5 Social Media Steps to Learn to Earn “C” Suite Buy-in

Take the following quiz to find out if you are on your way to earning your “C” Suite’s Buy-in for Social Media:

True or False:

1) Are you trying to educate your CEO on social media and convince him how wonderful social media is for business, prior to showing him you are trustworthy?

CEO’s don’t need to understand the finer points of social media any more than they need to know how to fly a chartered jet plane.  They need to understand how to board the chartered jet plane to get from point A to point B.

Lighten Up a Little!

Humor gets us through a rough week. So, I love to post fun work-related articles to encourage a smile out of you. Here is another winner from Business by Phone President Art Sobczak’s Funniest or Most Embarrassing Telephone Experience Contest.

Always Get a Name
From Rob Sinclair
I recently started a new freelance project calling CEO´s for a Business Development Summit taking place in Africa, I was actually calling “on behalf of” an African Country Government . I have recently moved to France and happened to call a major

Dirty Data Doldrums

Anyone know how much  inaccurate and low-quality data costs U.S. businesses  each year in bad mailings, staff overhead  and steady erosion of an organization’s  credibility among its customers and suppliers?   $611 billion each year according to The Data Warehousing Institute. 

I get to interact with 100’s of executives per year, and I can tell you first hand that these executives are oblivious to the data quality lacerations that are slowly bleeding their companies to death.  Case in point, how many of you have ever received a correspondence that was incorrectly addressed to you?  You either laughed, or it really irritated you. 

I received one at home the other day, and thought I’d die. 

Listen to RareAgent CEO Marge Bieler Talk Lead Gen

Who: Marge Bieler, President of RareAgent
What: Radio Interview with SLMA
When: 8:30pm (EST) (The full program begins at 8pm.)
Where: http://www.octalkradio.net/

(National) The Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA) will be interviewing industry leader Marge Bieler, CEO of RareAgent, today at 8:30pm EST. The main topic of discussion will be on lead generation and management and the impact on revenue.
“Many companies utilize telemarketing and inside sales people – without having the insight and visibility to really

Fear and Confidence

Why do we fail? Why do we end up with egg on our face or our foot in our mouth? Fear, doubt, ignorance, confusion, arrogance and thick-headedness! Yet, it’s learning about these traits that makes us fail and at the same time, gives us hope. If Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison can learn from their failures, then we can too!

I have many friends in business who are brilliant. Yet like others, they are fearful, overly confident, and blatantly ARROGANT. Yes, I’m right there with them. Oftentimes we cannot listen to good advice because our fear and our confidence are making us deaf, blind and dumb.

For me, the thought of failure was causing me to fail. Yet, what’s funny is

Three Steps in a New World of Customer 2.0

This is a new world, people! You know it and I know it. So challenge yourself to act in new-world ways with new-world technologies. We don’t have to throw out the lead gen mold… but we do have to re-shape it to reach Customer 2.0. What I mean is, the new customer is not waiting for your phone call. She is connected, educated about her options, and VERY busy.

In order to really make a difference in this new world, try adopting these three steps:

Lighten Up a Little!

If the heart-felt tirade and subsequent arrest of flight attendant Steven Slater teaches us anything, it’s that stress in the workplace is real, pervasive and potentially damaging if not channeled properly. In fact, if you cruise the Internet and talk with friends, it seems like most Americans are rallying behind Slater and see humor, and maybe a little bit of themselves, in his exasperation.

So in the spirit of blowing off some steam, here are some stories to make you laugh a bit.

Filtering Useless Info; Finding Useful Info

As I work at my computer, I marvel at how much information is right here with just a few strokes of the keyboard. Most of it is useless to me. However, it’s amazing that if I uncover the right combination of data, I can harness information that can translate into a new account and thousands of dollars for my firm! But where to look? It’s an impossibility to be able to drill down through every one of the 16-million company web sites in search of that pile of gold. I tried several search engine companies and found that they delivered some information, yet still required far too much time to get to the mission-critical company and contact information I needed. I found Broadlook (http://broadlook.com/b2bsales/?) to have the most powerful and user-friendly tools designed to get the real-time information from the massive, dynamic Internet.

Don’t Let Them See the Dollar Signs in Your Eyes

It seems like an immature kind of game sometimes, doesn’t it? A game that’s not very fun. Everyone knows that salespeople are selling to make money. But there’s a delicate dance that has to be done to defer the prospect away from this simple fact. Next time you make a call, first make the decision not to play your side of the game. Figure out what it is about your product or service that will truly help your consumer… and then, without a used car salesman smirk or dollar signs in your eyes, simply explain it to them. Even though I’m in the business of sales and I know every sales tactic inside and out, I despise being “sold to”. So I insist my team never does it. We know what the value of our product or service is— so then we are in the position of actually doing our prospects a favor by telling them about it. There’s no more game. No more dollar signs. It becomes a business conversation about value and opportunity. And that is fun.

WOW: Words of Wisdom from AA-ISP Leadership Summit

I love learning from my peers, and this week was inspiring.  As Olympic Gold Medalist, Jeff Blatnick states, “Success is no accident, it is earned and always expected!”  So how do you earn success?  Observe your peers, and mimic their success: