B2B Newsjacking With David Meerman Scott — Words of Mass Disruption

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If you are a Seller, Marketer, Leader, Entrepreneur or an Innovator this article is for you. This week’s podcast is the one you have been looking for. We are in the new age of the convergence of the Seller and the Marketer. This is a fact that affects all leaders and anyone effecting change in their space. I am here to help you parse that and make sense of it all.

Is it serendipity or is it making your own luck?

Over the last few months I have been working with the Sales team at UTD, part of that interaction led me to meeting the one and only David Meerman Scott. More proof that the programs that UTD is running bring in some amazing speakers. And, through what Quisitive has been doing with the sales program, I have had the opportunity to meet some incredible folks that have expanded and diversified my network and my perspective. A couple tweets to David and one thing led to another and I got David on my podcast.

Make it happen. Make your own luck.

This week David Meerman Scott and I sit down and talk through the challenges and advantages of the modern seller/marketer. The new seller is a marketer and the new marketer is a seller. If you haven’t figured this out, you probably feel left behind already. And, what is the modern tool set?

This is your Masterclass on modern selling and marketing, from a master himself David Meerman Scott. This article is an excerpt from the larger conversation that David and I have on this week’s podcast, please check that out.

David is a well-known sales speaker and he presents to audiences all over the world on the ways to generate attention and build business. He is a marketing speaker whose ideas on real-time engagement and the use of social media are popular around the world.

After today, the line between marketing and seller will be blurred forever.

This week we talk Newsjacking for B2B, the modern seller/marketer, using social tools to create value for your company and to make your selling and/or marketing cycle better, real-time marketing and sales, net neutrality and content neutrality, and of course we talk some #Blockchain. We give you real world B2B examples and use cases of how to use these concepts today. Tomorrow. Now.

Before you can jump into some of these more advanced concepts like Newsjacking and Real-Time Marketing you need to have a good handle on the modern tool set. That tool set includes, but, is not exclusive to the social media tools you are already using. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Blogs... etc.

The other key that needs to be considered is how you and your organization are adopting and advancing the use of these tools in your everyday process, sales cycles and marketing cycles.

1. The Convergence of Marketing and Sales

Historically buyers have been at the mercy of the sales person. For hundreds of years the buyer often relied on the seller to be the expert in the subject matter in which they were dealing. Just twenty years ago if you wanted to buy a car, most buyers would rely on the salesperson to educate them on the car buying process as well as the different car options. The buyer was at the mercy of the salesperson. Now buyers have unlimited amounts of information and tools to help educate them and find the best deals. Now the tables are turned and the seller is often at the mercy of the educated and knowledgeable buyer.

It isn’t all bad for the seller, just the seller that doesn’t adapt to this reality. The good salesperson understands their customers are using those tools and a good seller will influence the buyer online using social tools. A good sales person will influence the marketing process and be a part of it... willingly.

Flip that around and a good marketer is influencing the sales process. Before these roles were in different silo’s and often didn’t have the same goals. More than ever these silo’s need to be aligned and working together.

David Meerman Scott, gives a great business to business (B2B) example in this weeks podcast:

“If you are a seller on LinkedIn and you are creating content and active on LinkedIn, that becomes marketing and you are adding benefit to the company. As a marketer if you are adding content, then you are helping the sales process by providing articles the sellers can use to influence the sale.”

In other words, we are all in this together and we need to align. Now. Yesterday.

2. Inadequate Sales and Marketing Training

The next challenge the modern seller faces today is poor and inadequate training. More than 65% of sales decisions have already been made before you walk into the room to meet your customer. Close to 90% of customers have already looked you up online and learned about you and formed an opinion about you before you even meet them. If we are not training our sellers to be prepared for this we are doing them a disservice.

More and more customers prefer social as the communication point with a seller. Which means if you are not leveraging the tools you have access to to educate your team and yourself, to influence the sale or at least create content, you are already behind.

David, again clearly articulates the problem with training.

“If the only training you are getting as a seller is how to do cold calls and you are not getting training on how to use social tools to create a social networking presence or to help you do selling in the ways you want to be sold to. “

He refers to this as "Malpractice."

Bottom line, when you interview for your job you should be asking questions about these things and what position the company has taken. Or you need to have a clear conversation on how your current employer is planning to or already moving towards making these tools a regular part of the selling cycle. This is a big shift and some companies will struggle and resist to change until they have no choice.

3. The Mental Shift

Another topic David and I discussed in detail in this weeks podcast is making the mental shift that is required to fully embrace these new tools and techniques. If you want to become effective in the modern ways of selling, like using Twitter to engage with businesses, you must realize that many buyers want to do business electronically or socially. You have to make that mental shift - the mindset has to be there - you can buy some books, or training classes, but if your mind isn't in the right place you are not going to get it.

Forcing your team members to go to training doesn’t solve the problem.

One of the saddest things I regularly see is folks showing up to training that clearly don’t want to go and aren’t opening their minds to that mental shift. They don’t want to learn or change.

Tip to leaders, sure not all sales training is created equal, but, if your team members come back from training and says the program wasn’t good, often it really means they are not in the right mindset to learn and not willing to be open to this knowledge. That is a tougher problem to solve than finding the best training. Address that first.

Think about that time of year were everybody rushes to buy gym memberships to kick start that goal of getting fit and in shape. But then quickly 70% or more never make it to the gym more than a couple of times. They never made that mental commitment or mental shift to make that change, or to invest in themselves. Just because you buy the program, you don't automatically become fit and in shape. You must commit.

Often I hear traditional sellers stress over not fitting in to this new world and worrying about their future. It is not impossible for a traditional seller to make this shift to modern tools. Many traditional sellers can move into the seller/marketer world and into the world of social media tools in the modern world, but, they need to make that mental shift… that mental commitment.

FINALLY

My favorite part of the conversation this week with David is talking about Newsjacking and Real-Time Marketing. Listen to the podcast to get more detail on the real secrets of using social tools to get leads and building your brand. But, in order for you to be able to embrace and leverage these new concepts, the three points above need to be tackled first.

It would be very difficult for you as a seller or a marketer to walk into your organization and jump right into something like Newsjacking, if they haven’t made that mental shift we talked about above, they won’t see the advantages or mechanism for making it work for your organization.

Also, congratulations to David for getting Newsjacking nominated as a Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries.

SHOW NOTES/ABOUT THE LATEST PODCAST

This is episode 116 and today we will be talking with Author, Speaker, Newsjacking Strategist David Meerman Scott.

This week’s episode is your Masterclass on modern selling and marketing, from a master himself David Meerman Scott. If you are a seller, a marketer, a leader, an entrepreneur or you just want to know what is going on in the world of business, retail, tech, marketing or anything digital... then this is the show for you.

He is famous for predicting that Obama would win in 2008 and 2012 by using Social Media better than his opponent. He star grew even brighter when he predicted Trump would win 18 months before the election, because he saw how his team was using Social Media tools to his advantage. He has been a Wall Street bond trader and a male model. He is a Deadhead. He has his own private museum with Apollo space program artifacts in it. He has appeared in TV commercials, acted in the movies American Hustle and Joy, and was even in an opera in Tokyo. As you can tell he is super smart and super interesting, and he has his pulse on things I care about... using Social Media tools to blur the line between consumer and salesperson and marketer and seller.

If you are new to the show you are interested in business or industry transformation or how digital and data are changing every customer experience around us everyday, then this is the show for you. Please follow, subscribe and share.

Thank you,

Eric Hanes

www.wordsofmassdisruption.net