Social Selling in 30 minutes or less. Or how to use LinkedIn for leads.

Email Marketing Hacks to increase your response rate.

Why Your Best Employees May Be Thinking About Leaving

Salespeople who actively seek out and exploit referrals earn 4 to 5 times more than those who don’t. get more referrals with these tips.

I used to like Jeffrey Gitomer. He was an old school sales trainer with a Northeastern attitude. I read many of his books including the Sales Bible. Then sales changed, and social media came along. Like many old schoolers, he hasn’t quite found the rhythm with the new way of sales.

He is correct that giving value first is still important. Content Marketing requires a good amount of work to attract visitors. (They are visitors not customers or even prospects.)

Where he gets it wrong especially is social media. In his newsletter today, he talks about how many connections he has, how many likes he gets, how many views. Those numbers talk to ego, but they don’t talk to an actual outcome.

When you go to his twitter page, there is zero engagement. He uses it for broadcast. And twitter is like a hose with people only catching a trickle (if they are watching at that moment. It is like TV in the 70s – no VCR, no VOD, no on-demand, rarely a rerun – you either saw it live or you didn’t.)

Broadcasting is fine for pushing marketing out (advertising, branding). However, Engagement is what matters. That is the goal. Quite different from just looking at numbers or feeling good about likes.

Someone asked me this morning about suggestions for bundles.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of the possible services to offer:

Data Center, collocation
Hosting, managed servers, VPS, PaaS
Hosted Email, Office 365
MPLS, IP-VPN, WAN
Managed security, firewall, router, IDS
Fixed Wireless
3G/4G Backup
Internet Failover, shadow circuit
Managed LAN
Managed WLAN, Wi-fi
Managed IT, RMM

VoIP – Hosted or SIP trunks
Conferencing – audio, web, video
Collaboration – Sharepoint, Lync
IM/chat, Presence, Jabber
Data storage
Backup and Retrieval
Mobile Device Management
Website design, maintenance
VDI, DaaS, managed desktop
Managed Print
SAAS, CRM
Video surveillance, Network DVR
cabling
White Glove Service

So Beka Publishing will be publishing my next book, Channel Manager Playbook. The book will be printed in the magazine this year a couple of chapters at a time, then collected and bound as a book. You can read the chapters in the current issue of Channel Vision magazine here (page 91).

At the CVX Expo in October in Anaheim, I will be presenting the best practices for channel management. Tim Basa of Bullseye will also be presenting on channel management at the show and we will be taking Q&A after our sessions.

The webcast replay for Secrets of Channel Managers is still going strong. Invest in the webcast here.

“It’s not clear to me that more stuff seen leads to more ideas gotten and more action taken. We probably don’t need more inputs and noise. We certainly need to do a better job of focusing and even more important, doing the frightening work of acting ‘as if’ to see if we get it.” [Seth Godin]

It isn’t about MORE ideas. It IS about focusing on one or two and executing well on them.

Stop looking at the shiny objects – Squirrel.