Sales & Marketing Society of the Mid-South

While many SMS members know Lori Turner as managing partner of RedRover Company Sales & Marketing, they don’t realize that she was also contributing ghost writer for “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guerrilla Marketing.” She possesses tremendous knowledge about how small businesses can use non-traditional marketing tactics to promote their brand, product or service.

Lori shared the secrets of why guerrilla marketing works and 10 types of guerrilla marketing that you may have never heard of in a recent SMS workshop. Attendees learned about proximity marketing, intrusive marketing, ambient marketing, and more. The presentation also included examples of brands using guerrilla marketing – some successfully and some not so much. Lori also outlined the six steps to creating your own winning guerrilla strategy.

We had a packed house for the workshop, so if you missed out then make sure you’re on our mailing list to find out about our great upcoming events! You can register on the homepage of our website at http://www.sms-midsouth.org

Billions of dollars are spent every year on creative and artistic advertising campaigns that don’t resonate with consumers because they fail to reach them where and when they want to be reached.

This was the message from Maria McLendon, a marketing and communications leader who shared her expertise in market segmentation, targeting and positioning with attendees of the Sales and Marketing Society of the Mid-South March luncheon. McLendon is a marketing and public relations consultant who is skilled in orchestrating internal and external resources in order to develop and implement effective advertising and sales promotion programs.

“Great ads and marketing can be lost if we are not fully aware of who is receiving the message,” McLendon said. “We have to know our customers inside and out. To have a successful campaign, we must identify our ideal customers, and then reach them when, where and how they want to be reached.”

“Maria’s presentation was timely and well received by our SMS audience,” said Lori Turner, Managing Partner, Red Rover Sales and Marketing. “As business owners and marketers, its easy to get excited about all of the new and exciting marketing delivery channels, thanks to the explosion of social media, but it’s critical that we don’t lose sight of the fundamentals — proper market segmentation, understanding the common traits of those segments and messaging accordingly.”

The Sales and Marketing Society of the Mid-South is a network providing continuing education to sales and marketing professionals with the intention of continually improving the standards for professional selling, sales management and marketing. Its primary goal is to provide educational events and services for sales and marketing professionals. In addition to being a source for education and information, SMS is also involved in sponsorship and scholarship programs for college students from the University of Memphis, Christian Brothers University and Southwest Tennessee Community College.

Check out the photos from the Luncheon, courtesy of Gary Baldwin:

We had a sold-out house today for our 3rd workshop, and this one was by far one of the most compelling.

Lori Turner, Manager Partner at RedRover Sales & Marketing delivered an amazing overview of what an effective sales strategy is, and then how social media tools can be used to increase sales effectiveness.

James Hutto of Valeo Design & Marketing covered the “Four C’s to Conquer LinkedIn” and talked the audience through the building blocks necessary to using Lori’s strategy of prospecting and profiling sales leads using social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.
Here is their presentation:

We’re looking forward to the next workshop which is tentatively scheduled for October 2.  Due to the last two workshops selling out, we’re going to seek a new location that will allow us to accomodate more seating.  We hated to have to turn so many down today that tried to register the 1-2 days before the event!

October Workshop

We get more questions about Twitter-this and Twitter-that, we feel like its time to jump in and get you some answers.  We’re going to have a panel available to answer questions about how to use Twitter, how people are using it in their businesses, and most importantly- how (if) people are profiting from their use  of it.

We want to hear from you! Fill out our Twitter Survey to submit questions that you would like to see us cover.  We’ll get some savvy people there to give you some different perspectives.

We just finished up our second workshop in our new series designed to offer more value to our members and the community.  This was titled Weaving the Social Web: How to Maximize Your Time Spent on Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and More.

We had an even better turnout for this session, and there were some great questions from the crowd.  Social media continues to be a hot topic, and this organization is dedicated to helping you understand the practical ways to implement this new channel for your marketing efforts.

Make sure and mark your calendar for our next workshop, which will be on September 2nd.  This one will feature Lori Turner of Red Rover marketing, and James Hutto of Valeo Design & Marketing.  They will be covering how to harness social media to fill up your sales funnel and close more business.  Details to come!

Its been a long time coming, but the Sales & Marketing Society of the Mid-South finally has the blog up and running!  The purpose of this blog is to allow us to more readily communicate with our members and anyone else about upcoming events, member benefits, special discounts, sponsorship opportunities- you name it!

We will also be posting slide presentations from our guest speakers, videos from luncheons and other events, photos, and anything else we can get our hands on.  Stay tuned by subscribing to our RSS feed and we’ll make sure that you’re always in the loop with what’s happening in the word of sales or marketing.