3 Takeaways From the First Sales Hacker Toronto Series Meetup

Innovation Factory

On July 8th, I attended the first Sales Hacker Series Meetup held at The Lab on Queen St. West.  The event was presented by Sales Hacker & Third Core and focused on hacking Lead Generation and List Building for sales.  The event was extremely well attended with tons of sales people from all over Toronto and GTA, and for the first Sales Hacker event held outside of San Francisco or New York, I definitely think the Toronto crowd showed that there is an insane amount of talent north of the border.

After a couple Steam Whistle’s to wash down the work day, we assembled in the main classroom area of the Lab and were treated to presentations from three very successful sales professionals and talented speakers.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, or you were there and need a quick recap, here are the 3 takeaways I gathered from each speaker:

Jamie Shanks, Managing Partner – Sales For Life

Jamie is an expert on social selling and spent his time teaching us how to leverage the amazing power of LinkedIn for lead generation and finding the right contacts at a prospect organization.  He took the audience through the basics of a LinkedIn advanced search, how to save these searches and how to create notifications of your contacts’ job changes/promotions etc.  He then explained the power of LinkedIn groups for lead generation and sales.  When you’ve joined a group with your prospect, you can begin the conversation subtly by commenting on their posts, or you can actually send them a direct message through the group without having to ask for an introduction even if they are a 2nd or 3rd degree connection.

For more specific details on these tactics, check out Jamie’s blog post.

Emmanuelle Skala – VP of Sales, Influitive

Emmanuelle’s works for Influitive, an advocate marketing software company that helps you get your customers to sell FOR you.  So it’s not much of surprise that her presentation had to do with ensuring your current customers are so delighted with you, they want to tell others about your product or service.  Your job as a sales person is to make sure that your customer has such a positive experience that they would love to recommend your solution to others.  A specific, low cost example of delighting your customer would be to send them a small personal gift around 30 days after you’ve closed the deal.  For example, a salesperson on her team learned that her buyer was going to Thailand in a few months, so she sent the buyer a Thailand travel book with a personal note thanking them for their business, and to enjoy her upcoming trip.  A simple gesture like this can go a long way to eliminating the potential for buyer’s remorse (which is most likely to occur in the 30 days after a sale).

Download Influitive’s Advocate Marketing Playbook for more ways to get your customers to sell for you!

David Priemer – VP of Sales, Salesforce.com

David’s presentation had a bit more of a marketing feel, as it was geared towards driving high conversion inbound leads.  High conversion leads are of course, much more valuable to a salesperson because they’re further along the sales funnel, and thus take less time to close.  High conversion leads are leads that have already expressed interest in your solution, and are closer to making a purchasing decision.  In order to attract high conversion leads through your messaging, whether it be the language on your website, your marketing materials or your social media channels, you need to get people’s attention with polarizing content that is both relevant and insightful.  If you spend the time to figure out who your customers really are, and then create these marketing messages for them, you will attract much more high conversion leads than low conversion, thus driving sales and growth.

Follow David on twitter for more great sales advice and content!

A big thanks to Sales Hacker, Third Core, and The Lab for hosting a great event.  I look forward to attending more Sales Hacker Series events in Toronto as I’m sure most of the other attendees do.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, and you want to learn more about sales for your startup, download our white paper Introduction to Startup Sales

3 Takeaways From the First Sales Hacker Toronto Series Meetup