For Salespeople, Blogging is the Means, not the End

Posted on May 14, 2010
Filed Under Sales | Leave a Comment

When non-salespeople ask me about my job, most ask about "winning the meeting" or, the moment of epiphany where a large group of people are so amazed by the clarity of my logic and the beauty of my prose that all objections fall hopelessly to the floor as they reach for the corporate checkbook. In other words, they've got a picture of my job as taking place right then and there.

Similarly, my view of lawyers used to be that they're just spending all day in court waging epic oratory battles with other beautiful people from Brooks Brothers' ads that hold the fates of innocent people in their hands. Imagine my dismay to learn that most lawyers spend 90% of their time knee deep in research and investigations looking to build their case.

For the most part, the same is true of selling high value products to enterprises in 2010. The buying process may consist of dozens of meetings with different people who are evaluating the decision from different perspectives. Many of these meetings require their own presentation which may require independent research and a totally separate narrative. Blogging helps tie this data together and provides a platform that encourages experimentation of how to express it. Blogging doesn't happen in the meeting, but it may be what helps me win the meeting.

For this reason, blogging is a key part of this process. If a corporate blog is never shared with the outside world, but only used as a repository for information that may have value in the dialogue with customers and prospects, it would still be worth doing. From a sales perspective in an organization with any kind of reasonable demand generation system in place, this is typically what I've seen. The blog is used to highlight interesting trends and data points that can be used to illustrate or enumerate key points in the conversation that happens between the point when a customer wants to buy a product and the point at which they need to buy a product.
If blogging helps me build a collection of stories that customers can use to internalize the story of the value of my product, it's paid me back more than any amount of Diggs or retweets ever will.

Prolific247 has been building and managing business blogs since 2007. Building a Blog Machine is a collection of best practices and current information for corporate blogging. If you'd like to learn more, please find us at www.prolific247.com.

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