Social media is becoming more and more pervasive and has already been entrenched as a tool for external marketing. But what about internal communication? New research shows it might be groundbreaking there as well.

Steve W. Martin recently interviewed 54 top salespeople about how they use LinkedIn to research accounts, prospect for leads, and generate sales.

As a person is a person through the eyes of others, so it is with a brand. Brands are everywhere and nowhere - networks of relationships continually in motion, growing, shrinking, sometimes changing almost beyond recognition.

Ryan Sauer, an online marketing consultant, provides some insights for companies wanting help in utilising social media to improve results.

You need a ‘hook’ to attract readers, listeners or viewers and pull them from the media they intended consuming, into interacting with your advert.

What separates great from good sales organisations? After working with over 200 companies the evidence suggests that the best business-to-business sales organisations share specific patterns of organisational structure and behaviour.

Anyone who needs to persuade others can turn a kernel of a sales opportunity into tangible results by recognising the process by which your customers make decisions to buy from you.

Even tiny ads - with almost no information - can be effective for certain products.

There's a natural tendency to assume that the losing salespeople lacked sales prowess that the winner possessed or their product was far inferior in some way. However, this isn't always the case.

If you are persuading along with a colleague, your customer is influenced by both of you. Together, you and your colleague are perceived as an ensemble.