This blog post has three items:

1. The #7 Sales 2.0 tool: IntroMojo
2. Another $1,500 give away
3. The inaugural TriggerBuzz event

The #7 Sales 2.0 tool

In my last blog post I asked for tools that should be considered for list of top seven Sales 2.0  tools. One of the tools suggested was IntroMojo. The value of IntroMojo can be summed up in one word ‘Rapport’: The ability to have something in common with a decision maker you have never spoken to before, so you can start the relationship building process.

The  Trigger Event book SHiFT! has an entire chapter on how get called first when a decision maker experiences a Trigger Event and starts the process of Searching for Alternatives. In that chapter we talk about the need for a “Psychographic Fit”: Having the similar interests, values, or aspirations as a decision maker. The challenge is how do you know the interests, values, and aspirations of a decision maker y0u have never talked to?

That’s were IntroMojo comes to the rescue. The brainchild of Daniel Waldschmidt and Colin A Martin, it allows you to:

1. Identify the right people with the names you are looking for. IntroMojo asks you a few simple questions to help you zoom in from a name to the person you need to engage with.  Things like location, company, job title, industry are all clues that IntroMojo presents in helping you find the person that you want to reach.
2. Learn all about them. Learn a decision makers background, education, and work experience.  More importantly you can learn what your prospect is talking about, what books, videos, and music they enjoy, and what they like.  You find out who they’re friends with, what videos and blogs they are writing, and where they engage on the web.
3. Stay informed about what they are doing. Each time you need to engage a decision maker, check IntroMojo and it will serve up the most recent  information on them.  It’s new each day you check so your sales pitch can stay relevant.

$1,500 Give Away

This blog post has three items:

1. The coolest use of social media I have ever experienced
2. The recording of the webinar 5 Ways to Close Deals Faster
3. My countdown of the top seven Sales 2.0 tools

Buzz: The Coolest use of Social Media

Back in July I had the chance to participate in the coolest use of social media I have ever experienced: Small Business Buzz.

Months ago I subscribed to their tweets SBBUZZ and I have watched their weekly events via my iPhone but I never participated in a conversation until July – when the topic was sales. Then I found myself contributing to the conversation and that got me thinking…

How can I do something similar so that so practitioners of Trigger Event Selling^â„¢ can have their questions answered by anyone who wants to participate and provide answers. It’s called TriggerBuzz. It will be held the first and last Tuesday of every month so you can learn new things to get a healthy start and have a strong close your month. So starting next Tuesday October 5th – from  9:00-9:30 Eastern – each month you have two opportunities to have your questions about Trigger Event Sellingâ„¢ answered.

If you have questions you would like to have answered you simply need to  follow TriggerBuzz and send a direct message to TriggerBuzz. I have SocialOoomph – the #5 way to sell more by using social media – set up to auto-follow those who follow TriggerBuzz so you should be able to send me a direct message as soon as you follow TriggerBuzz.

If you have any questions or suggestions for TriggerBuzz you can contact me by phone (North America: 866.744.7904 | International: +1.403.313.0412) text (+1403.874.2998) Skype (Craig.Elias), email (Craig.Elias@ShiftSelling.com) or this contact form.

Biz: Recording of 5 Ways to Close Deals Faster

The recording of the recent webinar “5 Ways To Close Deals Faster by Using Industry and Market Triggers” is now available. In this webinar Tibor Shanto and I share information on the industry and market triggers that shorten sales cycles and five ways you can harness them to close deals faster.

Best: Countdown of the top 7 Sales 2.0 tools

Next Tuesday I will continue my series of Top 7 countdowns – Top 7 Sales Mistakes & Top 7 Social Media Tools – and list what I think are the top 7 Sales 2.0 tools. This is done David Letterman style – starting with number seven and working my way up to number 1.

The first Tuesday of every month I will share the next tool in the list and offer a $1,500 prize to the person who submits a creative way to use the tool and gets the most votes for their answer.

Contact me if you know of a tool you think should be considered.

Have an eventful week!

Craig

Here are the names of the lucky winners of the eight tickets to The Art of Marketing – coming to Calgary on Monday June 14^th:

• Volker Mendritzki
• Kashif Choudhry
• Chuck Warnica
• Nora Bouz
• Kae Shummoogum
• Berta Gomez

I took the names of all those who entered and created a random number generator, in Excel, to come up with the six winners above.

