Sales and Marketing people face massive changes as the buying process changes.

Where as, in the past we could interrupt people, via cold calling or cold emails, or advertising, the ability of companies being able to do this is reducing, either because people just won't stand it or technology has grown up so that the tech can stop it.

Ad-blockers are growing at 30% year-on-year, GDPR has pretty much killed email marketing, I, like so many people, block cold callers on my iPhone.  As buyers we all know this sort of activity just doesn't work anymore.  Add to that our intolerance as buyers to this sort of thing.  It all becomes just noise which we ignore.

Breaking through this for brands is difficult or maybe that's an understatement, it's near on impossible.  Gary Vee says we are living in an attention economy.  And we are, we are all wanting a person's attention, but nobody is giving it.

So what's a brand to do?

The one thing that all brands have, it's totally unique is its people.  You can activate those people to talk online about your products and services.  Not in a boastful way or in a corporate marketing way, doing this is no different from the above.  But in their own voice.

If your staff are writing blogs in an authentic way, you will start building a library of keyword optimised pages on the internet, that will give you an unrivaled earned media position.  You can swap any budget you might have in SEO or paid media into this as you will literally shout out your competition.

Who's doing this?  We are, (we do no outbound marketing) our competition have 37 times more people than us, but we have 60% of the share of voice.  Don't believe us, go to Twitter and put in #socialselling who do you see?

This does not guarantee you revenue, but it's pretty closer to wasting money on all of the activities that have proved to not work over the last few years and are certainly not working now.