrants will receive a link to the recording and the handout.

http://bit.ly/Smarketing

Join Art Sobczak  (the Gold medal winner of the Top Sales Books of 2010 ), OneSource (the gold medal winner of the Top Sales 2.0 Solution of 2010 and Craig Elias (the Bronze Medal Winner of the Top Sales Books of 2010) as they  join forces to give you the best strategies on how to prospect over the phone.

Date: Tuesday May 10^th – 9:00AM PST | 12:00PM EST
Host: OneSource (Gold Medal Winner of the Top Sales 2.0 Solution of 2010)
Speakers: Art Sobczak & Craig Elias (Gold and Bronze Medal winners of the Top Sales Books of 2010)

Registration opens on April 15, 2010

This blog post is about three things:

• Today’s webinar for over 2,500 people
• Dreamforce 2010 & #infoshift
• Trigger Buzz #4 – Tonight @ 9:00 Eastern

Webinar

Join the  3,000 people who have already registered for today’s webinar “3 Ways to Get the Customers You Want by Using LinkedIn.”

Craig Elias (LinkedIn user 3,956) and Scott Allen (LinkedIn user 2,369) – of over 85,000,000 users – will share the three best ways to use LinkedIn to get the customers you want.

Even if you can’t attend, I suggest you register to be emailed a link to the recording and the handout.

If you are dialing in make sure you call in early because all indicators are that we could bump up against the capacity of GoToMeeting’s system .

Registration and details of this no-charge webinar can be found at http://bit.ly/TriggerWebinar.

#infoshift at Dreamforce

Next week I will be using Twitter to report on my time at Dreamforce. In a partnership with Infogroup – the largest information provider on the planet – I will be using the hash tag #infoshift -  the combination of the two companies names (Infogroup and Shift Selling) that also reflects the shift away from the high quantity of  information that has become ubiquitous to information that is highly relevant and timely.

I will be looking for the best Trigger Event Sellingâ„¢ and Trigger Event Marketingâ„¢ ideas and resources from Dreamforce 2010 (#DF10) and will report on all the companies and resources that can help you get in front of the right people at EXACTLY the right time.

Contact me if you have suggestions for companies that I should check out, want to know how others solve a specific problem or look for specific solutions.

If you are attending Dreamforce, Infogroup is giving away copies of my Trigger Event book to everyone who attends Clare Hart’s presentation titled “Interactive CRM: Drive Revenues and Outpace the competition” that is from 3:45 – 4:45 on Tuesday December 7^th.

Clare will share ideas and resources on how to use Triggers, Social Media & Chatter as your secret competitive advantage.

Those who attend can also schedule 20 minutes, with me, to develop the best Trigger Event Selling^â„¢ strategies for their business.

FYI: Clare Hart is the new CEO of Infogroup

TriggerBuzz #4

Today – Tuesday November 30^th – from 9:00PM-9:30PM Eastern (6:00PM-6:30PM Pacific) is the fourth edition of TriggerBuzz.

Get your prospecting questions answered by following @TriggerBuzz on Twitter. To submit your questions, once I follow you back, you need to send a direct message to @TriggerBuzz.

Details and instructions can be found at ShiftSelling.com/TriggerBuzz

On a final note I had no submissions of ideas on how to use the #6 Sales 2.0 tool – FeedBlitz to get in front of highly motivated decision makers at exactly the right time . So the first person who calls me (+1.403.874.2998) or Skypes me (Craig.Elias) with an idea on how to harness the power of Feedblitz will be this months winner of the $1,500 give away.

Have an eventful week!

Craig

P.S. Let me know if you are attending Dreamforce, I would love to connect in person while I am there.

In my last post, The #2 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media, I shared three ways to sell more by using LinkedIn. Jos Willard added a fourth way and received the most votes for his answer to my question “How else can you use LinkedIn to create or harness relationships to sell more?” For his efforts Jos won $2,000 worth of Trigger Event coaching, training, or advice.

For a while now I have been sharing, with my customers, ways to generate leads by using Trigger Events in their marketing efforts – aka Trigger Event Marketingâ„¢. Doing so allows them to harness the Selective Perception that is created when people experience the Trigger Events that turn them into highly motivated buyers.