I then created a second random number generator to choose two of the six people from the list above as winners of a pair of tickets. The winners of  a pair of tickets were Volker Mendritzki and Kae Shummoogum. Everyone else won a single ticket.

Winners can contact me by phone (+1.403.874.2998), Skype (Craig.Elias), email (Craig.Elias@ShiftSelling.com) or by using the contact form found at http://ShiftSelling.com/Contact

So that’s eight tickets I’ve given away but I have one extra pair. Thursday morning I will send out a message via Twitter (CraigElias is my Twitter name) saying that I have two more tickets to give away and the first two people to phone my cell phone (+1.403.874.2998) and mention my favorite two words that are in that tweet will win those tickets.

If you don’t win it’s well worth the money to attend. Save $50 off the ticket price by registering here,

Here is a list of the speakers and a brief bio on each of them:

Chip Heath — Strat­egy and Communications
Chip Heath is the Thrive Foun­da­tion of Youth Pro­fes­sor of Orga­ni­za­tional Behav­ior in the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity. He is the co-author of the New York Times best­seller book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Sur­vive and Oth­ers Die. Chip’s lat­est book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, writ­ten with his brother Dan, was released in Feb­ru­ary 2010 and is already a NY Times and Wall Street Jour­nal best seller.

Sally Hogshead — Per­sua­sion and Influence
Nine sec­onds. That’s the length of the aver­age atten­tion span today. Just nine sec­onds! Peo­ple become dis­tracted by the next prod­uct, the next ad, the next option. How can you pos­si­bly hold your cus­tomers’ inter­est long enough shape their opin­ion? How can you break through the clut­ter to nail your next sales call, or moti­vate your inter­nal team? For that mat­ter, how can you influ­ence any decisions?

Sir Ken Robin­son — Inno­va­tion and Cre­ativ­ity
Last month I fea­tured Sir Ken’s inspir­ing TED Talk in the blog. Sir Ken Robin­son, PhD is an inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized leader in the devel­op­ment of cre­ativ­ity, inno­va­tion and human resources. He has worked with gov­ern­ments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with inter­na­tional agen­cies, For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, and some of the world’s lead­ing cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions. In 1998, he led a national com­mis­sion on cre­ativ­ity, edu­ca­tion and the econ­omy for the UK Gov­ern­ment. ‘All Our Futures: Cre­ativ­ity, Cul­ture and Edu­ca­tion’ (The Robin­son Report) was pub­lished to wide acclaim in 1999.

Mitch Joel — Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and Social Media
When Google wanted to explain online mar­ket­ing to the top brands in the world, they brought Mitch Joel to the Google­plex in Moun­tain View, Cal­i­for­nia. Mar­ket­ing Mag­a­zine dubbed him the “Rock Star of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing” and called him, “one of North America’s lead­ing dig­i­tal vision­ar­ies.” In 2006 he was named one of the most influ­en­tial author­i­ties on Blog Mar­ket­ing in the world. Mitch Joel is Pres­i­dent of Twist Image — Canada’s best Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions agency (Mar­ket­ing Magazine).

Gary Vayn­er­chuk — Per­sonal Brand­ing in the New Media Land­scape
Online mar­ket­ing trail­blazer Gary Vayn­er­chuk is a 33-year-old entre­pre­neur whose dual iden­tity as both busi­ness guru and wine guy has made him known as the “Social Media Som­me­lier.” A self-trained wine expert, he rev­o­lu­tion­ized the wine indus­try with his video blog, Wine Library TV (affec­tion­ately known as The Thun­der Show), and grew his fam­ily wine busi­ness from $4 mil­lion to $60 mil­lion in five years. What raised Vaynerchuk’s noto­ri­ety even more than his busi­ness acu­men was his fore­sight com­bined with his pio­neer­ing, multi-faceted approach to per­sonal brand­ing and business.

Max Len­der­man — Brand­ing and Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing
Max Len­der­man is Exec­u­tive Cre­ative Direc­tor at GMR Mar­ket­ing, the largest expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing com­pany in North Amer­ica, where his work has won numer­ous indus­try recog­ni­tions, the lat­est includ­ing the 2009 Effie Award and the 2007, 2008 and 2009 Ex Awards. He pre­vi­ously founded and ran Gear­w­erx Expe­ri­en­tial Mar­ket­ing, Canada’s pre­mière expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing agency, with offices in Mon­tréal and Toronto.

