It's been a year since I wrote Starting a New Sales Job (or Starting Over) and it is the most visited article on my blog. The article revolved around the use of LinkedIn and I thought that I'd share some other old school things that I do that any salesperson or small business owner could do.
It's a pretty well known fact that salespeople like referrals. Hubspot has this cool report that shows me how many visitors were referred to me from where. However, just like getting referrals the old school way, you have to know how to ask. First let's look at who is referring to me.
Notice that this has nothing to do with SEO, using keywords or understanding anything about the way that the Google algorithm works. This is old school sales stuff. Here's what I do and how I ask for referrals.
- I subscribe to and read most of the sales articles and many of the marketing articles on blog.hubspot.com. I comment when so moved. If my comment tickles someone's fancy, they come visit. If they have a good visit, they come back. I've also had a few authors mention and link to me in their articles. Those are very cool referrals and I've written a couple of articles as a guest author. So, people come visit to learn more about me.
- Mark Roberge wrote an article for blogs.hbr.org and I commented. That was quite a while ago, but as you can see, it still works.
- Katharine Derum mentioned me and linked to me on thescrambledegg.com, as did Arjun Moorthy on curiousjuice.com, Carole Mahoney on minternetmarketing.com, and David Weinhaus at davidweinhaus.com.
- I've also written guest articles for this blog, minternetmarketing.com, and slcbookkeeping.com.
- Finally, and I can't stress this enough, I subscribe, read and comment when I can be relevant on each of these blogs regularly.
In the old days, salespeople were expected to cold call, network, attend events and the like to get noticed and start conversations. It's so much easier today. Sit at your computer. Hang out where your prospects hang out. Show how smart you are by making remarkable, relevant comments. There's only one rule. NO SELLING! Get noticed. Start a conversation. See who wants to engage.
Another cool Hubspot report is the Social Media report. This shows how many visitors I got from the various platforms.
See the Twitter number? Respectfully, retweets are boring! Start conversations! Look at this one.
If you look at my blog and Twitter feed in that time frame, you'll see that Greg Brown made a great comment on a blog article and I asked Pete Caputa, Jill Konrath, Chris Snell and Trish Bertuzzi to weigh in. They did and when they did, they let their followers know.like Trish did above. More visits for Rick from Twitter. More people checking me out. More people that may want to engage and have conversations.
I hope this gets you thinking because referrals are awesome and inbound and social media are the new way to get them!
BTW, if you're not subscribed to my blog, don't you think you should be?
