Donal Daly

It is almost impossible to have lived through 2011 and not get all caught up in the social media frenzy. The launch of Google+ was one of the most talked about events of the year among the technorati. Was this to be the end of Facebook?  How would Twitter react? Even though Google+ amassed a user base of more than 10 million in three weeks (including the Dalai Lama), Facebook didn’t collapse, but pretty much just copied the Circles feature from Google+, and Twitter changed its approach to be a broader service instead of purely being a micro-blogging site.

How all this will pan out in 2012 is of course uncertain, but what is certain however is that social media is irreversibly part of the fabric of the world in which we operate.  Increasingly we are seeing Twitter and Facebook as a social force for dissent,...

If you read one sales book this year, The Challenger Sale should be the one.  Actually, if you don’t generally read sales books at all, you should make an exception in this case and read this one.

The Challenger Sale comes from Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson of the Sales Executive Council, part of the Corporate Executive Board.  The hypothesis it sets out flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that suggests that complex B2B selling is all about relationships.  Instead it describes a new kind of  B2B sales winner – the...

Most sales professionals accept that effective and consistent use of a sales methodology is a predictor of better sales results. However, many (if not most) investments in sales methodology are simply wasted dollars.  In fact less than 40% of sales people who have been trained in a sales methodology use it most of the time. (Source: Dealmaker Index).  This is considerably less than the 66% of folks who use a CRM consistently.  It is time for the methodology vendors to look in the mirror and stop criticizing poor adoption of CRM.  But that is for another post. I wonder however if it is really understood just how much difference using a sales methodology can make.
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Social Media is on everyone’s lips. But B2B use-cases are extremely rare. Most stories relate to B2C experiences are hard to transfer to the B2B sales world. We’ve been working on that.

Over the last 18 months or so I’ve been trying some B2B models in the Social Universe. The core philosophy has been to shape thinking, cultivate customers and earn permission to engage.

Here’s what we have learned …

1. The Social Universe is a great place to listen and learn: If I follow you on Twitter, read your blog, or study your LinkedIn profile, I quickly get a sense of who you are. Everything you do in the Social Universe leaves a shadow that I can collect to build up a picture.

2. Give Value First and Expect Nothing in Return: Where traditional selling centered around targeting the customer, now you need to make it easy for her to want to find, and want to engage with you – because you give...