Focused Social Selling in Action – Cull & Tag Contacts

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Background – My “Focused Social Selling” article series details my conviction that certain steps should be taken in order to make social selling dramatically more effective. More than ever, I am convinced that it will be proven to be accurate. My premise is that fewer and better connections, when engaged personally and consistently, will yield better results than will a scatter gun approach by allowing us to focus only on who and what is the most important. This system has been designed primarily for B2B sales.

The only way to validate my theories will be for me to eat my own dog food. What follows is a journal of my steps and I will be breaking this process into multiple articles.

Cull your target database

The next step is to cull your tagged database down to a manageable level. My starting list has ended up as being way too large. I’m not at all surprised by this as I expected it and began my selections by casting a wide net that would still provide me with the ability to evaluate my potential players.

That being said, there are a lot of folks on my initial list who would fall under the heading of “I like you” vs. “You will buy from me”.  I also need to leave ample room for new targeted connections, shared group members, and people who are not even on LinkedIn. This only means that there will be a “round 2, 3, and probably more” of contact culling in order to whittle my list down. Still, you have to start somewhere and somewhere is where I will begin.

This is the critical point where you need to whip out your target buyer persona (see this article in our series) and to ruthlessly apply that criteria. This does not mean that those contacts who do not make the final cut are banished permanently, or even temporarily, to oblivion. It only means that I need to get down to my final 300 (insert your own magic number here) where I can direct my focus.

Determine and assign contact tags

Having successfully reduced this number to approximately 250 contacts, allowing room for interesting additions as they present themselves, I now have my beginning list which I can now tag appropriately and set reminders in Nimble.

As it sits right now, all of my 250 contacts have been tagged “C” and I have also tagged each as client, referrer, etc. Tagging is a wonderful tool as it is an extremely easy way to group your contacts and you can also do so via the use of multiple tags. You might think of using tags for industries and titles, to name a few possible classifications. You would now have the ability to look at contacts who meet the multiple tag and field value criteria. For example, show me all contacts who are …

  • Tagged A
  • Tagged Client
  • Tagged President
  • Tagged Manufacturing
  • Located in Atlanta

Not only can you focus on this specific subset of contacts, you could also use this result list to send a targeted email blast and/or to make phone calls to schedule appointments in a specific city and for a specific industry. Can you say … time and territory management. The combinations are geometric!

I have chosen, as goals, to control my A, B, C client tags based on the following percentage mix:

  • A Contacts – 15% +/- or 40 total
  • B Contacts – 30% +/- or 75 total
  • C Contacts – 55% +/- or 140 total

What remains now is to go back to my target buyer persona in order to determine which tag to assign to each contact. Remember that this is what I would call a good starting point. As you learn about each contact, and work or engage with them more closely and consistently, their tag classification may change and that can also include being removed from your contact focus group altogether.[Tweet “Focused Social Selling requires that you cull and tag your contacts!”]

Set recurring engagement reminders

First off, it is important to remember that recurring reminders represent the worst case engagement scenario for your important contacts. This means that, come hell or high water, you will be in touch with these folks a minimum of “x” times per month, quarter, year, etc. My system allows for recurring reminders to be weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. If you wanted to set up a schedule outside of those parameters, based on your chosen system features, some sort of a workaround would be needed such as having the system remind me quarterly for a semi-annual schedule.

If your CRM (or some or any other system that you might choose to use) does not have recurring reminders, you will need to remember to reset your reminder after each engagement. Your routine should look something like this …

  1. Respond to a reminder by reaching out
  2. Note in your system what you did and what was the result
  3. Set a reminder for your next engagement

Some systems offer recurring reminders that will reset themselves based on trigger actions. For example, my CRM (Nimble) will automatically reset a recurring reminder if an email is exchanged or if a conversation occurs on Twitter. However, outside of those two instances, I must manually log my touch and tell the system to reset the reminder and to start the new countdown from that point.

It only makes sense that you will be in touch more often with your A contacts than you will be for B contacts and B’s will be more frequent than C’s.  I am choosing to use weekly, monthly, and quarterly reminders. Now, based on your contact tag mix, please keep in mind that this means that if you have say fifty A contacts who are on a weekly schedule, that is a schedule that you will need to ensure that you have time to complete!

Please note – All posts in this series will be tagged FocusedSelling. You will be able to click on that tag at the bottom of any post in the series and all posts in the series, most recent first, will be listed for you. So, if jump in the middle and you want to get started, work from the bottom up. Cutting in line and skipping steps would definitely be ill-advised. #FocusedSelling.

Craig M. Jamieson

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!
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