Tony and Jeni at Anthony Cole Sales Training Group have shared some funny sales stories.

I'm racking my brain for a good one to share as a salesguy.

I have a crazy one to share as a buyer.

When my wife and I bought our house, we needed to buy a mattress for our spare room. Since the most use it would get would be when family is visiting on the weekend, we didn't want to spend a lot on it. We also didn't want one that was going to disintegrate in a year. But, price was certainly the most important factor.

So, we went to Mattress Giant. Here's the conversation as I can recall it:

Me: Could you point us to your cheapest mattresses?
Salesguy: We have a mattress over here that is $550. Try this one. [Amy lays down.]
Amy: This isn't bad.
Other Salesguy with other customers to Our Salesguy [from a few feet away]: Are you selling that one? Do we have more than one of those left in stock?
Our Salesguy to other Salesguy: I think this is the last one.
Salesguy to us: Do you guys want this one? This is the last one. I can give you a good deal on it. Probably knock $50 off of it.
Me: This is the cheapest mattress you have?
Salesguy: No. We have cheaper ones.
Me: Could you point us to the least expensive one?
Salesguy: It's over there. [He points and walks away.] [We go over and lay down. Amy and I agree that it's fine.]
Me: [Had to go interrupt him from doodling on his computer twenty feet away.] How much is the cheapest one?
Salesguy: It's $300, but I don't know why you'd buy that one. The $500 one is going to last a lot longer. The cheap one isn't going to hold up.
Me: I'm looking for a mattress for a spare room. It'll rarely be used.
Salesguy: Well, I guess if you don't care about the people sleeping on it, it's fine. [I give him ridiculous look. Can't believe I'm actually still talking to him.]
Me: Can you give us a minute to talk about it?
Amy: Are you sure the cheap one is ok? [My wife is falling for this asshole's sales moves.]
Me [to Amy]: It's fine. This guy just doesn't make as much commission if he sells this one. So, he wants us to buy the more expensive one. They wouldn't have it in the store if it wasn't going to last.
Salesguy: [Walks back over interrupting our conversation.] You know you can go on craigslist if you want to find a cheap mattress?
Me: I don't want a used mattress. I want a cheap one. We'll take the $300 one. Can you write us up?
Salesguy: Sure. [Walks over to his computer.] [I presume I have to follow him and do.] [Amy and I sit down.] You want the $550 one right?
Me: No. We want the $300 one.
Salesguy: Ok.
Me: When can we have this delivered? [My parents are visiting the following weekend.]
Salesguy: I have to look that up. But, we do deliveries every day. Do you guys want to add the stainguard cover? It's an extra $120.
Me: No.
Salesguy: Do you need a base for the bed?
Me: Yes.
[There was one other add on thing he tried to upsell us.]
Salesguy: Are you sure you don't want the slightly more expensive better one?
Me: Yes, I'm sure [insert his first name].

To top it all off, the guy checked off that we didn't need a base for the bed. The guys that delivered it, had to go back and get us one.

And for the record, the mattress is just fine. When Peter was born and Amy was nursing him in our bed, I slept in it a few times. And my parents, Amy's parents and my sisters and brother in laws have slept in it. They get good night sleeps. They know we care about them.

Do you have a funny sales story?

Chris Johnson is a colleauge of mine at HubSpot.

Here's a rough transcript of a recent call:

CJ: Hello Mr. X. You recently did a search at Google for "The Best Search Engine Marketing Program Available 2008". It looks like you found us. Are you trying to optimize something?
Prospect: blah blah blah.

Two things that made this blogworthy, atleast in my opinion.

1. That's Long Tail. We certainly didn't set out to rank for that "search phrase". It happened, though. I'd imagine that noone will ever type that phrase again. But, when we add up all of the 1 time relevant phrases that people type, it starts to add up to a lot of visitors and leads.
   
2. Google Delivers "the Best". It's interesting how people ask Google, a computer that crunches our links to determine quality, for the "best" solutions. During Mark Roberge's presentation on SEO yesterday at the WBJ Sales Summit (his slides), he used the example of searching for "best plumber". Sam Wildt raised his hand and made the point that the person that ranks at the top isn't necessarily the "best". Mark agreed and explained that Google makes their best estimation. The crazy apart about it... is that many people start their search with "best" in front of their search term. They must believe that Google brings back "the best" or atleast some approximation of it that helps them start their buying process.

How recursive is this?

As this gets published, I'm speaking on a panel at the WBJ Sales Summit w/ Mark Roberge and Dave Hurlbrink. Mark is speaking about SEO. Dave is speaking about sales workstyle management. Together, we're doing our best to spell out important pieces of an inbound marketing strategy that will help the attendees improve online lead generation and lead nurturing activities within their organizations.

