(photo courtesy of flickr user Eva Rinaldi, celebrity and live music photographer)

The top 5 stories will receive full profiles in my future blogs – including deal details, company highlights and podcast interviews with the winners.

Here’s what I need you to do:

Post up, right here and now, your biggest deal profile from 2010. This is your chance to shine, so don’t be shy. Answer a few key pieces:

1. What made the sale big?
2. What did you do differently?
3. What one tip would give someone else to land a big sale like you did?

I want to get this bragging opportunity to at least 1,000 people, so post this link into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and anywhere else you interact with people who are part of this community of hunters: http://tinyurl.com/beststoriesof2010

I want to get 200 comments from coast to coast. I can’t do this without you so post your comment below right now.

Do this fast- We’re already into 2011 and I want to make certain that we get your glory now so you can take the lessons from the stories for your next biggest deal.

Let the bragging begin!

Check Out Tom’s New Blog! from Hunt Big Sales on Vimeo.

If you’ve got a few seconds, head over to bnet.com/​blog/​smb-sales-advice and check out the new blog!

Recently I was interviewed by Paul Diamond from the Vistage organization. We discussed the vast array of social media sites for salespeople and the fact that there are a lot of these sites out there, but not all of them are good. I think that Paul’s take on the topic and what he uncovered in his research is helpful. Check out his blog post on the topic on Bizmore.com.

By Gretel Going

When I asked Tom if he thought his audience would benefit from an article on b-to-b lead generation, his answer was an obvious “yes,” so here I am. I do a ton of web, social media and content work with Tom, and he tells me that people ask him all the time to share some of his savvy trade secrets. Against his better judgment, I’m going to do exactly that in this post. Enjoy…

Most people think of LinkedIn as a great place for networking, researching contacts and searching the job market, but it’s true value as a lead generation tool has yet to be fully realized.

With a highly-engaged community, quality discussions and the ability to generate an incredible amount of traffic and leads, LinkedIn can be an incredible sales tool for b-to-b companies when used strategically. I only wish it hadn’t taken me three years of using it to figure it out.

Before I go into my tips for using LinkedIn, let me clarify: I don’t believe that “So and so sent me a message on LinkedIn and now we’re talkin’ business” qualifies as a case study on using LinkedIn for lead generation. The event must be uniquely limited to the platform at hand, whereas in that example, the same thing could have easily happened over email (or Facebook, or Twitter, or…you get it). Now, if the person got a hold of you on LinkedIn because they happened to see your contribution to a discussion in a group there, or arrived as one of your shared connections, well, that’s another story altogether.

Anyway, I’ll cut to the chase and tell you a few ways we’ve used LinkedIn to generate leads and other business opportunities for ourselves and for clients…

“Answers”
Obviously one of the great (and sometimes, not so great) things about social networks is that people can emerge (or just pose) as experts in their industries. Given a soapbox, many people will use it to spew advice or request it, and that’s exactly what happens in the Answers section on LinkedIn. People in your network post questions-provocative, thought-provoking or purely inquisitive-and other users answer them. Of course, many of these questions can lead to opportunities, whether you present yourself as an expert by starting an engaging conversation, or if you provide someone with a solid answer (or point them toward another source who will offer them that answer) and start the dialogue that way.

We’ve used the Answers section several times to connect our clients with opportunities. For example, we were able to get Bank of America’s Annual Report (produced by our client Story Worldwide) featured in the book The Writer’s Guide to Annual Reports by Robert Roth. We’ve also used it to secure speaking engagements, radio interviews and identify business opportunities.

Still others, as pointed out in an article by Copyblogger, use Answers to identify sources for articles they’re writing, which could mean media coverage for you…especially if you’re in a niche industry where experts are hard for journalists to track down.

Groups
There are thousands of active groups on LinkedIn and I guarantee there are at least a handful that cater to your interests (whether work-related or personal). I currently belong to nine groups, and have elected to get a daily digest (email) of the day’s activity from about five of them since I, like many people, don’t have the time to hang out on LinkedIn all day to see what’s being discussed. These groups and digests are not only a great way to keep up with relevant conversations; they’re a great way to get your conversations out there.

I first realized this when our client at Hunt Big Sales posted a link to his e-book Landing Big Sales with an RFP into one of his active groups. Within two days, he got 300 downloads (or leads) from simply making the book known to this one group. Considering his book requires a registration (albeit a free one), this was a welcome outcome.

Needless to say, when we launched our new social media e-book last week, we took our audience generation campaign over to our LinkedIn groups (as well as Twitter, Facebook and other outlets). And as expected, 49% of our downloads so far have come from these groups.