Here is an excellent example of Trigger Event Marketingâ„¢, that I recently noticed on the home page for TD Canada Trust. It is based on the knowledge that getting pregnant triggers couples to want a house, which leads to needing a mortgage. The event of getting pregnant typically triggers a number other purchases besides houses and mortgages – Cars, life insurance, and finally getting around to doing a will.

If you want to do the same thing for your own business all you have to do is conduct a Won Sales Analysisâ„¢ the next few times you win a new customer. Doing so will allow you to identify the Trigger Events that motivate buyers to want what you sell. Once you know what the best Trigger Events are for your product or service, all you need to do is apply what you learn to your marketing efforts. When you do, your marketing will jump off the page because it’s resonates with the reader and you are highly likely to generate leads that result in core, loyal, customers, who will represent 80% of your profit and only 20% of your headaches.

If you want to learn more about Trigger Event Marketing I have a Facebook page that shares the resources and examples I come across. I invite you to become a fan of the page and post any examples you come across. I also invite you to call me (+1.403.874.2998) or Skype me (Craig.Elias) if you want to spend 15-20 minutes brainstorming ideas on how to make Trigger Event Marketing work for you.

Next Tuesday I’ll post the #1 way to sell more by using social media. Take a look at numbers 2 through 7 and see if you can guess what it is.

Have an eventful week!

Craig

The #2 way to sell more by using social media is to harness the power of people and relationships to get things done and the single most powerful relationship building and relationship harnessing social media resource is LinkedIn.

Now a lot of readers will say it should be #1 and for the longest time I would have agreed with you. I do agree it is the social media tool with the biggest number of different ways it can be used to sell more but in the last year I have found a social media tool that provides users with the most powerful information to sell more.

There are so many different ways to use LinkedIn to sell more that Amazon lists over 200 books on how to use LinkedIn.

Here are my three favourite ways to use LinkedIn to sell more:

1. Company Search: A search on a company lets you know who to target and the best way to get to them. The #2 most powerful Trigger Event is when there has been a change in decision makers at a prospect. These people who recently experienced the Trigger Event of being hired or promoted are the ones most likely to have interest in your products or services. When you do a company search you can see who recently got hired and who recently got promoted. A company search also lets you see who in your network works there now and who use to work there. Those in your network who use to work there can give you some valuable insight or context for your sales pitch and those  in your network who work there now are the ones likely to make the most valuable introductions.
2. Contact Information: Someone who was a customer in their last job is likely to become a customer in their new job. Being connected via LinkedIn give you access to their latest contact information and with this contact information you can reach out to congratulate them on their new position and see if and when they will have a need for your products or services in their new position.
3. Profile Organizer: Keep track of all your interactions with your connections – I have a personal plus account which allows me to use LinkedIn’s new profile organizer. This allows me to organize contacts and even keep notes on my activities with each person. The best part is you don’t have to be connected with someone to add them to a folder or make notes. It’s like a mini Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Sometimes it’s not worth the time and effort to add every prospect’s contact and company information into your CRM tool until there is enough activity or interested in becoming your customer. Now there is a quick way to keep track of the early interactions without having to take the time and effort required to enter all that company and contact information into a CRM tool first.

So this month’s question is how else can you use Linkedin to create or harness relationships to sell more.Win $2,000 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use LinkedIn to sell more. To win the $2,000 prize you must get the most votes for your answer. This month there is also a second prize of $1,000 worth of Trigger Event Selling services to the person who gets the second most votes for their answer.

Answers are submitted by commenting on this blog post. Answers are voted on by clicking on the button that appears at the end of each answer/comment.

Winners are announced the last Tuesday of the month – March 30^rh – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday March 29^th.

Answers/comments need to be approved – to avoid spam – which typically takes just a few minutes. Contact me by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), or this contact form, if you don’t see your comment approved within a few minutes of posting it.

Use the button below to Tweet , Stumble!, Digg, and email your friends so you get the most votes, because the voting system I use does not allow you to vote for your own answers.

Good luck & have an eventful week!

