As a sales and marketing person, my job is to tell a compelling story to engage existing and prospective clients and have them want to work with and buy from me. I have been going about this for years in the traditional sense by knocking on doors, making cold calls, attending industry meetings and networking. It worked well for me—I made decent money and won some awards—but it clearly wasn’t going to be enough to help me take my sales and career to the next level.
For the past six months I’ve had a nagging feeling that I wasn’t doing enough to stand out, so I started writing some stories about my company’s products and systems. My goal was to create enough content to put on a blog and share with my current and potential customers. This is not an original idea but I finally decided to pursue it after reading and hearing countless stories on podcasts from popular sales and business gurus like, Gary Vaynerchuck, Anthony Iannarino and Dorie Clark. They kept preaching the need to differentiate yourself from your competitors and I finally felt compelled to make a change. The pandemic is making me realize how crucial this is.
One of my main reasons for a change was to improve my writing skills for future career goals and to reignite a creative side of me that I felt had been missing. My customers also needed to see something different from me, something that showed how I cared about their businesses and could help them increase patient compliance and revenue with my company’s products and systems.
But I hadn’t imagined just how much writing and researching these posts would help me.
I gained a better understanding of my products and the customer’s needs for them. I was connecting with my customers on a deeper level by really talking to them about their business, obtaining quotes from those who have been successful using our systems and was able to drive more new customers to our programs.
The other learning part of this experience has been creating my own website through WordPress.com. Developing the WordPress site brought back incredible memories of an earlier project in my marketing career. I was the lead project manager for the creation and launch of the WordPress site Hu-FriedyPerformance.com, an interactive product demonstration module for distribution reps to use and help secure sales. It was really eye opening to see how different departments thought a tool like this should work. I was working with product managers, our sales team, distribution sales reps and an outside vendor. This project gave me deeper insight into how my company and industry worked as a whole and the hurdles a manufacturing company must go through to gain the attention of distribution reps and customers.
Working on the website with both my future and that of my customers in mind also has me thinking about all of the new things I’ll learn and the endless opportunities to uncover, such as using the blog posts to expand my presence on social media, turning posts into scripts for videos, learning more about SEO, and generally increasing my digital marketing engagement.
Looking toward the future and remembering the past has allowed me to conceptualize a career path that is more than just sales. My goal is to one day lead a sales and marketing team and show how they can combine sales and marketing skills in the field to better connect with and find customers they didn’t know existed.
The process of writing the blog posts and developing the WordPress site provided me more enjoyment in my career than I’ve had in a while and gave me a new outlook on my future. Of course, that future is a little more unstable—but it’s one where I’ll be better positioned on my career path thanks to my new website, jassonddempsey.com.
Jason D. Dempsey 