Here's my presentation on why blogging is an important component of that.

I'll also be referencing a few links during the presentation.

Blogging as SEO Machine.
Check the results on google for "a search for Central New England Sales Summit". Also, take a look at how well my article about blogging and sales ranks for a keyword search of "improve your sales process".

Blogging as the Host of the Conversation
Take a look at Dave Kurlan's article where he asked people what their best sales advice is. Take a look at this article and how my clients endorse us in public in our comments, where our prospects read it. Noel Huelsenbeck:

"John is right on one account when he says "learn how to market your business on the web yourself" I would add, and do it using a proven methodology and experts, then add the hard work. Why John is out searching the web trying to find the short cuts and getting "free" info I've already designed my site, ranked my keywords, gotten leads, made sales and taken my $250 investment and made thousands."

Blogging as Networking Central
This blog post about the best internet marketing blogs led to many new relationships for me and HubSpot. I also make a habit of answering questions on LinkedIn where I can leave links to relevant blog posts. After the sale, I also frequently highlight my clients as I've done in this series of posts where I asked individual clients to share their internet marketing advice.

Blogging as Lead Nurturer and Lead Capture Tool
I'll be referencing this quote from Rick Roberge's blog (who's speaking now in the other room, btw):

I've had conversations with peers about whether salespeople should generate their own leads.

I've even gone so far as to say that the stronger your lead generation program(s), the weaker you are encouraging your salespeople to be and vice versa. The weaker your lead generation is, the stronger your salespeople need to be.

I'm constantly getting pushback. Salespeople want fancy websites, big advertising, more mailings, marketing support, yada, yada, yada. Anything for more leads so they don't have to work so hard.

In summary, blogging is an extension of what I do as a salesperson. It helps me generate leads, nurture prospects and sometimes it's the thing that seals the deal.

I've been talking to Alex West from RR Donnelly recently. She sent me examples of lenticular printing so I could see what she does.

See the animiated gif above. Lenticular printing actually makes that happen on paper. It requires 3D Photography to make it happen.

I'm more of an internet marketing guy. I don't usually blog about this kind of stuff. I've had slight departures - talking about trade show marketing and direct mail. However, I'm fairly immune to being "marketed to". I usually find what I need and discover new stuff online.

But, this was a little too cool not to share. (My 20 something coworkers were fighting over the martini glass print.) If I received something like this in the mail, I'd probably actually read it. Apparently, based on Alex's lenticular printing marketing case studies, I'm not the only one.

Fabrice Grinda, founder of classifieds site, OLX, answered my business advice interview questions. There's some great advice for any business owner, especially if you're an internet marketing startup or trying to figure out internet marketing for any type of business.  

When & why did you start your current business?

I left the last company I had created in November 2005. Once again, I went back to 9 business selection criteria and started looking for new opportunities.

It struck me that there were 5 big trends in the world:

• 1. There is a transition from offline media consumption to online media consumption
• 2. There is a transition from offline advertising, especially print advertising, to online advertising
• 3. There is a transition online from paid business models to free advertising business models
• 4. There is emerging market growth with GDP per capita and Internet usage growing faster in the emerging markets than in the developed world
• 5. There is a massive transition underway in the $100 billion a year classifieds market from paid print classifieds to online print classifieds. This transition is already well underway in the US and Western Europe, but is only in its infancy in the developing world where newspapers continue to dominate classifieds online and offline.

Given those trends, I created OLX free classifieds in March of 2006 with the objective of building the largest free classifieds site in the world. OLX is essentially Craigslist 2.0 for the world!

What is your unique selling proposition?

OLX is the next generation of free online classifieds.

OLX provides a simple solution to the complications involved in selling, buying, trading, discussing, organizing, and meeting people near you, wherever you may reside.

First and foremost, while Craigslist is essentially in English all around the world and only covering the main cities in each country, OLX is in the local language with all the major cities of the country covered. OLX is already in 25 languages. We aim to end the year in over 40 languages!

The second fundamental difference is with regards to the business model. Almost all classified sites charge for jobs and real estate and are only temporarily free with the objective of eventually charging to post a classified. OLX intends to remain free to post forever. We use an advertising business model which we will supplement with featured listings in the future.

The product is very different as well. OLX has taken all of the major Web 2.0 elements and brought them to classifieds:

• We have a fantastic mobile classifieds version of our site that lets you do anything you can do on the web on your mobile phone!
• You can easily design rich colorful listings with pictures and videos
• You can display your listings on your social networking profile (Facebook, MySpace, ...)

What do you like most about internet marketing?

