Featured Speaker – Mike Kerby – C308 Marketing

Another great NetWorks! meeting today and another fine speaker, Mike Kerby with C308 Marketing. Here’s a little bio info:

Mike is the founder and President of C308 Marketing, an on-line marketing communications firm headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Mike’s role is to oversee all C308 client’s on-line marketing strategies; including website architecture, content planning, distribution and syndication strategies, social computing, and analytics and tracking strategies. Prior to founding C308 Marketing in 2003, Mike worked as a strategic marketing consultant for technology companies. During the boom of the late 90′s he gained valuable experience launching new products, as well as developing business plans and sales channel marking plans for his clients. From working with Iomega during their rise at retail in the 90′s to the launch of the new HP segment portal, Mike’s experience with a wide range of blue-chip clients makes him an incredible asset to C308′s local, regional, and national client roster. Mike is also a member of Sales and Marketing Executives Boise with ……..yours truly (smile). Please click on Mike’s photo to go to his LinkedIn profile or on his company logo to visit their website.

Social Media – Where’s The Beef?

I’ve been doing this for about 45 days now and I find myself asking questions. One question in particular (smile). I feel that I have developed a fairly good fundamental understanding of how Social Media works (from a technical standpoint) and now… I would actually like to see it work. Not measure it. See it.

While I do find that maintaining this blog is very rewarding on it’s own level, the goal was not to provide for my personal gratification (smile). The goal is to encourage more folks to inquire about membership in NetWorks! To date, not one person has left their card requesting more info. Heck, I can get better results than that with direct mail (smile). So, I find myself asking those same questions that I know a lot of business people are asking themselves when presented with the prospect of integrating Social Media into their business and marketing plans…….Where’s the beef? I need some ROI (smile).

My gut feeling tells me that, much like Twitter, I am going to have to redefine my expectations for this tool. At the same time, I recognize the need to modify my message and to develop a plan which will leverage those gains that I know these efforts have provided.

Sales 101 – Qualifying For Budget Part I

http://www.annbernard.net

All this talk about “marketing” is making Craigy cranky (smile). Time to get back to the basics. Time to kick it old school. Time to talk about selling (smile).  So let’s discuss what, in my experience, is one of the probably two most challenging aspects of selling for both inexperienced and experienced sales people……………qualifying. The other would be closing (more on this later as saying that a “sales person can’t close” is largely a misnomer. Fact is….they can’t perform any of the previous selling steps properly)  and they both have to do with money. That dirty little topic that nobody seems to want to bring up (smile).

Sales & Marketing Executives Meeting

I had a chance tonight to attend my first full monthly meeting of the Sales & Marketing Executives Boise.  I belonged to this group about 20 years ago and had fond memories of it so I decided earlier this year to find out if it was still around. I couldn’t find anything on it so did a shout out to our group and it turned out that both Rocky Cook and Skip Anderson were members. So, I got a hold of the gentleman who runs it right now and they were quick to accept and approve my application to join. This leads me to believe that:

1. Nobody must have remembered me from before or………..
2. They’re even less discretionary about membership than I am with our group or………