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.

Business advice from design build remodeler coach, Mark Paskell:

1. What is your unique selling proposition? The Contractor Coaching Partnership coaches and mentors residential contractors, using litmus tested, proven, best practices specific to the residential construction industry, and combines them with a powerful self improvement program.
2. When & why did you start your current business? When? I started my business in February of 2008. Why? To have my own business and go after my dreams.
3. What was the smartest business decision you've made in your current business? To build my business through referrals and personal introductions.
4. What do you like most about internet marketing? I like the fact that you can reach many economically.
5. If you had one piece of internet marketing advice for another business owner, what would it be? Do not waste your money on unproven website and IT services or people.

If part of your job involves initiating conversations with prospects, you need to read this email chain that Dave Kurlan has shared between him and a prospect:

Lesson - Even if you fail to get a response or you get a negative response, keep at it! The key is to get a response - to something - to get a dialog started.

Dave's example is about contacting a referral. However, the same principles apply for following up on web generated leads. Do what you need to do to just start "any" conversation.

With referrals, I usually keep at it until I figure out whether I can help the prospect. However, with leads, it is two strikes and their out. Dave's example makes me think that I'm not doing enough before I abandon that lead. The main reason I don't is because I'm looking for low hanging fruit in a humungous orchard. In plain english, I have more leads than time.

Anyone have this problem? How do you make sure you do the things necessary to get people into conversation with you?

I was invited to speak at the Central New England Sales Summit alongside my sales mentors.

I will be speaking on a panel about how the internet is aiding the sales and lead generation process. For a sneak peak of some of the things I'll be talking about, read "13 ways to use your blog to improve your sales process", "sales lead generation through online business networking" and "how to generate a steady flow of leads".

Also, we're giving away 3 passes to the event to the people with the best answer to the question, "How has the internet changed your sales process?". Leave your answer in the comments on the HubSpot blog.

They're also looking for nominations for Central New England Sales All Stars. (More from Dave.)