I recently re-read The Challenger Sale. 

Granted, I don't work in sales but everybody sells - whether it's a product, a service or your personal brand. 

I also believe that sales skills are essential for any consultant because they teach you to think differently when you're trying to provide solutions, are doing presentations and pitches or are simply talking to a customer about a difficult situation.

Especially when it comes to solutions, you need to help your customer get to the solution on their own by probing them with questions and guiding them rather than point-blank dropping the solution onto them because that's not how they'll truly adopt it - they need to come up with it on their own so that it sticks and so that they firmly believe in it. 

Back to the book - it lays out the ideas and strategies behind some of the most successful sales teams and sales reps and how they perform the job in today's world of sophisticated buyers.

Most of the selling approaches used nowadays are no longer effective because buyers are fed up with being interrogated without receiving any value.

There's a better approach to successful selling that the book promotes - the Challenger model.

Why the Challenger Sales Approach Works?

This is a guest post by Mike Davies from ITPR.

Given that 99% of a PRs job is to understand the media and build relationships with journalists, it might sound a bit strange that the practice of “selling in” a story to a journalist can be so nerve wracking.

But this process of pitching stories is often the most daunting task for any new PR exec; and still conjures a few moments of hesitation for the odd seasoned professional.

Anyone who has ever caught a journalist on a bad day will understand why pitching stories can be so nerve wracking. Short replies and quick hang-ups can leave even the most thick-skinned with a feeling of trepidation.

As an ex-journalist, I must confess to understanding some of the frustration felt by my former colleagues.

Like any first in your life, I will never forget the first PR pitch I received as a young journalist that made me question what exactly these public relations people were being paid for.

Not only did the “pitch” start with a generic “hi there”, the story was completely irrelevant to the area I was writing about and had no value to my readers.

Worse still,

In only 14% of organisations, the PR and communication department is going through a process of digital transformation. 

This seems rather odd to me compared to 42% for the marketing and advertising department. 

14% to 42% is a big gap. 

I recently discovered one of the reasons for this. 

I flew to Copenhagen early this month to attend an internal training for a rather large organisation where I was asked to be their keynote speaker and specifically present on digital communication and digital communication trends. 

As it turns out, fear is one of the key reasons why the PR/communication department is behind when it comes to digital transformation.

Comms professionals fear technology. They fear the unknown. They fear experimentation and failure. They fear change. 

But as I said in my presentation, fear only holds us back. 

Digital transformation requires change. Yes, change can be scary and change can create resistance but change is good because change means progress.  

If you run an agency (or any business for that matter), you know how important sales is. After all, it's how you win new clients, expand your service portfolio and generate revenue. 

Through my experience as an agency consultant at HubSpot, I've found that every agency has different sales, service and account management processes. Unfortunately, many don't even have processes which is, put simply, bad business practice (or no business practice?). 

Don't believe me? 

I'll give you the hard facts. 

We recently surveyed over 1,400 agency professionals from around the world to uncover the biggest sales challenges and published those in a new report called 2019 State of Agency Selling. 

Through this survey, we found that 46% of agencies only have a somewhat defined sales process, while the next largest group of 31% doesn't have a defined sales process at all. 

This is a guest post by my friend Edyta Kowal from Prowly.

A newsroom has always been a brand’s window on the world.

But the way we’ve been communicating with the world through this tool has changed quite a bit over the years.

Today, in the era of oversupply of all sorts of content, which almost everyone creates now, we find it increasingly difficult to be distinct.

On the other hand, PR people some time ago already accepted the fact that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish much by speaking just to journalists or keep focusing on the same dull formats used over and over again.

The development of new technologies, the ever-present digital connections, as well as the increasingly demanding and well-informed audiences—all these elements have contributed much to the fact that working in PR today requires a more comprehensive approach and oftentimes taking actions that are far from standard.

Most of all, however, it requires a focus on activities that will make audiences come to you because you can offer something extra, like a solution to their problem or something that will address their needs.

It is this subtle contrast between outbound and inbound that makes all the difference. And makes PR now more exciting than ever.