Focused Social Selling – Pre-Planning Part B

Articles, Social Selling,

This is the second article in our series that discusses pre-planning for the Focused Social Selling System. As they say … “Fail to plan, plan to fail”.  Continuing …

Gather contact info

One of the most important questions that you have to answer is how will you, can you, gather and parse the most important info on each contact? A simple Google search of most people will uncover an unbelievable amount of information on folks. We need to distill this down to the good stuff and then store that for easy access … someplace. Let’s take a look at just a few of the bits and pieces of info that, at the very least, we should wish to collect …

  • Pertinent contact info (name, company, phone, email, etc.)
  • Notes (meetings, discussions, information)
  • A record of your engagements
  • Exchanged communications (emails, texts, social)
  • Touch and tap reminders including recurring reminders (tasks)
  • Company website and social presences
  • Social profiles (distilled critical social information)
  • Likes, dislikes, mutual interests, mutual connections, pain points, & commonalities
  • Events
  • Next steps to be taken toward securing business
  • A way to tag and organize your connections and their A, B, C classification
  • The list goes on and on and on …

Now, and I don’t know about you but, I can’t see this being done with anything but a CRM and a Social CRM would be even better. I’m not talking about Outlook or Google Contacts either. We will talk more about this in our next article. Certainly, while you will be visiting their appropriate social profiles to gather much of this information, just as much will be revealed during real life engagements like actually meeting or talking on the phone.[Tweet “Is social sales creepy? Tell us what you think! “]

Create touches and taps

You will need to determine what your arsenal of weapons of engagement is and when and how will you use them? I would define taps as quick engagements that are meant to just let people know that you are there and that you are thinking of. Examples would be …

  • Likes (on any of the social networks)
  • Retweets on Twitter, +1’s on Google+, favoriting, or sharing forward on other networks
  • Endorsements on LinkedIn

Touches, on the other hand, are more personal in nature and something that promotes direct engagement. Examples for these would include …

  • Commenting
  • Messages (public or private)
  • LinkedIn Recommendations
  • Sharing someone else’s article and publicly crediting them for that
  • Things like retweets that include a personalized message

Fortunately, with social sales you have many more taps and touches at your fingertips including …

  • Email them an article that they will find of interest
  • Bring a person or an opportunity to their attention
  • Facilitate an introduction
  • Share their news and articles to your networks
  • The list goes on …

Now, take these social engagements and combine them with your traditional tactics …

  • Lunch, breakfast, dinner, coffee, or a tasty adult beverage
  • Taking them to a sporting or other type of event
  • Free tickets to anything
  • Gift cards or certificates
  • Handwritten, including thank you, notes
  • Phone, email, or text
  • Video chat
  • Drop bys
  • Donuts

As you can easily see, there is absolutely no reason why you should ever have the feeling like you are struggling for some unique way to keep in touch! Absolutely none! How often we tap or touch someone will be governed by which classification we have assigned to them (addressed in our next article). I would think that a three to one ratio (tap to touch) would be optimum.

Define engagement procedures

I’ll give you three hints … it has to be personalized, targeted, and it has to be progressive. One of the things that you have to think about is where (which social networks) are these engagements available to us. We also want to act appropriately and, particularly with social sales, we have to be cautious of the creep factor. We do not wish to be perceived as being a stalker. For example, I would find an unsolicited request to friend me on Facebook from someone who I do not know, to be inappropriate. A template invitation from that same person on LinkedIn, maybe not so much but, no less ineffective.

A personalized invitation with an introduction and a reason for me to connect … that is quite different! Take a look at this graphic from the nice folks over at HubSpot. You can also grab their Ebook on the survey.

Social Selling Creepy Infographic You can read a lot of things into this. First off, this graphic points to initial, not progressive, engagements. You can engage with just about anybody on Twitter and it will be considered to be appropriate. You can also engage directly with people on LinkedIn groups without being formally connected to anyone and, if you follow the kindergarten rules (see below) … no problem. Nice! I see a lot of people reaching out to me on Twitter and then pinging me on LinkedIn because … it works! The survey graphic would support this model. Additionally, as in real life, it’s not what you say but how you say it. For example, if you were to discover that a company was downsizing and that is a trigger for an opportunity for your services, would you say …

  • “I saw on Facebook that you are downsizing and I would like to talk to you about that” or …
  • Would you take this info and use a statement like … “Many companies today are wrestling with staff levels. I don’t know if you would be one of them but, if you are, we help companies like yours with that process. Would that be something worth meeting to discuss?“

Like night and day. You also want to follow the kindergarten rules for stepping into any conversation. Do you have something to contribute and when is the right time to do so? You will also never ask for anything until you have earned that right by building a relationship first. See, you already know this stuff! Start with a casual conversation on Twitter, follow up with a request to connect on LinkedIn after first asking if that would be o.k. via a Twitter DM, connect and engage on LinkedIn, follow up with an email, then a phone call, and finish up with a video chat or … an in-person meeting.

This same type of progressive engagement can be done by commenting (when that person appears in your news feed as a part of a conversation initiated by one of your first degree connections or in LinkedIn groups. Ultimately, your engagement goal, and process, is absolutely no different than it would be in real life and, guess what? This is real life! The foundation of business is relationships and the goal of your engagements are to build those relationships that put you in the place of asking for business when appropriate or capitalizing on those opportunities when they present themselves. It really is that simple.

If you have not built any kind of a relationship with a potential customer, and you uncover an opportunity, are your chances better or worse than if you have previously established a relationship? Can you build a relationship around the opportunity? Can you build one when that customer comes to you? Yes and yes but … you will be operating as a vendor and probably one of many who are competing for this same prize. I prefer better odds. I would rather groom a client in preparation for opportunity and always remember that, courtesy of “The Go Giver”, givers get. To be continued …

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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