Sales Tips stays with the same general topic as my last review of Steve Mertz’s Sales Presentation Training.

Laurie offers Sales, Skills and Presentation Skills training information from her main website which contains a wide range of two and three page Automotive and Real Estate sales and service articles and encourages people to “visit my blog for more great info”. So here’s a nice example of blogging as a natural way for an information broker to engage in multiple ways of communicating. OK, let’s take her up on the invitation and see what we find….

Blogging since: February 27, 2005
Posting Frequency: once a month, with gaps
Post Length: 500 words average
Aesthetic Appeal: Bare bones Blogger template: none of the branding found on her main website
Graphics: Hardly any
Categories: None
Tagline: Sales tips to help people no matter who they sell to or what they sell
Blogroll: 6 assorted links, including one to fellow NSA financial wizard, Kim Snider
Target Audience: Anyone – we are all in sales
Comments allowed: Yes
Trackbacks: No
Alexa.com traffic ranking: N/A
Sites that link to this blog: N/A
Yahoo Links: 17
Google Page Rank: 3/10

Review:

It’s a pity Laurie does not post more frequently. She’s been silent since June 26 and there are often month-long gaps between posts. There have been times she posted weekly. So all this leads me to think she leads a busy life and her blogging must happen when there’s time. This is quite understandable. And what a delight to read the quality of the posts when she does find time.

She blogs on the sales lessons found in a wide variety of situations: from bed bugs to book returns; from Personality inventories to Prada; Restaurants to Banks. Laurie shows us how sales can be won and sales can be lost by simple customer service interactions. She has taught sales skills for over 20 years and her advice rings true.

Her main web site highlights Laurie’s skills in face-to-face sales training:

Clients and participants agree: Laurie Brown is a dynamic, warm, funny speaker who energizes and motivates her audiences to discover the best in themselves and show it to the world. With more than twenty years experience in working with international and culturally-diverse groups, she connects easily with everyone. She offers highly customized, practical and relevant content that make the difference. She provides a fun, engaging presentation and she is dedicated to YOUR success!

She certainly communicates this warmth in her blog. It’s chock-full of stories about her own experiences with friends and family as she comes across everyday situations that illustrate sales lessons:

These conversational phrases make her blog come alive.

Then she lists the sales lessons: the dangers of upselling; the secrets of exceptional customer service; the importance of multiple thank-you’s. Here’s an example of the sales advice she offers:

Many salespeople think it is best to leave the objection buried. Perhaps if they ignore it it will go away. But, when you do that, it eventually will come back to haunt you. Like any infection left untreated, it will only grow and grow. Your job is to surface it, clean it and move on in the sales process. Unanswered objections lead to lost sales or the need to lower the price to keep the sale.

Putting resources into a re-design of the blog to match the branding of her web site would be a worthwhile investment.

My hope is that Laurie finds the time to post more frequently. One suggestion would be to capture discussion from her frequent training classes (a digital tape recorder and transcription service would do the trick) and post some of the classroom Q&A.

She’s been published in a dozen magazines and has a great list of articles and is rumored to be working on a book. Her writing skills are not in question. Writing Down the Bones would be a good book to read to find the inspiration for frequent posts.

After all, don’t they say success in sales is a numbers game?