Have an EVENTFUL week!

Craig

This is my last post in a series on the Top Seven Ways to Sell More by Using Social Media. Remember, the person with the most popular answer to my question at the bottom of this blog post wins $1,500 in Trigger Event Selling services

The #1 way to sell more by using social media is to learn of opportunities just after a decision maker has experienced a Trigger Event, that makes them realize what they have is not longer sufficient, but before they notice, or worse yet call, your competition – This powerful selling window is called the Window of Dissatisfaction.

My experience is that the single most powerful Trigger Event is a change in a decision maker at an organization.

You know this scenario. You have an account you want to get into, but the competition is entrenched in the account and no matter how often or how hard you try, you can’t get in. Then, one day, the decision maker at the account changes. Suddenly, resistance disappears and, before you know it, you have yourself a new customer.

The opposite is also quite common. You have a relationship with a decision maker, and that relationship allows you to enjoy the benefits of having the “inside track” on a lot of new projects. Then, one day your reliable contact leaves and you lose the business to someone else!

Just like MIT’s Lead Response Study shows the odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The ideal moment to cold call a decision maker is as soon as possible after the Trigger Event has happened and the best solution I have found to learn of these events as soon as possible is TweetDeck.

Now for all you Twitter fanatics out there, yeah I get that Twitter is the power behind TweetDeck but who has the time to sit around on Twitter waiting for a decent Tweet – like this one about a new CFO being hired – to show up.

My preference is to set up a column inside TweetDeck with a search for lets’ say VP of Sales and then every now and again include a filter that allows me to make the search results relevant to my sales targets. In this case finding more customers in Boston.

So this month’s question is how else can you use TweetDeck or something similar to harness a change in decision makers to sell more. Win $1,500 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use TweetDeck or a similar service to sell more. 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 27^rh – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday April 26^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

I had to take a hiatus from blogging in order to finish the manuscript to my upcoming book “SHiFT! Harness The Trigger Events That TURN PROSPECTS INTO CUSTOMERS,” in time in for the publisher keep his May 15^th release date. Now that it’s finished let’s get back to the Top Seven Ways to Sell More by Using Social Media. Remember, the person with the most popular answer to my question at the bottom of this blog post wins $3,000 in Trigger Event Selling services. The #3 way to sell more by using social media is to harness word of mouth by using a content sharing tool like AddThis or ShareThis. The reason you want to use one of these tools is because your content is more likely to be shared when you give readers the convenience of sharing without having to leave your web site. The more convenient you make it for people to take action, right now, the more likely they are to, not get distracted by something else and, finish what they started doing. I started out using ShareThis but readers had to click on the button in order to activate it and my experience with e-Commerce in the late 90′s told me that requiring people to take just that one extra mouse click reduced the likelihood of action – The statistic was that you lose people at the rate of 50% for every click you force them to make. I moved to AddThis when the Trigger Event of noticing a competitor using something that did not require the initial mouse click caught my attention. I moved to AddThis right away and in my first week I had twice as many people use the AddThis functionality – via mouse over – than I had with ShareThis. About a week later I received an email from ShareThis validating my perceptions and my experience. The email said “After conducting extensive tests with select partners, the findings indicate that allowing the button to open on-hover increases sharing activity by 50% per page view compared to the current no-hover option” Once I started using AddThis I went through the process of customizing the button so the most important sharing options (email, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Facebook) were shown on the left – in order of importance – putting the next most important ones (Favorites, WordPress, Delicious, Reddit, and PDF Online) on the right side, and customized the header. I selected the order based up on a report on how people share content and what Active Conversion (my marketing automation and sales optimization service provider) told me about which sites generated the most inbound traffic. The interesting thing is that a few weeks after I switched to Add This, ShareThis came out with the same functionality. But at that point I had already switched and had made the investment of customizing the AddThis button and I was no longer motivated to spend time on the problem. So this month’s question is what other sharing tools can be used, or how can they be used, to maximize social word of mouth? Win $3,000 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use a word or mouth tool like AddThis or ShareThis to maximize the sharing of web site content. 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 – February 23^rd – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday February 22^nd. 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 AddThis 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

In my last post The #5 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media I gave an example how you can sell more by using the social media application Twitter.

