Today's episode is a little bit of an experiment. So here's what I want to do. Every month I run what's called a Live Sales Q and. A. It's an open forum Webinar for anybody wants to join and ask whatever sales question they have - could be a question about their prospecting, about their pipeline pull through, building teams, managing teams, SDR metrics, whatever sales related topics come up. I answer them!  In this particular case, there were three topics that came up, which were pretty top of mind for a lot of people out there.

So in this particular episode, we covered three main topics. The first topic that we covered was cold calling: when to cold call, is cold calling dead, how to cold call, and how to think about cold calling as part of an outreach sequence. We certainly tackled the question of cold calling, in general, more so what we did is talk about the importance of outbound calling. I don't call it cold calling cause I think there's no reason to do a pure cold call anymore, but I think of it as warm calling. And so we talked about how to use warm calling as part of it multitouch on the channel sales engagement sequence.

The second topic that I covered in this live sales Q and A was on partnerships, when to use partnerships and how to use partnerships as part of your sales funnel at your startup.  In particular there are three different places where you can use partnerships: one based on prospecting and legion, the second one being in your sales pipeline to co-sell or resell your product, and third, on the customer success integration side of your business. We talked in detail about those three parts of your sales funnel and how partnerships could be part of what you're doing to both distribute your product and of course sell and support your product.

The third topic that we talked about was how to assess an account executive. More specifically, how do we know if somebody is the right fit? How do we know that somebody is motivated by the right things to make sure that they're a good match culturally with our startup, and for our staff, as it relates to our vision, mission, and values of the company.  Not just are they the kind of person that can sell my stuff.

Those are the three big topics that we covered in the Live Q and A. I'd love to get your feedback if you feel like this is a good way to redistribute this information and content that we're doing.

We can certainly pop more of this type of content into the podcasts so that if you're listening on your commute, listening in the car, or maybe as you're shopping at Trader Joe's (it's one of the places I listen to podcasts all the time). If it's the same for you and if this is a way for us to get more content, more information and more ideas to you, the startup founder and the startup sales leader, then by all means, I'm happy to do it as part of our podcast sequence.

I'll make two asks of you: one ask is that if you are listening to this podcast and you are what I call a repeat offender, that probably tells me that you really like the content. And if you do like the content, please leave a review on SoundCloud, iTunes, Spotify. Where are you? I would love to see your review. Not just for me though, it helps other people just like you find the podcast and helps us to increase the number of people that are listening, downloading and subscribing to what we're doing here.

Number two is if you would tell a friend or 10 about this podcast, that would be awesome. A word of mouth is still the best way to get the distribution of this content out to more and more people.

Thanks so much for listening and look forward to seeing your review!  

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Scott Sambucci from SalesQualia on his Startup Selling Podcast recently to discuss digital marketing for startups.

We touch on the mistakes startups make when setting up their digital marketing strategy, how to pick your marketing channels, why you need to pick a niche and focus on it, and so much more…

The interview focuses both on how a startup business owner can improve their marketing, AND common mistakes everyone should avoid.

Here are just a few of the topics we tackled in our conversation:

• The biggest mistakes startups make when setting up their marketing strategy.
• How to reverse engineer your marketing.
• Doing stuff and making noise vs driving towards specific results.
• The importance of focusing on a niche vs trying to sell to everyone.
• Why you need to set up strict KPIs for all of your marketing activities.
• The different types of channel: How to select the right channels. What is channel bias and how to avoid it.

You can listen to the podcast over here on the SalesQualia website.

Enjoy!