Lessons Learned in Sales

While preparing to talk to a group of young professionals I began to reminisce and recall my early days in the workforce. For the first six years of my life after college I sold telephone systems for AT&T and a smaller company then called Executone Business Systems. AT&T was, well, AT&T - the world’s largest telecommunications company at that time, the inventors of the telephone and the dominant long distance carrier. Executone was a small, privately owned competitor of AT&T and my first job out of college.

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Tags: AT&T, Executone Business Systems, humility, John Suppelsa, loners, Michigan State, office politics, Outwork others, phone systems, sales success, telecom, what makes you tick

How Does Social Media Effect Traditional Media?

Michigan State head basketball coach Tom Izzo recently proclaimed his “lifer” status with the Spartans after considering a job opportunity with the Cleveland Cavaliers. As Izzo deliberated this life changing decision, the rumor mill was cranking away with reporters tapping sources, staking out near the basketball complex in East Lansing and outside Izzo’s offices. There were even some reporters contacting Izzo’s mother to see if she had any insight into what was going on inside her son’s mind.

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Tags: Blog, citizen, Cleveland Cavaliers, Communications, fundraising videos, journalism, media, media relations, Michigan State, News, storyteller, Tom Izzo, YouTube

Honesty is a Key Tenet of Social Media

Social media isn’t really all that hard to understand, yet corporate America has a way of taking something simple, honest and relatively pure and smudging it up with it’s big fat fingers. Here’s my beef: One of the tenets with blogging is hyperlinking to content that is complimentary to your content. The idea is to share good information - pretty simple stuff.

So, growing up in suburban Detroit, I often read the Detroit papers - the News and the Free Press. The other day, while reading an article on my iPhone about my beloved Michigan State Spartans basketball team I noticed some obscure words hyperlinked - words like “comfort.” Thinking this is related content (like, ‘in beating Northern Iowa the Spartans can take comfort…), I clicked on the link only to find a pop-up advertisement for a deodorant. Dumbfounded, I began to click on other hyperlinks in this mobile article only to find more and more pop up ads. This is the type of stuff that will drive people away from social media.

In this age of transparency I find it amusing that so many businesses have a hard time helping people, instead of selling to people. It’s an old mindset that traditional marketers can’t seem to escape. They are trapped in old school thinking, that just does not work in the world of social media.

Quit trying to control the message, stop shouting at your customers and find ways to help people. If you want proof that the old way is the wrong way - next time you go to a party, introduce yourself to a stranger and begin selling your product to them. See what kind of reaction you get and then shoot me a note to let me know how that worked for you.

Ed Heil is the owner and president of StoryTeller Media & Communications an inbound marketing and public relations agency and video production company based in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Ed blogs on topics related to inbound marketing, social media, media relations, news media, video production and crisis communications.

Tags: Communications, Detroit, Free Press, iphone, media, Michigan State, News, Northern Iowa, Spartans, storyteller