In that post I offered $2,000 worth of services to the person who provided either the most popular example of ,or idea on, how to sell more by using Twitter or any Twitter application to sell more, and a $1,000 to the person with the second most popular answer.

It appears that everyone was either stumped or too busy selling to give an answer. As the Mother Hubbard nursery rhyme goes “I looked for some ideas … and the cupboard was bare”.

Next Tuesday – December 1^st -  I announce The #4 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media and offer $4,500 in prizes – $3,000 to the first place winner and $1,500 to the second place winner – for the most popular answers on how to use that form of social medial to sell more.

In the mean time take a look at the 100  most popular Twitter applications and see which ones you think can add the value to your own efforts by learning of Trigger Event information to sell more.

Have an EVENTFUL week!

Craig

This post has two items:

1. The continuation of our countdown of The Top Seven Ways to Sell More by Using Social Media, with a $2,000 prize.
2. A link to the article that resulted in Harvey Schachter writing about Trigger Event Selling in this Monday’s Globe and Mail.

#5 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media

A wise female entrepreneur I know once commented on sales people, who were always in a hurry to get down to business, by saying “Hold my hand and take me to a dance before you take me to the altar”.

She is not alone in her thinking. A large majority of decision makers choose who to buy from based upon an analysis of risk vs. credibility and the depth of your relationship with a decision maker is often the deciding factor on how much credibility you have.

The challenge most sales people have is how to start the relationship building process when decision makers are too busy to take, or return, their sales calls? Jerry Vass’ ‘Flanking Strategy’ – start by adding value, in a non-selling way, and build a relationship from there – is one way to make this happen.

The #5 Way to Sell More by Using Social Media is to use it to start the relationship building process.

From a Trigger Event Selling perspective the best way, I have found, to do this is to use…

AND

One of the reasons I joined Twitter was to start the relationship building process with decision makers who are looking for insights on how to enhance their organizations selling efforts.

The idea is to add value and build a relationship before a Trigger Event happens and they have a need for services like mine.

I typically Tweet, once or twice a week, about ideas, resources, or success stories on how to turn prospects into customers by harnessing Trigger Events.

I decided to combine Twitter with Social Oomph after I read the Lead Follow Up Research by MIT. The research shows the importance of following up with those who complete a web form, within five minutes!

The intent is to enhance the relationship building process, that begins when someone follows you on Twitter, do it in a value adding/non-selling manner AND do it as soon as you can after they following you.

It turns out that Social Oomph makes it incredibly simple to do that. One of the great features of Social Oomph is that you can automatically send a direct message to every new follower. The free version checks your new followers every eight hours and the professional version checks every eight hours. One small word of warning. If you use Social ‘ vetting process – or anyone else’s. E.g. TrueTwit – the auto responder does not go out until you approve the follower. I had Social Oomph’s vetting turned on this morning which explains why I have 43 autorepsonder messages waiting to go out.

If you follow me on Twitter I have Social Oomph configured to automatically send you a direct message, that includes a link to access my best ideas on how to replicate your biggest sales wins.

This content is ONLY AVAILABLE TO MY TWITTER FOLLOWERS. I suggest you follow me so you can see the practice in action AND get access to a no-charge resource that can have a significant impact on your selling efforts.

Win $2,000 worth of Trigger Event services by submitting either a great example of, or great idea on, how to use Twitter, Social Oomph, or ANY other Twitter Application 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 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 – November 24th – so voting ends at Midnight (MST) on Monday November 23^rd.

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.

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.

The Article That Harvey Schachter Liked

In the May of 2008 I submitted an article to Rain Today in the hopes it would be published on their site. In July of 2009 – over a year later – the Trigger Event of a change in people (the editor) resulted in a phone call and a request for permission to use my article the week of October 26th – this past week.

The article caught Harvey’s attention and last week he called to verify some information so he could write about the article in the Globe and Mail’s Monday Morning Manager. An online version of Harvey’s writing is available here.

The original article titled Shorten Sales Cycles by Harnessing Trigger Events is about a hypothetical sales person (Jed) who learns to vastly improve his prospecting activity by looking for and taking advantage of Trigger Events.