“Sales Best Practices”, I tell you the origins …
In 2000, I left Lille for Paris, and was looking for a way out of the industrial computer industry in full collapse. So I created and put online my Salesman CV on my personal website (ljvd.com).
At that time, with some SEO skills, it was possible to get on the first page of search engines, even for a small personal website.
A totally unexpected side effect was to receive questions about being a salesman. As the messages became more and more numerous and similar, and as I was busy with my clients, it was necessary to find a solution.
The Salesman’s FAQ
In 2002, a “Salesman’s FAQ” was set up to structure the answers.
The site occupied the first lines of the search engines, generating its thousand visitors per day, with always more questions.
Although PhpMyFaq is a collaborative tool, the “Salesman’s FAQ” had difficulty federating other salesmen, other contributors. And for good reason, the section was on a personal site and did not encourage collaboration. The solution had reached its limits.
The transformation into a community
In 2004, 6nergies appeared, the first French professional social network, integrating group functionality. The platform proved to be an excellent tool to discuss with visitors, but especially to involve other sales professionals in this knowledge sharing. This is how the community was created.
The other social networks
When 6nergies disappeared, a group on Viaduc was set up, the platform you now know as Viadeo.
Interested in a more international vision of Sales, the group on LinkedIn was born.
Today, you will find the majority of our members and our exchanges on the American platform.
For the anecdote
At first, I named the group “Best Sales Practices”. But the group did not appear in the LinkedIn search engine. The Lnk search engine sorted the groups on the first word, and no one was looking for “Best”. To give the group more visibility, I renamed it “Sales Best Practices”.
Admittedly, this made more than one English speaker scream, I was sometime called the illiterate frog-eater. A few years later, when LinkedIn had finally corrected its searching algorithm, I could have corrected the group name. That was without my visceral hatred for “French Bashing” and my love of provocation.
So yes, the nickname of the community will remain “Sales Best Practices” aka SBP, please use Salesty now.
The Community Site
In 2008, a small portal site was created to showcase our co-admins, announce us meetings. We have been using sales.eu.org for a long time. Thanks to eu.org which offers sub-domains for free to associations.
A sponsorship has developed over time. Although legal for an association, it appeared to us incompatible with the non-commercial spirit of eu.org. Moreover, Europeans only represented 25% of the community. We had to find a new domain name.
“SalesBestPractices” was already Cyber squatted by an opportunist, we had to find an new name. In 2014, after a joyful collaborative brainstorming, we found Salesty.