Craig

One of the keys to selling is reaching decision makers when they are most likely to be influenced: Influenced on what is the best solution to their problem – not who is the best supplier.

Solutions are all the different ways of solving the same problem or obtaining the same outcome (think of these as your competition), suppliers are alternate providers who sell the same solution (think of them as competitors).

Using this framework banner ads, Google ad words, and search engine optimization would be considered my competition because they provide alternate solutions that deliver the same  outcome – increased sales. Other sales trainers would be considered my competitors because they are alternate providers that deliver the same solution – sales training.

If you want to learn more about the difference between these two, Rene Mouborgne and W. Chan Kim explain the difference in an article, on Blue Ocean Strategy.

Recent research by Don Bulmer and Vanessa DiMauro shows that more and more decision makers are utilizing social media peer groups to form and validate decisions. Social media peer groups are those you would find on social media sites like LinkedIn, eCademy, Facebook, or Ning.

So the #4 Way to sell more by using social media is to create or participate in groups to influence those decision makers who experienced a Trigger Event that put them into the Window of Dissatisfaction BUT have not started the process of searching for alternative solutions yet.

I have a group on Linkedin called SHiFT! that has almost 2,500 members and a Trigger Event Selling Group on Facebook that has 300 members. I started these groups to encourage people, who have similar interests and aspirations, to share ideas, resources, and success stories about using Trigger Events to turn prospects into customers. It turns out that in creating these groups I am influencing decision makers on an alternate solution to increase sales.

To extend my reach I now participate in other groups related to sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, and innovation, that my target market (CEOs and VPs of  sales of small and  mid-sized organizations) joins on LinkedIn, eCademy, Facebook, and Ning.

Participating in these groups allows me to share my expertise with decision makers and influence their thinking while they are still in the formative stages of making a decision about which solution (sales training, banner ads, Google ad words, search engine optimization) they could use to increase sales.

So this month’s question is how can you leverage groups on social media sites to sell more?

Win $3,000 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use a group on LinkedIn, Facebook, or ANY other business oriented social media group to sell more. To win the $3,000 prize you must get the most votes for your answer. This month there is also a second prize of $1,500 to the person who gets the second most votes for their answer.

Answers are submitted by commenting on this blog post. Answers are voted on by clicking on the  button that appears at the end of each answer/comment.

Winners are announced the last Tuesday of the month – December 29^th – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday December 28^th.

Answers/comments need to be approved – to avoid spam – which typically takes just a few minutes. Contact me by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), or this contact form, if you don’t see your comment approved within a few minutes of posting it.

Use the button below to Tweet , Stumble!, Digg, and email your friends so you get the most votes, because the voting system I use does not allow you to vote for your own answers.

Good luck & have an EVENTFUL week!

Craig

Congratulations to the winner of $1,500 worth of Trigger Event services – Laura Waggoner. Laura won when her answer to the question related to The #5 Mistake Sales People Make received the most votes.

Stay tuned next week as I make available $1,500 worth of Trigger Event services to the person with the most votes for their answer a question that is related to The #4 Mistake Sales People make.

Till then, here is another free Trigger Event resource that I have found – the new “Save This Search” feature on LinkedIn. When you do a search and want to be informed when the results change you simply save the search and you’ll be notified via email (weekly or monthly) when the results change. For example: Let’s say you’re trying to get into Hewlett Packard and you want to target VPs, Senior VPs, and Executive VPs who recently got promoted or transferred.

Do a people search on LinkedIn for those currently employed by Hewlett Packard and have the “Vice President” in their title and you’ll get over 1,000 results. Now if you save that search next week you’ll receive an email that contains a list of the Hewlett Packard employees with “Vice President” in their title that recently updated their profile to reflect their new position. This past week there were six people who meet that criteria that changed their profile. Now you have a list of people to call who recently experience a Trigger Event and are more likely to be interested in your product or service.

Call me (+1.403.874.2998 or 866.744.7904) if you want help making LinkedIn’s new “Save This Search” feature work for you or have other free Trigger Event resources you want me to share with the over 3.500 readers of this blog.

Have an EVENTFUL New Years Eve!

Craig