Colleen’s Blog

The business telephone in your pocket or on your desk is still a vital part of sales—make no mistake about it. Today, however, it has tools to complement its immense power. Twenty years ago, you’d make a sales call because apart from face-to-face meetings, this was really the only way to connect with your audience and have a conversation in real-time. Now, with social networking, conversations are streamed and shared via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Even text messaging has a role to play. It could be a text message to a customer’s cell phone. I have a client who is a key decision maker at one of the largest agricultural companies in the world. He’s also notoriously hard to reach. As a result, we do all of our negotiations about contracts via text message. My point here is this: direct communications has evolved beyond just the telephone. You can too.

When many of our clients start using Testimonial Director, their first inclination is to create a Testimonials Page. That is, put all their great client feedback on one page on their web site. You’ve seen it: that lonely page that shows up on web sites where we ask prospects to go read the rave reviews of satisfied customers.

It’s been a long time in the making but at the end of this week, we’re proud to be releasing the next update of Testimonial Director. This release is based on your feedback – ideas to make the solution easier to use and easier to manage.Here is a sample of the new features that will be coming:

It’s been a whirlwind November focused on many “new” activities and clients and the month is not even half over! Welcome to all the new Testimonial Director and Engage Selling clients this month. It’s been such a pleasure meeting so many new businesses, sales professionals and business owners and I am excited to be able to help you all exceed your growth targets!

I was intrigued by Joanne’s work after reading a recent Demand Gen study that shows only 3% of sales were made via cold call and 97% of sales were made via warm calls (referrals, inbound leads, web leads, live chat etc). I started thinking… given that cold calling is becoming less effective, what can we do to ramp up other prospecting methods? As luck would have it Joanne and I met this summer at a conference, shared a glass of wine, and discussed sales. I came to discover that Joanne’s work has the answers you need to be successful in a no cold call selling environment. Read this book.