The Obvious: Connecting with people you don’t know
There are a few ways to use LinkedIn in the general networking sense. My favorite example of using LinkedIn to generate new business comes from our partners over at Hubspot. Hubspot allows you to collect information about your leads when they download your thought leadership content (such as e-books, research, white papers, etc.). One of their clients noticed that Bank of America* was particularly active on their site, so they headed over to LinkedIn to attempt to make a subtle and professional connect with the person at hand. As it turns out, by simply opening the floor to further conversation by making this connection, the company was able to secure Bank of America as a client. And not just any client—the biggest client in the company’s history.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should just begin connecting to people who you want to work with and start pitching/stalking them. It means you should integrate LinkedIn into your overall sales strategy. After all, because of its professional nature, people are more open to talking shop here than they are on, say, Facebook. There’s also something more appealing about receiving a business inquiry over LinkedIn than by email. People, including myself, tend to feel a bit violated when they get a random pitch in their inbox. Email is becoming the 21st century’s cold call…and we all know how popular cold calls are.

Updates & Applications
You’ll hear a lot of people telling you to stick to just one or two social media platforms. Our philosophy is to use as many (or as few) platforms as necessary to connect with the entirety of your audience. Basically, you need to be where your audience is. And if you make that commitment, whether to one platform or several, you need to do it right. On LinkedIn this means taking advantage of their newish applications, such as posting an RSS feed to your company or personal blog, and sharing presentations with slideshare, as well as posting regular updates and making sure to flesh out your profile as much as possible to show your qualifications, etc. You want to make sure that when people do find you and/or connect with you, you offer them as much ammunition as possible to start a dialogue with you. This may not be your first choice in platforms, but if this is the only place you’re going to be found by a certain portion of your target audience, well then, put a little bit of effort into it.

Okay, are you still with me? If so, thanks for reading my coffee-fueled dribble and feel free to connect with me over at LinkedIn…

*This example is unrelated to the previous Bank of America example. Just a coincidence…

When I was first exposed to Twitter, I was not just negative, I was militant. The idea that a 140-character message was an effective form of communication was ridiculous. The time-suck of all-day blathering about my life, my wife, my meals, my dog, and on and on was offensive to my mid-west work ethic. Worse, I found the constant reading of everyone else’s details and their pandering for micro-fame in the digital ether numbing and nauseating.

My marketing partner is a nag. A twenty nine year-old, social-media-addicted, drank-the-Kool-Aid® of social networking, NAG. She pushed, cajoled, threatened, and bribed me into getting engaged in Twitter (and LinkedIn and Facebook, but those are stories for another day). So, I jumped in and 90 days later, here is my report from the front lines of the question: “Can you really make money on Twitter, even if you are not a PR/Marketing/Advertising/Social Media-consulting company?” The answer is YES.

I have landed three consulting/presenting deals in the last 90 days in part or in whole because of Twitter. These deals have to do with my core business of helping companies grow through large account selling and have nothing to do with being a social media expert, which is good, because I am not a social media expert. As a novice who has now sold 6 figures of consulting in 90 days, let me tell you some things I have learned along the way…

1. Be valuable. The Twitter consultants, I call them the Twitter-azzi, tell you to put your life up on Twitter as a way to generate a personal dialogue with people and to not always be marketing your products or services. Welllllll… Let’s say I think that the right mix for me is 75% providing access to valuable expertise and 25% personal. Value is the result of helping people find information that is important to them—whether your information or that of other people in your area of expertise.

2. Be specific. Choose the area in which you are an expert. You need to pick your topic and focus on the information that you’re going to help people find. If you’re talking about everything all of the time, you will be an interesting personality, but not clearly valuable in any one area. Well, except entertainment.

3. Be choosy. The Twitter-azzi sends out all sorts of ideas on how to be followed by more people, as if that’s beneficial in and of itself. There is a flaw in the assumption that if people follow me, they are listening to me. THEY’RE NOT! These high-volume followers are just trying to increase the number of followers that they have. Don’t follow everyone who follows you and don’t follow people who you are not going to listen to. Be selective. The people whose posts I read are not even those people who I am following, they’re the people who are a part of a group I have created on TweetDeck, or they are including terms that I find in my Searches.

4.Search. This leads me to the key to managing hundreds of followers and millions of people on Twitter: create searches that allow you to catch those people and topics that are important to you. For me, “Vistage” is a search because I am a Vistage speaker and I know that they have a lot of CEOs who are tweeting about that topic. When I spoke at the GrowCo conference in Orlando, sponsored by Inc. Magazine, I put the conference’s name in as a search and met a dozen people who were tweeting during my presentation. Use the searches to hone in on your most important areas of interest and to follow/be followed by people of like interest.

5. Be efficient. I use TweetLater to manage my posts. I can write a dozen posts and release them on a schedule throughout the day so that those people who are following me are not inundated with five tweets all at once. I follow a Vistage speaker who I like, but he releases 5-10 posts at a time and I skim over them rather than read them. I think he thinks that he can tweet paragraphs like an email if he just breaks the paragraphs into tweets. The platform isn’t designed for that. And, as mentioned before, I use TweetDeck to manage my searches and groups—it makes it easier to see them all and work through them.

