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Marketing Skills Sales People Need with Whitney Cole #239
Whitney Cole works with mission driven health tech companies. She finds that companies struggle to relate to the consumer, despite having terrific technology. At many levels they understand the problems, yet struggle to explain it. Whitney calls herself a mission mavin, an expert that makes the complex, simple. In this episode Whitney shares the marketing skills sales people need to generate highly qualified leads.
Separating Marketing and Sales
Marketing gets the leads, but people buy from people. Buying is sales. Marketing is the content you create to nurture a lead. Sales is getting two people to actually speak to one another. The sales team may use some of the content to help close the deal. But closing is mostly a sales responsibility.
Marketing Founded on Your Avatar
An Avatar is an ideal client (for service based businesses). Build an Avatar by thinking of somebody you’ve helped or somebody you know needs your help. Ask what does it look like the day AFTER they buy your product/ services.
Consider and list the results and outcomes from your ideal client. Once you have an avatar sellers can do the following to raise their marketing skills:
- Learn how to write and hone communication skills.
- Learn how to use emotional language to persuade e.g. skyrocket, unlock the secret, discover, etc…
- Google how to write a good blog post and use those skills in all you write.
- Listen to your buyers and speak in the language THEY use.
- Learn how to write a good headline. This includes email subject lines. Write clickable subject lines with content that will back it up (the opposite of clickbait). Some tools recommended: CoSchedule.com – free email subject and blog post analyzer
- Use the Flesch-Kincaid test to simplify your writing or use the hemingwayapp.com
- Create different kinds of blog posts and discovered and consumed in different ways: podcasts, videos, infographics, ebooks, articles in Inc. or Forbes Not everybody reads. Not everybody likes videos.
- Don’t be everywhere posting, only be where your customer hangs out.
- Put content on Quora. Companies should find related questions and do a stunning job of answering the questions with well thought out and researched answers. Make sure and include facts and statistics. Don’t get too salesy.
- Reuse blogs on your website on blogging platforms like LinkedIn and Quora.
- To get published on Forbes, start by guest posting Business2Community. Google “how to write for Forbes”. to learn the process. Find people in your network who already are published on your target publication. You must write in what fits their publication.
Take Action
Design a content plan. Have a strategy when writing your blogs. Create a set of pillars with topics with content in different formats.
How To Find the Mission Maven Whitney Cole
The Mission Maven website
Free gift for Sales Babblers can be found here!
You can DM Whitney at https://twitter.com/Mission_Maven
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