Today I am pleased to announce the publication, and availability for free download, of my first eBook … “Focused Social Selling – less really is more”. But, before I share the highlights, a little bit of the backstory might be appropriate.
Not that long ago, I had an epiphany that gradually became more clear. There were problems with how I was approaching social selling and, I suspected that, I was not alone. I began by really analyzing my activities, my connections, and my results. None were encouraging but, the problems were apparent.
What I lacked was the ability to focus on those people who were important to me including existing and potential customers as well as influencers who I valued as friends and mentors. I commenced to write a series of articles on my website that explored a system to address these deficiencies in my strategies and tactics.
At my age, you definitely have a bucket-list and, while having already published a traditional book (The Small Business’ Guide to Social CRM) …check, I had still never done an eBook. Now I had my topic and my list has been reduced to with swimming with dolphins, driving a Ferrari, and jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
Neal Schaffer of Maximize Social Business has been a good friend and one of my social business and social selling mentors. Knowing that Neal had produced several successful eBooks, I asked him for a referral to someone who could professionally lay this document out for me. I can write (barely) but, I can’t even draw stick people.[Tweet “Less really is more when it comes to social selling! Get the free eBook!”]
Neal came back to me with an offer to have his folks do the design work, he would provide the introduction (Neal also did the introduction for my book), and we could then promote it together. #awesomesauce! I won’t lie to you. Having Neal on board with this carries a certain cachet that is much appreciated!
This system is designed for sales rather than marketing. Whereas marketing relies largely on reach, sales is (should be) primarily focused on building one-on-one relationships with buyers. My background is outbound B2B but, it will also work well for B2C folks and particularly for those who focus on referrals and repeat business.
We’ve got problems!
If you are connected to 1,000’s on LinkedIn and several 1,000 more on other networks, how are you going to manage that? You can’t. If you have indiscriminately connected to people, likely only a tiny percentage of your social network will actually match your buyer persona. It really is madness but, you can fix it.
In my mind, the only case that can be made for connecting to everybody and anybody is the off chance that you will catch someone’s attention with the right message, at the right time, and that will prompt them to contact you directly regarding your services. Sure, it can happen and it has happened to me but … rarely.
I am not a mass or marketer (I’m a no marketer) and my services do not necessarily appeal to a wide audience. Therefore, purely from a selling standpoint, trying to keep pace with a large network is frustrating, time-consuming, and counterproductive in that the inherent network noise diverts my attention away from qualified buyers.
Social selling does leverage the law of attraction and smart salespeople can deploy tactics that are similar to those in use by their marketing cousins. However, I’ve also always believed that salespeople need to be creating their own opportunities and that is called prospecting.
There are answers!
Cold calling may be dead (it’s not quite that simple) but, prospecting is not. Social selling will now allow us to leverage the reach of social media to discover new potential opportunities and then we can add these to our focused lists (if warranted) for further qualification, relationship-building and, hopefully, conversion.
Central to this program is an “A, B, C” classification of contacts where your best people, A, are placed on a higher touch schedule than are B or C. This system has been around forever (I first did it manually in the 70’s) but, it can now be managed by many good CRMs (I represent Nimble) with tags and recurring reminders.
Contactually was the first CRM that I personally encountered that focused on this idea. Refer is another such system. Regardless, you simply must have some sort of central database to manage your efforts. To think that you can do otherwise strikes me as being pure madness.
Once you have defined your buyer persona and you have culled your herd to a manageable size, you will be able to filter most network news feeds (LinkedIn being the glaring exception and, I’m not happy about that!) to easily focus on getting to know, engaging with, and building relationships with your target contacts. #nice
Engagements should be personalized, progressive, and lead to real-life relationships. Social selling, while a powerful tool, remains just that … a tool. It does not replace your traditional selling methodologies. Rather, it augments and enhances those. Selling remains a nose-to-nose and the toes-to-toes business.
Get the eBook!
Of course, you will have to make these decisions for yourself! I certainly can’t do that for you. However, if any of this intrigues you … get the free download and please let me know what you think. At the very least, let’s start a conversation on what I think is an important topic!
The folks over at Visme (click the image to see the full size version) have been nice enough to create the infographic below to accompany this eBook (another bucket-list item). Thank you, Visme! You can create these for yourself using their service but, please remember that I’m still the guy who can’t draw stick people.
Copy this code to embed this infographic on your own website …
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Craig M. Jamieson
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