I Love You, #SportsBiz Reps.
Let's have an honest conversation real quick. If you told me 17 months ago that I'd have 150 articles up on empoweredsalesperson.com, I'd have called you a liar. If you told me what we would be at 30,000 views on the site, I'd have called you a liar. If you told me that 700(!) people would have made a content request to the website, I'd probably have been speechless. And if you told me that 7,000 unique people would have visited the site, I'd probably have passed out.
I'm really truly grateful for all 7,000 who have showed up. I'm beyond grateful for the 700 who have requested content. In fact, I love you all. This has been the coolest job of my career. The dialogue between myself and the #sportsbiz sales community has been the most fascinating of my career. You, reps and managers, have challenged me to create content that has run the gamut from the most tactical of articles to literally selling while you're hungover. Every time I get a content request alert, I literally race to see what it is. I'm just so beyond grateful...I love you all...and thank you!
Feel free to stop there...but I've also learned a few cool things I want to pass along:
Reps want to read this at work, in the AM: The vast majority of views on the site come from desktops, Monday-Friday, from 8 am CST-11 am CST.
Reps read more than one article: Every time someone gets on the website, they read an average of 2 articles. The more frequently they read the site, the more articles they read. Our top users read an average 5(!) articles per visit.
Most read articles have one of two things: Every one of our top read articles can fit into one of two categories: 1) They are tactical in nature from direct rep requests. 2) They are rep requests, but intensely vulnerable responses from me. Reps either want specific instructions to tackle their challenges...or they want real insights from real world situations. This became obvious to me as I did a site audit in August, and, lo-and-behold September was the biggest month in site history...and October is tracking to be right there.
The Reader is Never Wrong: My success mark on an article is 100 views. If 100 people read it, it means it had good relevancy. If it had less, it just didn't have a good general audience. 70% of the articles I've written on my own intuition have fallen below that mark (see Tech Month & most podcasts!). 95% of the rep driven articles have gone above the 100-view mark. SO KEEP WRITING ME TOPICS! Clearly your ideas on articles are WAY better than mine.
Looking into the data has been profoundly impactful on me as I continue to attempt to grow the site...clearly. I'm going to be taking that into a new offering to come in 2020...Data-Driven Sales Training. With over 1,000(!!!) data points, and an on-going dialogue with the #sportsbiz sales community, there isn't anyone in sales training that has more sightline into the struggles that sales reps face. And I'm going to start using that data to help teams train their reps smarter. I've been building this data-set for 17 months and I can't wait to unleash it.
As I said, this is the coolest job I've ever had. No matter what I continue to do, empoweredsalesperson.com will continue to exist as long as you all keep caring about it. I love you all!