6. Be responsive. This is not just a broadcast channel; you need to respond to other tweets and engage with other people. If someone follows you, thank them and engage with them if it makes sense.

7. Be active. Retweet good content. Visit profiles to understand people on Twitter and possibly engage with them. Put your Twitter tag on your business card and website. This is becoming an important method of communication like your cell number and email address.

So, these practices turned into money because…

People I met started to engage me, my content and expertise through Twitter. Tweets led them to my profile, my profile led them to my website and blog, that expertise led them to contact me. It sounds simple, and in the end it really was. The difference in each case was that the point of entrance was not my newsletter or my website; Twitter was the jumping-off point.   You can follow me @tomsearcy.

Blog readers and enthusiasts,

I am going to give a Kindle 2.0 to the winner of the following contest:

I’m publishing three books (three!) between now and the end of summer. One of these books is on how to be more effective using all of the tools out there for prospecting large accounts. It is the much-expanded version of my most recent e-book, How to Get Into Bigger Companies for Bigger Sales.

My publisher and I agree that this particular title stinks. Not only is it tepid, but if you’ve read the e-book, you know that there’s a lot more to it, including an entire how-to on using specific social media platforms for prospecting and “listening.” That said, I’m looking for a more provocative and accurate title that elicits the reaction: “I want to buy this book for every single person in my company!”

So, you have one week. If your suggested title is the one I choose for the book, you win the Kindle 2.0. I have one, and it is flippin’ phenomenal.

Post your entries as comments to this post and, who knows, a week from now I might have a new title and you might have a new Kindle 2.0!

All the best,
Tom

Hi All,

It occurred to me recently that we have a TON of free sales resources scattered throughout our site. From e-books to podcasts, and webinars to essays, we’ve definitely taken this thought leadership stuff to heart. And now we’ve gone one step further and wrapped it all up nicely into one lovely package we’ve aptly named our “Resource Center.”

So now, instead of registering for every e-book or download, you will simply register once for the Resource Center (it’s still free, of course), and you’ll never have to fill out another form again. (Registration is only required for e-books, webinars and podcasts.) Your email address will become your login, although our center should recognize you if you enter from a computer that you’ve previously used to login. I’m not one to brag (which is a trait that my marketing agency cites as a fatal weakness), but it is pretty snazzy…

In all seriousness, though, I invite you to check it out and take advantage of all of our free tools, including a brand NEW e-book that we just introduced today. (I’ll write about that separately later.) “How to Get into Big Companies for Big Sales… and What to Do Once You Get There” details a variety of new challenges that big sale hunters face and then provides extensive pointers, tips and insight that will allow them to greet those challenges head on.

I would love your feedback on the new resource center and e-book, so please feel free to email me or leave a comment if you have a chance.

Now, let’s hunt!
Tom

There are so many “experts” in the world today—people from every angle and media source. They are friends, clients, vendors, family, talking heads on TV, bleeps on Twitter, posts on Facebook and on and on…

Every once in a while it’s good to dial the noise back and ask the question: “Which voices should I let through and listen to…?” Here are my answers to that question, at least for the moment. I guess I should add that some of these voices are as much guilty pleasures as they are credible sources…

Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week. His blog, which can be found at fourhourworkweek.com/blog, is awesome, and he’s also on Twitter (@tferriss), teaching you how to survive around the world as a gypsy and increase your overall productivity, guerrilla-style.

Jennifer Palus of Palus Business Consulting. Smart, bitchy (her word), and insightful, just like her blog at palusbusinessconsulting.blogspot.com.

Gretel Going, partner at Channel V Media. I talk to her about 10 times per week on all things digital/PR/Marketing/fashion, but the easier way (and cheaper for you) to get her information is to follow her on Twitter at @gretelgoing, or read the CVM blog, “CVMonologues.”

Steve Hershberger of ComBlu. Steve handles social media strategy for companies such as MicroSoft, Wal-Mart, and Coca-Cola to name a few. He’s a huge brain, snappy dresser…gotta like him. Find him on twitter at @sthersh, and read his blog at http://lumenatti.comblu.com/blogs/lumenatti

Jill Konrath. One of the voices talking about large sales I listen to and highly respect highly, Jill wrote “Selling to Big Companies” Catch her on Twitter at jillkonrath and over at her blog, Selling to Big Companies.

Fox News. Fair and balanced? Well… Anyway, I find great comedy in the reporting of the news and the manufactured drama between the hosts…

Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” I find every so often people who do not watch this show–usually strong Republicans–find the commentary to liberal. But in the words of Larry the Cable Guy, “I don’t care who you are, that’s funny stuff right there…”

Stephen Colbert. Host of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” and author of the book I am America, and So Can You!. Follow him on Twitter: @StephenColbert.

Who are you listening to? What are the voices in your head?