Over the years, I have tried all forms of advertising: TV ads, radio ads, print ads, flyers, banner ads, etc. When promoting online products, search advertising is by far the most cost effective marketing method other than SEO and viral marketing (if your site lends itself to those).

The users are already online so you don't lose a large percentage of the audience. Moreover, search users are looking for something hence any click is likely to lead to a high conversion rate. Best of all, you can track everything the search users do and can optimize your campaigns to meet your ROI goals.

We use a fantastic SEM shop called Keyade for all of our keyword buying globally in all languages on all search engines (including Baidu in China).

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Jen from The Ladders. We share a common investor, so we were just trading notes. She brought up the fact that our lead intelligence was pretty cool.

I pointed her to my post on HubSpot called "How to Use Your Blog as a Sales Tool" which talks about our lead intelligence tool and how I use it.

Then, I had a random thought that most company's inside sales teams are untapped internet marketing workforces. If trained in internet marketing, they could be very powerful forces for a company in the social mediasphere and blogosphere.

Sales professionals should use the web to:

1. Attract traffic to their company's website. Generate their own referrals online.
   
2. Assist in lead capture by sending people directly to register for marketing webinars and white papers.
   
3. Nurture prospects that need more education by guiding them towards website-accessible information - helping influencers to get the attention of decision makers. (The phone and figuring out what is important is critical here too.)
   

But, imagine your 5, 50, 500, 5000 salespeople fully trained in internet marketing best practices, driving traffic to your website from linkedin, the blogosphere, Twitter, etc. Imagine them asssiting with SEO, link building and lead capture. And imagine them using the web to educate engaged prospects.

That's a lot of untapped potential.

Do you know any organizations that are this forward thinking?

Leave a story about how you, as a salesperson, have used social media to engage or nurture a prospect. I might use your story when I talk at the Central New England Sales Summit. Share your story over here if you're interested in potentially attending for free.

The other day, I posted a guest article to my blog about why small businesses need to take control over their online presence, because if they don't someone else will. It was written by Malcolm Shepperd from Gill Media, a smart guy who knows his stuff.

Shortly after the article was published, I received three comments from the same person. The first one said, "Does any mailer out there track the opens when they deploy". Not only does the sentence lack punctuation, it is irrelevant to the article. I clicked the person's name to go check out their website and I saw a press announcement about how they just launched an email marketing tool. If that wasn't enough, she posted the question twice and then left a third comment that said "Great Post. Very Informative" with a link to her website in the text of comment.

Malcolm's whole post was about protecting your online reputation from other people who might try to sully your company's reputation online. I didn't think I'd have to advise people to avoid being idiots in order to protect their own brand online.

So, I called and her and told her that link building by leaving comments is not that effective and that I'd send her an email with a link to article about why leaving comments does not usually support search engine optimization if a site uses no-follow. I asked her to stop doing it on my website. She said, "no problem". I told her I'd be happy to talk to her if she wanted to talk about proper ways to build links for her company and her clients. Yes, her company provides internet marketing services, believe it or not.

I also told her that leaving comments is a good idea. But, they shouldn't be covert attempts at promoting her own business; that they should add to the conversation with an insightful question or comment that is relevant to the article; and that she shouldn't include URLs in the body of the text. Here's good advice:

Why not worry about No Follows? Because ALL humans ignore No Follow. If you participate in a blog comment discussion and link to your site, chances are readers of that blog will follow the link ... building to your site's traffic. The more popular the blog, the more traffic you can build.

But do not place a signature link in the comment body itself except for critical circumstances. Linking to your own site in the comment body is not only spammy in nature, but can also get your name, site, email and IP flagged by 'social' blog spam software like SpamKarma, and get your comments automatically deleted from dozens of blogs which use the application.

Using blatant Anchor Text instead of a handle or name in the Name field of blog comments can have the same result, so don't do it!

The conversation reminded me of all of the comments we had on the HubSpot blog about link building, leaving comments and SEO. We got a pretty good chuckle out of that comment thread, where many of our commenters refused to believe that leaving comments on blogs that employ no follow didn't help their search rankings.

There was one very valid point that several commenters made, though, and it's best summed up by an article on Search Engine Journal:

I've always been an advocate for active blog commenting playing an important role in the online marketing mix for a massive amount of reasons, even beyond SEO.

By taking the time to comment on blogs, even one or two comments per day can lead to extremely positive results such as reputation building, expert positioning...

While SEO Consultants will debate whether No Follow links from blog comments help out with SEO or not, marketers should leave comments on other blogs as a way to generate direct traffic and to network and meet people with common interests.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on the early success of Flickr:

Customer Service is The New Marketing

One of the most important elements of Flickr's early success was its incredible engagement with its users. Flickr management spent what might have seemed like a totally unreasonable amount of time welcoming new users to the site, participating actively and promptly in forums and highlighting the best photos uploaded.

