Focused Social Selling in Action - Monitor and Engage!

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.

What has followed my original articles has been a journal of my actual steps and this will be the final article in this second series. I will be excerpting from my previous posts on this topic. That is not to say that we will not be revisiting this subject in future articles including discussing my results. Finally, please stay tuned for an entirely new and exciting series that we will soon be introducing![Tweet “Focused Social Selling will prevent your business from flatlining!”]

Take a close look at the graphic above. This is what happens to your heart, your business, if you do not learn to monitor and engage with others socially online and in real life.You will, likely sooner rather than later, flatline. A sobering thought. Let’s get started!

You have created your lists and taken an inventory of your engagement tools. You have also defined an engagement strategy. All that is left now is to monitor the updates from your chosen target accounts and then to engage where appropriate.

Let me tell you this. You are going to be reinvigorated and you will experience new levels of focus and freedom as you look at filtered news feeds that only feature the good stuff from those whom you have determined are the most important to you and to your business! With that, let’s get started!

Monitor daily

With your news feeds filtered to show updates from your chosen 300, I would expect that, depending on how active your network is with sharing, you should be able to monitor and engage in as little as 30 minutes per day. I made the choice to combine all of my “A”, “B”, and “C” accounts on one list on each platform which I call “Watch List”. Let’s now take a look at how we can now filter each ..

Twitter – In order to monitor a filtered news feed from Twitter, from your profile page, select “Lists”, “Subscribed to”, and then select your list. “Member of” are the lists that other people have you added to. “Subscribed to” lists will include public lists by others that you have subscribed to follow.

In order to monitor this list, simply select the list that you wish to view and you will be presented with a filtered news feed that shows only Tweets from those who are on your list.

Facebook – From your Facebook news feed, select “Friends” and then click on the list name. You will now have a filtered news feed showing updates from that list only.

Your filtered news feed will look like this …

Google+ – Google will allow you to select your lists, which they call circles, from the left sidebar. Please note that only a certain number of circles will be displayed here but, you can choose which of these they are. I chose to eliminate other circles so, for me, this will not be an issue.

All that is left to do is to select that circle in order to view your filtered Google+ news feed ..

Pretty easy, eh? You will now be able to quickly and easily monitor updates from these three social networks from those folks who have met your buyer persona. If you wish to view your entire news feed on any platform, just turn the active list off.

LinkedIn – To briefly recap from a previous article, there is simply no way, at least at this time or that I can determine, to effectively filter your news feed on LinkedIn. If you are just getting started with LinkedIn, I envy you as you will be (should be) very selective about who you choose to connect with. If you do this, there really will be no need to filter your news feed at all!

For the rest of us, we only have two choices and those are to …

Disconnect from those who we do not wish to see in our news feed or
Monitor your news feed closely and visit individual profiles to view their specific recent activity

Depending on an individual’s privacy settings, you may also be able to follow someone on LinkedIn and at least see their published shares. Go to their profile, view recent activity, and you will find a “Follow” button. This is a great way to get a feel for someone prior to adding them to your list and/or extending an invitation to connect..

Engage!

Touches and taps should be made based on your recurring schedule or if important. Beware of too many touches in too short of a period. However, it is critical that you engage with your people consistently and that you approach this as a long-haul strategy. If your target account is currently blissfully being serviced by a competitor, breaking in could literally take years. It is your goal that, should an opportunity arise, you will be the first person that they think of and, if you have done this correctly, you will be.

Expecting to make 7 to 10 touches to gauge whether or not an opportunity will ever present itself, is a perfectly reasonable expectation. Considering that probably ⅔ of your former accounts left you because they felt ignored, this will eliminate that. As statistics also show that it can be up to ten times more expensive for you to find and bring on a new account versus maintaining an existing one … why would you not want to do this?!

Engage progressively and remember that your goals (in order) should be to …

Initiate a relationship.
Develop that relationship.
Take this relationship to some level of real life.
Earn the right to compete for mutually beneficial business opportunities.
Solidify the relationship long-term.
Never get lazy and complacent. You have worked hard to get to this point and taking your customer(s), and your potential customer, for granted is the equivalent of buying them a one-way ticket to Competitorville.

Don’t forget to engage on LinkedIn groups!! You can be part of the 5% cream that floats to the top! Groups, providing that they are occupied by folks who could fit your buyer persona are, if nothing else, your farm league. These are the players who could very well move up to the majors and play or your A, B, or C squads (first, second, and third strings). Suffice to say, you should belong to the appropriate groups that are frequented by folks that are on your target list.

Register your engagement in your CRM

You simply must keep good notes and this is one of the major benefits of any CRM. Register each touch (what you did specifically), the results, and your next step. Then, set a reminder (if your CRM does not have a recurring reminder system) for your next tap or touch.

Please note – All posts in this series have been 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.

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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!