Glenn Gow, is founder of Silicon Valley-based marketing firm Crimson Marketing. He is an expert in marketing strategy for tech companies and author of Revenue and the CMO. Follow his insights on tech marketing at the Crimson Technology Marketing Blog.

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I invited Glenn to Marketing Smarts to share insights from his book, Revenue and the CMO, and to discuss how businesses can effectively implement social selling and measure the success of their efforts.

Here are just a few highlights from my conversation with Glenn.

Marketers can enhance their own career prospects by facilitating the use of social media as sales support (01:55): "I think the opportunity is for marketers to really shine. One of the themes I put forth in the book is that this is really how to advance your career as a marketer. This is really about how to step into the new world of Big Data and social selling in a way that creates true revenue, that supports the sales organization so they can be much more effective. The marketers who do a good job of this are going to do extremely well in their careers."

Marketers should help salespeople by finding "golden nuggets" of information, like a press release about a prospect's company, or a tweet from that company's CEO (07:42): "Marketing's job is to boil down the information that's available to just the 'golden nuggets' of information that sales needs. That's a commitment that marketing needs to make...to help feed the sales organization, just the key pieces of information they need (not everything)...so now that sales rep has exactly the information he needs to go in and have a dialogue."

To get social selling implemented at your company, start with a pilot program, and keep it focused on specific goals (08:58): "[Marketers] have to be very closely tied to the sales team.... Are we going after a particular vertical we need to understand better? Are we going after a particular geography, or are we going after some named accounts? Narrow the universe down to just what we're focused on in the pilot and become part of that sales team.... Marketing is going to avoid boiling the ocean, and just focus on the information that's valuable to that specific sales team approach."

For more information, visit CrimsonMarketing.com or follow Glenn on Twitter: @CrimsonCEO.

Glenn and I talked about much more, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on January 15, 2014