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One great strength for any successful salesperson or business is the ability to adapt to a new situation. SME’s and even large Corporations are constantly changing their business model and product / service offerings. So how do you teach your sales staff to sell Blogware if it is a big departure from what they normally have sold? 

 

One of the first steps in a sales approach is identifying your client profile. If you know what type of client you are looking for with services you already sell, what is the client profile of a blogger? This is pretty simple to do for Domain owners, Hosting customers, ISP customers, Digitial Certificate or Email customers. Hell, you don't even have to use one of these services to effectively sell it.

 

So why is this so difficult for blogging customers?

 

Well, I believe that one of the reasons is that since Blogs are applied on so many diverse verticals and new uses are being discovered daily, looking at the application of one doesn’t necessarily give you any better of an indication of client profile than who a cellular customer calls with their cell phone. It may give some indications of the value proposition to analyze a call history, but with people calling so many different places that use wouldn’t be able to “profile” a cell user any better than how a publisher uses their blog. These are just people who need to communicate.

 

I personally think it is much more psychological in nature, or the need to be “heard”. A blog is a perfect way of doing that and no matter the application this is the end result, you share what you want, when you want, and with whom you want.

 

How do you quantify that? What percentage of customers have this personality trait? I really don’t know other than to say that I love to be heard, I know most Sales people love to be heard, and the fact I use my blog all the time makes it really easy for me to sell the service to my clients. If you are not at least somewhat emotionally invested in an offering, you will never be very successful at selling it.

 

The key behind blogging is that it is part of a new culture that is developing. It’s a belief in the ability for everyone to be heard, its Mass Media controlled by the Masses. What does that mean? It means that the target profile is anyone who has ever voted, called into a talk show, provided feedback, coordinated a party, has a special interest, wants to be successful at anything business related… or just likes to keep track of their thoughts.  This means most of everyone.

 

Blogware has been designed from the ground up to be intuitive for anyone who has surfed the internet, used an operating system, and knows the basics of any email client. The fact it is database driven and dynamic means immediate gratification to publishing on the Internet and no need to understand FTP delays or understand what a “HTML Page” is. This immediate gratification and ease of use lowers the bar for entry to the majority of internet surfers out there whose attention span is less than 3 seconds, and although it may be a little too much for your Gram and Grandpa, it’s not too much for your parents, you, or especially your children, and that means the Hosted web presence market has opened up significantly past business applications which is the majority of paid Hosting customers today. This results in a very broad target market and more customers for you. All you have to do is help your clients “get it” by exposing the benefits of Blogging. Traditional Mass Media is doing that today by mentioning blogs and bloggers on a daily basis in major news articles. Prominent Bloggers are doing this every day on their own creating a viral marketing effect for all of their visitors.

 

The only way for you to do this from a sales perspective is to insure your sales staff “gets it”. The key is blogging is “Sticky” and so rewarding that although strongly encouraging use of the tool by your sales staff may be a burden at first, as the benefits of networking through this revolutionary Internet Printing Press are exposed, people become addicted. This is the same process your clients will go through, and if your sales reps have as well then they will be way more effective in evangelizing the use of the tool to your customers.

 

The key is use. If you use it you “get it”. If you “get it” you can sell it. The rest works out in the wash…