Blogging – opening the door to sales
Blogging for money may be a dangerous use of resources but what about ‘trolling’ for money. Today I came across this awesome blog post by Jeremiah Owyang (Senior Analyst for Forrestor) – someone that I follow on Twitter and a blog that I enjoy reading.
The post (entitles CMS Horror Stories, and Your Soon-To-Be ‘Legacy’ Community Platform) is a real good read for anyone who is in the midst of a CMS selection. In his post, Jeremiah asks to very key questions:
1) I’d love to hear from you about your CMS horror stories, feel free to leave a comment below, go ahead, vent away.
2) Are you deploying a community platform for your web strategy at your company? What are you doing to plan for the long term 5+ years impacts of this system in regards to the rest of the enterprise web strategy?
I work at PaperThin (makers of the CommonSpot Content Server) and I have to say that Jeremiah opened my eyes with this post to an amazing sales opportunity. One that I am sure smart people are deploying (and we will be shortly as well) – and that is ‘Blog Trolling’. A quick search on Technorati for CMS returns over 22K results. Each search result a Blog with some information about Content Management Systems.
One of the most difficult thing to do in the world of sales is to find your target market. What better way to find a customer interested in a CMS then on a blog post (an open communication channel) that is discussing pains or issues with their current CMS. In solution selling this would give us the opportunity to “Recognize the pain” – for most of the people who post comments on Jeremiah’s post they are admitting their pain publicly.
Best thing about comments on a blog – since most people are constantly trying to sell their blog to readers of other blogs, they include the link in their comments (just click on the persons name). Can’t fault a sales person from e-mailing or calling (most blogs extend contact information) you and saying:
“Hey, saw here that you were having difficulty with your current CMS and that you feel like it is ‘inflexible’. Give me a half hour and I will show you how flexible our application is …”
In all honesty, when you post comments on a blog you are openly asking someone to contact you. You are begging for it.
Note: More on his second question (about your Community Platform) a bit later.