From playing on the same college basketball team at LSU as "Pistol" Pete Marovich, to a successful 14-year sales career at IBM, to working alongside Zig Ziglar for 32 years, Bryan Flanagan has some great stories to share. This is definitely one of the more entertaining interviews conducted on the Sales Integrity Podcast. After 3,628,807 miles, 4,670 engagements, and training over 745,144 professionals, Bryan still believes that, armed with the right skills and attitude, anyone can learn to sell. And he imparts such wisdom during this interview as "Comfort kills careers" and "Think in silence, talk in complete sentences" as well as "The intention behind your technique determines your integrity" and much more. If you are the type of sales leader or sales professional who seeks to learn creative new ideas in a fun way to take your sales career to the next level then you will want to "grow get em" by listening to this interview of the great Bryan Flanagan.

What is Social Selling? According to LinkedIn, Social Selling is about leveraging your social network to find the right prospects, build trusted relationships, and ultimately, achieve your sales goals. In terms of measuring Social Selling success LinkedIn conducted some research and found that sales reps with the highest Social Selling Index (SSI) scores create 45% more sales opportunities, are 51% more likely to hit quota, are 3X more likely to go to club, and 78% of social sellers outsell their peers who don't use social media. On today's episode we focus on where it all begins as it relates to social selling - the connection. We provide a systematic approach for connecting with over 25% of your target audience of senior executives on LinkedIn. If you want to learn a proven step-by-step approach for reaching out to senior executives who will gladly accept your LinkedIn connection requests then you will want to listen to this episode.

“Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads." [Source: DemandGen Report] Today we start a new podcast theme - Sales & Marketing Integration. Moving forward we will look at the ins and outs, as well as benefits associated to the sales department and marketing department working together as it relates to Lead Generation. Today’s niche focus will be: Social Selling vs. Lead Nurturing. If Social Selling is really just the sales professional's way of getting attention and then nurturing leads how does that affect the Marketing department’s formal Lead Nurturing campaigns? What are the pitfalls associated to these two departments not communicating as it relates to this topic? We address this in detail during this podcast episode. We even provide 3 tips on how Sales and Marketing can work hand-in-hand to make the Lead Nurturing process a great success without stepping on one another. If you want to learn how the Sales and Marketing departments can leverage Social Selling and Lead Nurturing campaigns in conjunction with one another to generate more qualified opportunities, then you will want to listen to this episode.

“Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text." [Source: Insivia Reports] We continue with our theme of “Creating Content” as a sales professional. Today we focus on sending videos within LinkedIn InMails to New Prospects. It’s not as easy as it may sound. People who don’t know you typically won’t click a link for fear it could be a virus or something less desirable. Within InMails LinkedIn doesn’t convert a link to a preview of the video like it does on its activity feed wall when you post a link in an Update. During this episode we provide you with a “sales hack” on how to get around this challenge within LinkedIn. We also provide you a quick blueprint and outline for how to structure your message within the 300 character limit LinkedIn imposes on you when sending messages to 2nd degree contacts or beyond using InMails. If you want to learn a creative way to send videos to target market prospects within LinkedIn that simply yields results, then you will want to listen to this episode.

The Sales Integrity Podcast just completed it’s 3rd month in existence and has received some excellent feedback from our audience of loyal listeners. This quick episode will provide a special announcement for some changes we are making to the podcast moving forward effective May 2017 based on audience suggestions.