Someone sent me a Seth Godin post, so I will blog about it now.

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The post:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/first-ten-.html

The B2B sale is a relationship sale. What Seth describes is selling into referrals. This is the way most businesses actually grow. Better than 70% of sales come from or through existing customers in many companies and industries.

To scale up in that sales environment, the key is applying a process mentality to figure out what activities further those relationships. What activities can we control that speed the buying decision? What are we doing that unintentionally lengthens the sales cycle? Identify problems. Try to discover root causes. Test ways to improve.

Relationships are relationships - can't standardize them. But human nature is human nature, too. This allows some activities (and not-doing certain activities) to be adopted as standard practices. See also: behavioral finance.


Dumping a lot of volume into a leaky process just creates a bunch of work and chasing after the wind. So, like Seth says, start with small investments. Look for things to try that you can afford to repeat if they work and won't kill you if they don't. Pull back fast from activities that don't give sustainable results - either tweak them and try again, or move on. Find a few small things that seem to help. Do more of those. As repeatable results become evident, begin to add volume to the process inputs.

Attention B2B online marketers: one for the swipe file!

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For you non marketers, here's a secret of the trade. Many marketers maintain a little box called the Swipe File. It's just a collection of marketing tactics we've observed that caught our eye as an example of a good idea, good execution, clever humor, whatever.

My tip for your swipe file: Tatum LLC. They have a fantastic email newsletter targeting financial executives. (Full disclosure: I have no relationship with Tatum except for being buddies with some of their current and former team members.)

Regardless of our profession, all of us will be spending more time helping financial executives understand why we want their money for our various game-changing, must-have, do-it-right-now projects and tools.

Wondering how the financial executive thinks? What they're worried about? What language they speak? How they define value?

Or, are you simply a hapless B2B marketing looking for ideas that speak to the executive reader?

Check out Tatum's website & go sign up for their e-blasts. (And it wouldn't hurt to go brush up on financial ratios and Net Present Value, too.)

Is 22 Tweets-Per-Day the Optimum? A Twittercurmudgeon mumbles.

OK, here's a disclaimer: This is completely personal. It's not intended as a best practice for building your business or landing good PR or anything like that.

I refer to this post on a good inbound marketing blog (Hubspot). "Ever wonder how often you should be tweeting? How much is too much..."

They ran some analytics to come up with...
- average # of Twitter postings per user (~4.4)
- average # of followers per Twitterer (~103)
- average # of Twitter postings for the 50 MOST FOLLOWED Twitterers (~22!)

Regarding this third statistic, they raise this excellent question:

"Is this correlation or causation? for example - is it that the most interesting people just happen to tweet at that frequency, or is it that this is the "goldilocks" number - not too frequent, not too seldom - to be most productive at attracting followers? Or some other phenomenon?"

Here is my humble, yet accurate opinion.

When you're in the top 50, then a huge number of people perceive your content brand to have celebrity cachet, information value, or (most likely - just see who's in the top 50) both.

When you've got that kind of influence, the demand for your content is higher than for that of most Twitterers.

For those of you who are not in the top 50 and do not have that kind of brand power, here's my personal, and admittedly somewhat curmudgeonly rationale for why you should NOT tweet 22 times per day:

- You're drowning out all the other people from whom I want to hear, who only say 1-2 things per day (or less). But those things are interesting, insightful, informative, witty, of human interest, or otherwise valued.

- From how many people can I reasonably absorb a daily ~500 word essay in 140 character episodes? Here's the math. Say I follow 100 people. Each of them tweets only 10x/day. That's roughly 20,000 words per DAY. I'm reading this on my smartphone, people. Do you think this is even possible?

- Very, very, very few people have 22 fascinating, informative, insightful, witty, valuable things to tell the rest of us each day. (And many such thoughts are restricted by contractual agreements, space limitations, and/or personal taste.)

- Even if some Tweeple make it a full time job to crank out interesting things to say, do I need to make it my full time job to watch for and consume these sayings?

I assure you, as a follower of a few folks on Twitter, that if any of you good Tweeple on my list start Twittering 22x/day... I will put you on mute. And if you keep it up, I'll unfollow you.

Hopefully I'll find some tools for swimming deeper in the social media river without drowning. (Your suggestions are welcome!) Meantime, I'm looking for low volume, high value Tweeters. I follow very few Tweeple who routinely average more than 4 posts/day on Twitter.

Having said all that, I hope to see and hear from you on Twitter!