Longtime Benchmark blogger Hal Licino wrote a terrific piece this month on Serving the Social Media Customer by Unselling. Click on the link to read the full piece. Here's an excerpt:

One of the primary points is that the process of relationship-building takes precedence over closing the sale. This may definitely seem like heresy to any marketer who was brought up in the age when it was drilled into the heads of any sales person that the single most important part of their job was to “ask for the sale.” In the social media sphere it is literally brand poison to even remotely address the question of making the sale at all. Sales is no longer a unilateral process where the customer is enticed by all means possible, even those that flutter at the edges of legitimacy as in the bad old days past. The onus now is on the foundation of a relationship between peers with mutual interests.

When a prospect asks about Benchmark Email, what will you tell them? The facts are a great place to start:

	Over 400 holiday and professional templates that are fully customizable and incredibly easy to design
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	Video emails that easily link from a website's URL. No embed codes necessary!
	Benchmark Email's social media integration extends your email campaigns to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with the click of a mouse
	A dedicated server and top-notch deliverability for even our largest volume senders
	If a user is too busy, We Do It for You! And not too shabbily either, if I say so myself