#1 Welcome To The Jungle — ROI Overload

Did I just use one of the most iconic sports warm up songs to introduce my first ever newsletter?

If you like what you read below, consider subscribing here, for weekly sales, marketing and leadership tips. — Scott

Did I just use one of the most iconic sports warm up songs to introduce my first ever newsletter?

Yup.

Why?

Because I thought it would be a cool way to introduce a newsletter that’s supposed to help you navigate a jungle, far scarier than the one Guns and Roses envisioned when they first wrote the song (the jungle… was LA).

The jungle we’re going to be navigating.

Business.

💼

Holy sh*t, there’s a lot I could write about.

That’s cool though, it will give me something to do Sunday afternoon, or Saturday night (I’m writing this as we’re watching SNL in bed).

I promise every intro won’t be as long as this one.

I apologize, but I had to set this up properly.

Buzzer sounds. Puck drops. It’s game time.

Here’s a quick list of what’s coming up.

• 🤷‍♂️ Sales: Which methodology should I pick?

• 🤑 Marketing: SEO vs. Social Media Marketing — Which is Better?

• 🚀 Leadership: Think Like a Rocket Scientist

• 💻 SaaS of the week: Sales.Rocks

• 🎧 A few other people you should listen to.

• 📚 Other things you should read.

• 🧠 #ScottsThoughts: Quota Crushing Assholes

🤷‍♂️ Sales: Which methodology should I pick?

Challenger, SPIN, Miller Heiman.

3 of 1000000+ different methodologies.

If you’re a solopreneur, there’s a good chance you haven’t really delved into these yet, but if you’re working at a company over 50 people, you’re trying to figure this one out.

This happens when businesses try to deal with problems of scale (which is a good thing), but also difficult to properly manage, measure and improve.

Especially when you have 200 different sales people, all doing things differently and you have no idea what is working, or why.

Enter. Sales methodology.

“Businesses need our sales team to be on the same page. And not just the salespeople but those who support the process, such as consultants, sales engineers, and so on. Under one methodology, your team will know exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and with whom.” — Dave Mattson, CEO and President of Sandler Training

This will be fun if you’re a VP Sales at an org that’s placed the responsibility on you to decide, for the first time, how to codify and roll out a methodology across an organization.

It will not be so fun, if you’re a VP Sales in a larger org, that’s already chosen a methodology that absolutely sucks, and you’re trying to invoke massive change across an org.

But.. change management is a topic for another day.

So let’s pretend you’re in scenario #1.

Where do you start?

What do you pick?

Well, we know that a sales methodology is simply a documented sales process, that you can teach, train and standardize across your organization.

The answer seems obvious… pick the best one.

Not so simple.

Let’s review the options.

All methodologies are generally broken down into three camps.

• Transactional — Solving a buyers problem, presented by buyer.

• Consultative — Buyers don’t fully understand the problem. It’s understood with the help of the seller.

• Provocative — The seller makes the buyer see they had a problem, they weren’t even aware of.

Those three camps generally spawn the wide array of sales methodologies we all know and love (and hate).

MEDDIC, N.E.A.T, SPIN, SNAP, Challenger, Sandler, Target Account, Value Selling and many more.

If you want to dive deeper into any of these, go here, or here or here or here or here. “

But that doesn’t really answer the overarching question, “which one should I pick”.

The answer is… whatever works.

No.

Really.

But here me out…

This is how you’ll get the methodology to “work”.

• Start with why. No.. not just because Simon Sinek. Really understand what you need to achieve (customer, workforce, target profiles, personas etc).

• Map out the deployment strategy. You can’t set it and forget it.

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. You are not smarter than everyone else.

• Get stakeholder buy-in. If you don’t have buy in from the CEO, marketing, sales leaders and most importantly, your sales team. Every single strategy will fail. Over communicate your rational, plan and support for the methodology.

Regardless of what you pick, the number one cause of failed change in an organization, is failing to plan.

Take time in making your decision, and remember.

A good process is implemented again and again and again.

The second you (and your team) stop treating it with the same care and enthusiasm you did when it was new, is the second it stops working.

🤑 Marketing: SEO vs. Social Media Marketing — Which is Better?

With online marketing, there’s always a debate about the best strategy to grow a brand and a business.

Usually the debate centres around where to spend your time on items that can give you free / organic traffic.

Of course, if we all had unlimited marketing budgets that would be great, but for (most) of us, that’s not the case.

So let’s break it down. If you had to pick one… is SEO or social media marketing be the better option?

Often, businesses will hire an SEO expert or agency to increase their visibility in the search engines without even thinking about social media and the traffic that it can bring to their business.

We’re still talking startup/smb.

Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.

Business owners who grew up with social media, are definitely more likely to understand the value.

However is there a true advantage to prioritizing one over the other?

Let’s discuss.

Targeting an Audience

To bring in relevant traffic and sales, it’s important to be able to target a specific audience.

It is definitely easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms.

Most social media platforms allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a certain demographic who will be interested in your niche.

