If you are in Sales why are you not blogging?

Selling products, services or selling yourself? Start a blog today...

One of my favourite modules of our training is the blogging module.

I'm an Associate Consultant of DLA ignite, the worlds leading Strategic Social Media company. We are trained in how to best use Social Media for Business, not simply 'how to do LinkedIn', a complete end to end strategic approach to placing Social Media at the heart of your organisation which transforms how and where you do business.

We never stop training as a team as staying connected is important to us. Every week we go over the modules as we would with our clients. We share our learning, our experiences and developments.

Recently we were revisiting blogging. Some of you reading this will think that blogging isn't for Sales people....time to wake up. Blogging is now an essential part of the role (it actually goes much further through the organisation but today I'm focussing on Sales).

When I look at a Sales, Marketing or Business Development professional's profile and see '**** hasn't written any articles yet', I wonder why not....?

Sales professionals tend to be good communicators.

We make connections with our clients - communication
We stand up and present - communication
We take complex problems and solutions, break them down and present them in words - communication
We write sales plans, forecasts, proposals, management summaries....and so on - All communication.

For the doubters, Sales is all about communication and in 2020, that includes blogging.

Why blog?

Writing a blog is personal, its your own thoughts and words
Your network is more interested in you than your re-post of corporate content
Blogs are an excellent addition to your content plan - you do have a plan right?
Readers tend to spend more time reading blogs than they do posts
You demonstrate your insight and knowledge on subject and topics
If you blog regularly, before long you have a body of work you can showcase
You can take a blog and use it across all of your Social Channels
You can send blogs to contacts, partners, clients if you feel its relevant to them
Blogs have a longer lasting digital footprint than posts

At DLA, we use content as a way to get inbound (leads and meetings). A rich and diverse range of strategic content including blogs/articles, posts, video/images, podcasts and so on.

We do no outbound marketing whatsoever. No advertising, no unsolicited emails, no cold calling and no events. We are a Social Selling company after all, we use social and only social.

And the return on our investment? We get at least four pieces of inbound, every single day.

Look at blogging as an essential element of you prospecting toolkit. Its not restricted by client office hours, you can blog at any time of the day.

Sales professionals who blog are prospecting when you are not. If you are in Sales and don't blog, someone else is eating your lunch.

Its not difficult, when you start its like breaking a seal. You will find that ideas come to you from everywhere. Our CEO at DLA, Tim Hughes, is famous for saying "there's a blog in that" to just about any interesting discussion

So, if you are in Sales and haven't yet blogged, think for a minute. Choose a topic and relate it to something you do.... and start to type. A beginning a middle and an end - 300-500 words on something personal from you that will help us, educate us or make us think differently. Do that every week and before long you will have built up a credible library of curated articles.

Once you start you can share your experience with your colleagues, imagine the digital impact of all of your direct team/ your management team all blogging once per week (?)

You will also get quicker over time. I put this together this morning in around 25 minutes.

Get in touch to talk about blogging or any other aspect of Strategic Social Media for your business.

In closing, the quote below is from Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger.

Eric Doyle

You can contact me here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericdoylecrux