15 Time Management Tips For Social Sales That Will Really Work!

When I first began my research into this new thing called social media (social sales), I heard the same phrases over and over:

“Social media is a huge time suck!”

“Social media is like a black hole. Once you get sucked in, you’ll never get out!”

Well now, that’s a problem. As a salesperson, I understand the value of time and I also understand that, no matter how hard we try, 24 hours in a day cannot be stretched to 25 and there is no carryover of unused minutes from one day to the next.

These days, when I speak with other salespeople about social selling, I get variations of the same response. “Who the hell has the time to waste on these worthless activities!?” As you can see, with salespeople, the response is even worse. They add the “worthless” adjective.

So, if social sales has the potential to be a black hole, how do we avoid being sucked in or, if we are already going down, how can we begin to climb back out? Here are 15 tips to do just that!

Align your perception with reality. The first myth is that you have to spend an inordinate amount of time in order to be successful with social sales. This is absolutely not true and you do have the ability to control the time that you do spend. If you have no discipline in this regard, and get sucked into the vortex in the process, I would suggest that the fault lies with you and not with the activity.You can be very effective in incorporating the social element into your sales routine in as little as 20-30 minutes per day. In many cases. social sales techniques will actually save you time vs. traditional methods and, if your ROI is running high, you may even decide to devote more time to your social sales activities. In fact, I think that you would and will.

Get your head on straight! Instead of procrastinating, get ahead and stay ahead. One thing that I love about social sales is that many deals come to me and when I least expect them. By always being ahead of schedule, you will have a much better chance of capturing these opportunities when they present themselves. Besides, exceeding customer expectations in all areas, including those aligned with time schedules, is the only acceptable result!

Keep a to-do list. I have probably tried to use just about every electronic to-do list that is available but, I’m old fashioned and I keep mine on paper. Not just any paper, mind you. I buy 6” x 8” note pads, tear them apart, and then two-hole punch and clasp them into new pads. Did I also mention that I am also OCD anal? Each page has 11 days of activities and I will completely rewrite this list every 2 to 4 days. There is something very therapeutic about crossing things off, I can always look ahead at what is coming up, maybe I have the time right now to perform and then cross off those tasks ahead of time, and whenever I write anything down … it really sinks in. This is actually my most critical and effective time-saving method as I am always on task if not ahead.

Get organized and set aside specific times to concentrate on your social selling activities. If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. There are tons of articles on this topic that will certainly point you in the right direction but, at the end of the day, this is about your time and your schedule.

Remember that you don’t have to be active on all of the social networks. The only ones that you need to address are those that return the maximum ROI for you and these will generally be where your customers are active! For example, I find that Facebook is not particularly well suited for my needs or for my personality. Hence, my time on it is very limited.

Being active in social sales can have the unwanted effect of substantially increasing your incoming email. Much of this might be things like messages from your service providers and their newsletters. Of course, you can generally unsubscribe to these at any time. However, what if you would still like to be able to read these but at a time that is convenient to you? Certainly, you can create labels and filters within your email client. I happen to love a service called Unroll.me that allows me to send specific senders to something called the “rollup” which is one email that I get every morning that provides me with snapshots of their emails. It’s awesome!

Turn off your social notifications. MOST, IF NOT ALL, OF THEM! This includes email notifications as well as flashing lights and beeping devices. Maybe you can ignore these but, I’m like Pavlov’s dogs. I do not have the discipline to mentally block out these types of distractions, I feel the need to address them RIGHT NOW so, I remove the problem altogether. Honestly, if I could not turn these notifications off, I probably could not/would not be active on social media. This needs to be done for all of your social networks including those found on your mobile devices whose settings will be separate. There may be certain notifications that you want to keep but those should be few and far between. For example, I do get group notifications from LinkedIn but most of those are set for weekly rather than daily. I also allow private messages to come to me directly as those may be opportunities. You will need to condition yourself to check for these other notifications maybe once per day and that is going to take you literally less than 5 minutes including responding if appropriate.

Get mobile but, put your phone away when with others! The beautiful part of mobile is that you can be active anywhere including sitting in a waiting room or riding on a bus. Make use of this “down time”. For example, I am writing a draft of this article on Google Drive, with my iPad, sitting in my Lazy Boy, and I have the History Channel rolling in the background. Now, when you are with me and you are furiously pounding away on your phone, please don’t tell me that you are “multitasking”. You are being rude and your explanation is akin to peeing on my leg and then telling me that it is raining. Rude salespeople, in particular, don’t have a tendency to sell much stuff.

Avoid “shiny bauble” syndrome. It’s great to keep up on the latest tools and tricks! That being said, it is also very dangerous. I have this disease and I have it bad but, I am getting better at controlling it. Try to always keep your eye on the ball, first become proficient at the tools you have already invested your time in mastering, and then be open to new applications that will fill, or improve upon, specific processes in your own work life. Still, I won’t lie to you, this can be a real tightrope and falling off too often will result in you being sucked directly into that time vortex.

Get yourself a good social dashboard! A social dashboard will allow you to monitor and manage many of your social network activities, from multiple networks, all on one screen thereby eliminating the need to jump from tab to tab to look at each. I primarily use Nimble Social CRM for this task but will also use HootSuite for specific tasks. You might also look at SproutSocial.

A little “automation” is perfectly okay! For our purposes, automation would be defined as messages/updates being sent out by a system rather than through our direct actions. As examples, my new blog articles are automatically posted to my networks via two services: TwitterFeed for Twitter and LinkedIn and Networked Blogs for Facebook. There are many other tools to do this but, right now, this combination does what I want/need it to do. HootSuite can also perform this function as well as a service called dlvr.it. WordPress offers built-in tools through plugins such as JetPack. You can also use these same applications to auto-capture new articles from any site and then send those to your social networks. The key is, you have to have the confidence that the site(s) you will do this with will produce consistently high quality and pertinent articles. You will not have the ability to pick and choose which articles are posted so … be careful! These tools will save you time and boost your activity/visibility! Other automation techniques would include auto-follow on Twitter and auto direct messages (auto-dm) when somebody follows you on Twitter. I don’t use any of these and while I have no heartburn with auto-follow, I absolutely despise auto-dm! Direct messages, of any sort, should always be personalized and you have taken the person (you) out of the message.

Pre-schedule many of your weekly updates. There is selling time and there is non-selling time. If I can schedule activities that don’t involve being in front of a customer during non-selling hours … this is sales 101. Set aside some time each week and write out selected updates, and note the networks that you will want to post these to, and then schedule them for delivery on specific days and times during the week. All three of the social dashboards mentioned previously in this article have this functionality as does another of my favorite services, Buffer. Some have the capability to even pick/suggest the best times and days for you!

Make the most of every activity at the time that it occurs! If you want to follow somebody, add them to a list, send them a reply or a message … do it now! Having to go back and do it later is a huge time suck and that is assuming that you can even remember to do so in the first place!

Filter your network streams with filters, lists, and searches! The huge challenge with social media is that there is so damn much of it! As a salesperson, I need the ability to quickly and easily focus on those people and areas that are critical to my success. Those would be customers, prospects, and opportunities! On Twitter you create lists of people and saved searches of keywords. You tag your clients on LinkedIn and you monitor groups that you both belong to. You create a circle of your prospects on Google+ and then monitor that specific circle. You also have a circle for your customers. You can do exactly this same thing on Facebook but, instead of calling them circles, they are called lists.

Subscribe to articles via RSS to a reader as opposed to having articles emailed to your or going back to sites to see “what’s new”. I am currently using Feedly but there are many others. Save interesting articles to be read later via your reader or by using services like Pocket, SpringPad, or Evernote.

There’s never enough time to do it right but there is always the time to do it over! How about we change that dynamic and do it right the first time!

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

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Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services

Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!