That kind of engagement can turn passing early adopters into ongoing community stakeholders and advocates. It's something that any startup could benefit from emulating and a role we're seeing formalized in an increasing number of companies hiring community liaisons.

I recently wrote a guest post on Aaron's ColdCalling2.0 blog talking about how happy and successful customers are the best inbound sales lead generation strategy:

Referrals & Brand Searches - Your best marketing is happy customers. In my previous company, after a few years of working at it, 100% of my business came from referrals. Customers have the ability to sell your services for you because they have little to no selfish interest in you bringing on new clients. So, when they recommend your product or service to a peer, they're not only establishing that you're credible, but trustworthy. The trust implicit in their relationship with the prospect they're referring is transferred to you.

There's an old saying that says it's hard to predict referrals. It's also expensive to build a brand (although fairly easy to measure brand awareness). However, I'd argue that if you're doing the right things for your clients and you're truly a stand for their success, it will happen. On the web, you can accelerate the pace by entering the conversation, setting the precedent for receiving referrals by giving them and by generally making yourself available to speak with new people whether there's an immediate direct connection between their need and your service or not. Practically speaking, I recommend starting a blog and reading these tips on using a blog to improve your sales process and how to use LinkedIn to drive traffic to your website.

What are you doing to:

1. ensure your clients' success?
   
2. refer business to your clients?
3. facilitate connections between your clients who'd benefit from knowing each other?
   
4. give your clients the tools to talk about you to their contacts online?
   
5. ensure that your clients are referring people to you online and these referrals are receiving vip treatment?
6. acknowledge the customers that refer you business?
   

I had a conversation with someone the other day who was interested in HubSpot. They were referred by a client. I asked him how I could help him. He hadn't really bothered to understand what we do.

I positioned us a few times (ie We help small business owners who are frustrated with not getting enough leads from their website and online marketing activities.) He didn't bite. He kept insisting he was doing pretty well with his internet marketing. Unfortunately, he wasn't. Then, he proceeded to pitch me on the idea of trading advertising on his site for HubSpot services.

I told him that we have no need to advertise on his site. We have more leads than we can handle and we know what we need to do to get more, if we need it.

I used to trade services. But, it never worked for a variety of reasons.

Here's my rules taught to my be Rick Roberge:

1. I'll buy your service if I have a need and it helps me fill that need.
   
2. Feel free to buy my service if you have a need and you're convinced that it fills the need.

I think the people that try and trade their way to success just don't know how to discover needs and align their product to the needs of the customer. This is going to result in no sales, which is going to result in no cash flow, which is going to make it difficult for them to invest in anything to make their business better, including their online marketing.

Which is a shame because there are a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners out there with great ideas and great passion.

Trading is often used by entrepreneurs as a sales shortcut because they do not have the ability to sell. Before they're going to see their business succeed by closing new business, they need to learn how to identify problems, establish urgency and to present approprate solutions when the time is right.

Unfortunately, they probably also don't have the willingness to make the changes in their business (and themselves) in order to learn these skills.

• Your big clients will eventually disappear. (Meaning they will have in-house SEO talent.)
• Small businesses are/will be increasingly interested in search marketing.
  
• Finding accurate information about SEO and search marketing is tough.

I agree with all of his points.

Unfortunately, Matt is looking at this from the angle.

Small businesses need Search Engine Optimization. They are now educated enough to know they need it.

Unfortunately, large SEO firms will never serve small businesses.

What IS happening is that most small businesses rely on local web design and development firms to do SEO for them.

This isn't good either because most of these firms aren't that good. Or the good ones are too expensive. And worse, most do it in isolation without their clients involvement and treat SEO like a one time activity.

SEO should be done by the people that invent, make and sell the products at the company. They will need to learn the basics and manage the process internally. After they learn the basics and have the right SEO tools and systems in place to track leads and sales generated from their activities, they should should hire a full time blogger and social media marketing coordinator who is responsible for teaching the entire organization how to leverage the web to generate interest, website traffic, leads and sales. Outsourcing this task is like outsourcing your face to face networking or all of your customer service. It's core to the business.

The most time consuming task required - in order to do SEO successfully - is content creation. Should you really fully outsource the voice of your company? If you're going to outsource it, shouldn't it be to a writer or a messaging person? 

Further, in the very near future, even GOOD SEO skills will ultimately be like html writing skills. Many more people know how to write html now than in the 90s. Now, you wouldn't pay someone $150/hour to write html like people did in the 90s. In a few years, we'll look back at the $150-$300/hour pay that good SEO firms receive and think that was pretty silly too.