Focused Social Selling - Monitor & Engage!

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 with them where appropriate. 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. Let’s now take a look at how we can now filter each …[Tweet “It’s time to monitor and engage with your target accounts!”]

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.

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.

Google+ – Google makes it even easier as your lists are shown on the top tabs. Note that the “More” tab will reveal additional lists not shown.

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 – If you have not hidden LinkedIn contacts, monitoring is going to be more problematic as you have to go to each profile to review their updates individually and on a regular schedule. Of course, you could just choose to monitor your entire news feed but, that sort of takes the focus out of focus. Either way, you will also see who they are talking to (comments, likes, etc.). Might there be potential relationships there for you as well?

However, if you have chosen to monitor LinkedIn by hiding updates from all but your selected folks, you will have to unhide (manually and one at time) each person that you have previously hidden. Then you would have to reverse this process to go back to your filter. Yes, it sucks which is why you really would want to think twice before committing yourself to this process.

Depending on an individual’s privacy settings, you may 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. For these types of folks, a good practice would be to “save”, “tag”, and “follow”.

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 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

Bio
Twitter
YouTube
Latest Posts

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!