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Sales People Can (and Should) Blog Too

Posted by Peter Caputa on Mon, Mar 04, 2013 @ 08:54 AM
 

I blogged long before I had any real sales skills or experience. I thought I knew how to sell, but didn't really learn the right way to do it until I hired Rick Roberge. When I started learning how to prospect, I realized that a blog is a perfect selling tool. Blogging helps with generating awareness, establishing credibility, and nurturing prospects. Shortly after I started getting sales coaching from Rick, I started coaching Rick Roberge on how to use a blog. Unlike me, he was a salesperson long before he ever wrote a blog post. That was almost 10 years ago now. Rick is still blogging.

At HubSpot, my sales team is constantly telling our partners to blog more frequently. They're also coaching agencies on how to offer blogging as a service to their clients. But, very few people on my team actually write their own blogs. Not anymore...

  1. Sales People Can Blog - A group blog by Danielle Herzberg's sales team. So far, contrbutions are from Dan MacAdam and Brian Signorelli, both Channel Account Managers at HubSpot. It's fun and it's funny, not just for salespeople, not just for agencies.... So far, their stuff appeals to a general marketing and sales audience.
  2. Inbound Agency Selling with David Weinhaus, a Channel Account Manager. David was the first salesperson on my team to blog consistently. Great advice for agencies.
  3. Nick Sal Inbound - Nick Sal is a consultant on our agency team. Anyone who knows Nick, knows that he brings excitement to everything he does. That shows through in his writing too.
  4. Innovation Al Marketing  - Al is the wise man on the agency consulting team at HubSpot. He's an excellent writer and communicator. I speak from experience when I say: don't ever ask him for critical feedback about your blogging efforts, if you don't really want it.

There's a real SHIFT going on - where marketers aren't the only ones blogging. There's a shift in sales going on - where salespeople are seeing the value of blogging. Inbound marketing changes sales. Frank Belzer just published his book today: Sales Shift: How inbound marketing has changed selling, making it more difficult and more lucrative at the same time. He's leading a bit of a movement, I believe.

Are you in sales? Do you blog? Why? Why not?

Comments

Thanks for the shout out Pete. Gary V really got through to me at Inbound12 last year. To matter, you have to care. To be successful you have to scale. There is no way to scale caring as a salesperson better than creating meaningful content for our prospects, interacting where they exist online, and thinking through different stages in the sales cycle - all the things inbound marketing has been exhorting marketers to do for years.
Posted @ Monday, March 04, 2013 2:19 PM by David Weinhaus
Aligning marketing and sales is an age old challenge that I think will resolve itself one of two ways; smart companies who evolve to inbound marketing including content contribution from everyone especially sales will grow, and the tone deaf, intransigent companies will fall further behind into irrelevancy.
Posted @ Tuesday, March 05, 2013 10:20 AM by Craig Lindberg
First, thank you, Pete. I know that you don't have time, but I think that you should coach everybody the way that you coached me. I haven't learned much that you haven't taught me, but what you taught me, I remember and use it. Interestingly, some of the stuff that you taught isn't practiced by many others. Here's a few best practices a la Pete Caputa circa 2006. 
1.) Spend a third of your time reading other blogs. I subscribe to 153 blogs divided into two groups "Top Priority" and "When I have time". 
2.) Spend a third of your time commenting on other blogs. (If I were 30 and broke and needed to develop an on-line presence, I'd comment 'remarkably' on other blogs and link back to my LinkedIn profile.) 
3.) Spend a third of your time writing to your own blog and be sure to link to others. IMO, this is where many bloggers miss the boat. They write decent content, but don't include any 'link love' and therefore don't encourage any WIIFM forwarding. (How could I not promote this post after you said all that nice stuff about me?) 
 
One more thing very on topic. I've got about 1,000 articles on a variety of topics. It's not unusual for me to say to a prospect, "I wrote an article about that a while back. I'll send it to you." Prospects appreciate salespeople that are critical thinkers, literate and expert enough to write in public. In other words, they're more than just salespeople. 
 
BTW, I just agreed to write a monthly column for Sold Magazine titled Sales Anecdotes and Their Antidotes. It will be lessons that I've covered on real coaching calls on the topic of the month. I'll also be writing the cover story article in September on Networking and Prospecting. Guaranteed, I'll be talking about how I use my blog to do both. 
 
Thanks again!
Posted @ Tuesday, March 05, 2013 9:22 PM by Rick Roberge
I'll take your can and should and raise it to a must. Sales people must blog to establish expertise, credibility, and personality. If you are going to survive as a sales person in the 21st century, social media and blogging are your lifeline. And I am a marketer. Training sales people to do a marketer's perceived job does not mean I won't have one. Marketers are like matchmatcher's for sales people, but sales is still the one doing the courting.
Posted @ Friday, March 08, 2013 7:25 AM by Carole Mahoney
Pete - as you know I have been pushing the sales people need to blog message for a long time. I am still amazed by the pushback I get from sales which is usually "we don't have time" and the pushback from marketers which is usually "they will do a lousy job". Until both sides pick up the slack and help each other we might be a lonely voice. This change stuff is hard.
Posted @ Friday, March 08, 2013 8:54 AM by Frank B
Well said, Frank. I think we can get "some" salespeople over the "I don't have time." We can win that battle. But, I don't know how to get marketers over the "they will do a lousy job" part. Of course, we'll do a lousy job. We're not going to be as good as them. But, we got interesting stuff to share. How do we bridge that gap? Have you seen companies bridge that gap?
Posted @ Friday, March 08, 2013 10:26 AM by Peter Caputa
I haven't seen anyone 100% succeed yet but I have seen people heading in the right direction. One company I worked with had a contest where there sales people submitted draft articles - they all had to submit and there was a prize. By calling them Drafts it took the pressure of sales to provide a perfect article and set the right expectation for marketing. They of course had to edit and maximize the content for IM but that was easy. Upside they got 3o plus potential posts!
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