SEO is not quite as targeted. Although you can certainly target those interested in your niche, you generally cannot target a specific demographic.

How Much Effort Is Involved?

To ensure a return on investment, you’ll want to consider how much effort is required to promote your content via social media and SEO.

With social media, you’ll have to plan and post regular content on the various platforms.

While there are tools available that can make this process easier, you still have to do this on a consistent basis.

Social media marketing is not something that you can rely on to work without your own efforts.

Each post you make will only have a short shelf life, so you’ll need to make an effort each day.

SEO, on the other hand, will require work, but once you start to rank your web pages, there will be less ongoing work involved.

SEO is always a long game.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to expect short term results with SEO.

Which Content Should You Use?

Whether you are performing SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to create content.

The type of content you create will make a big impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.

When writing content for your website or blog, usually long-form content will work best.

This means that you may need to create articles of a few thousand words, rather than a couple of hundred.

For social media, images and videos will work best and will be shared across the community if they resonate with the audience.

When this occurs and your content starts to be shared, you’ll also see an increase in traffic to your website.

So, Which is Better — SEO or Social Media Marketing?

You’ll see the most benefits from incorporating both SEO and social media marketing into your online marketing efforts.

HA! That’s the worst answer ever.

But.

It’s the truth.

However, it doesn’t have to be painful.

Write long articles and embed images and videos into your content.

Doing this will increase engagement and time spent on your website, therefore showing the search engines that your content is good and can be trusted.

Plus, people will share content on social media that they find to be interesting and valuable.

Search engines also use social media as a ranking factor, so it’s worth building your social media presence as it will help with your SEO. Building traffic via SEO to your website will also help people to engage on social media too.

Adopt a Gary V style content strategy, using one long form piece of content to develop multiple short form/social posts.

Even though SEO and social media marketing are different, there’s crossovers, similarities and strategies to help you kick ass at both.

And… they’re both necessary.

So suck it up princess, if you are doing one, and not the other, you’re leaving serious money (and traffic) on the table.

🚀 Leadership: Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Former rocket scientist turned law professor, Ozan Varol, believes that while we can’t all be rocket scientists, we can all learn to think like one.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist is about creativity and critical thinking — two skills in short supply today.

We all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our daily lives. Those who can tackle these problems — without clear guidelines and with the clock ticking — enjoy an extraordinary advantage.

Creativity comes naturally to us, but we are educated out of it in favor of certainty.

Critical thinking, while valued theoretically, is not taught because we prefer the ease of conformity and the prepackaged answers we can accept from others.

Check out the entire post (this was an excerpt) at Leadership Now, this was a great article, and they go deeper into some of Varol’s thoughts on how we should think & lead.

💻 SaaS of the week: Sales.Rocks

I found an awesome deal on AppSumo for a new sales lead database / engagement tool (think Zoom Info + Snov.io + Outreach / Salesloft).

I am sorry but the promo expired (I totally bought as many codes as I could… and I promise, I’ll do better, my next SaaS of the week won’t be retroactive).

Anyways, I saw it on Sumo, tried it out and it is awesome. 56m contacts + email automation and task scheduling + email verifiers and contact list uploads.

It also has a phone number verifier built in, something I don’t think I’ve seen before.

Anyways, check it out.

This is a strong product.

I’m hoping it will only keep getting better as they add more contacts to it.

🎧 A few other people you should listen to.

I thought this episode of Sales Hacker, was incredibly important and insightful. The episode was about “Managing People Through a Crisis” with Alyssa Merwin, VP Sales North America, at LinkedIn.

I think everyone could use a few pointers right now considering according to a recent LinkedIn study, nearly half of workers want to quit their current job, due to poor management, and increasing stress during Covid.

📚 Other things you should read.

I’m going to take an easy out and seriously suggest you check out the book I quoted in the Leadership section. It’s honestly a really good read, and it’s great for literally anyone.

Seriously, it’s one of Inc.com’s “Six Books You Need to Read in 2020 (According to Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, and Adam Grant)”.

Amazon Link

🧠 #ScottsThoughts: Quota Crushing Assholes

Question Of The Week: I have a sales rep that hits quota every month and is the highest performing team member on the sales team. He is consistently late to the sales check-in, rude to other team members, and rarely updates Salesforce. How do I deal with him?

ST: I don’t care how good this rep is, he needs to be brought into an immediate 1:1 to discuss his behavior. Toxic individuals in the workplace, no matter how effective they are, can negatively impact the entire team. Having a conversation about meeting attendance and peer relations is paramount.

The conversation about CRM updates is important, but not as damaging to the team. I could probably find a root cause of his frustration with his CRM, I’ve dealt with this quite often with sales reps.

That being said, if his behavior towards meetings and peers did not improve, I would have to manage him out, regardless of how good he’s doing. Although this can be quite damaging if your organization is sitting in the camp, where 80% of your results come from 20% of your reps. Start posting job adverts asap, and expect the worst. This is not someone you want to have on your team, or in your organization.

That’s it. I’m out. ✌️

-Scott

PS.🤘