Smarketing Strategy #4 and Win Without Discounting

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.