Our Ability to Connect May Be Leaving Us Disconnected

We now have the ability to connect with many others on a variety of platforms and by a number of means. Through the power of social media, our reach has been amplified exponentially. Unfortunately, all of this connecting may be leaving us even more disconnected.

Why be connected?

From a business standpoint, we connect with others so that we may be able to leverage that relationship in order to increase our revenues. While this might be cold and not particularly politically correct it is, nevertheless, accurate.[Tweet “Does connecting on social media have you feeling disconnected?”]

The definition is not being met

Being connected does have its definitions and, by those, I would suggest that most of, if not all of, us are not meeting these to any degree that would be considered to be even remotely satisfactorily.

“Having social or professional relationships, especially with influential or powerful persons” – “To form a relationship or to feel an affinity”

We only have so much time and energy (finite resources) with which to build a relationship with another person. If relationships are not being formed, our connection, if any, is only at the lowest level and that level is only a half step above being totally disconnected. Connecting is easy. Relationships are hard.

Too many folks

How many people that you have connected to on the social networks do you have an actual valid relationship with? 5%? 10%? Less? Does having a full Rolodex of names and numbers, by themselves, create additional revenue? If not, will a bigger Rolodex accomplish that task or would a smaller file of actual buyers perhaps be a better goal? I like Plan B.

Too many moving parts

In an effort to become even more connected, we find ourselves having to deal with multiple social networks combined with multiple selling tools (lead generation, lead discovery, sales intelligence, sales enablement, marketing automation, CRM, and dozens more) that are all …

Competing for our attention.
Delivering a variety of different signals to our organization.
Storing this information and insights anywhere and everywhere but, not centrally.

Not only do we have too many parts, few of them talk to one another. My central database for all of my business activities, social or otherwise, is my CRM. The more disparate applications that I deploy just means that my customer data is spread out over multiple sites or, I must hand collate those to my CRM. Few of these applications will actually sync with each other.

Our inability to focus

In order to leverage a connection, you must have a relationship and, we don’t have enough time (resources) to do that on a large scale. So … how can it possibly work as intended? The fact is, I only have the time and energy to focus on a select group of people. If I do not and instead choose to try to focus on thousands, I lose this ability to focus on any.

There is hope

We have taken the initial steps toward connected status but first, maybe we need to take a few steps backward.

Develop a buyer persona – What does your optimal customer look like? Can you define, identify, and replicate them?

Target your connections – It’s great to connect but, we must connect to only the right people, those who can help us to realize our goals.

Cull the herd – I work with companies all the time who are just getting started with social selling and I tell them how lucky they are, and how insanely jealous I am, that they are embarking on this journey with a plan in place. I connected with just about anybody before I had my fewer is better epiphany. This means that I now must go back and cull the herd in order to reduce it to a manageable size.

Tag, list, group, and organize – Once we have identified our target buyers, we can further organize them through a series of tags, lists, and groups. This will make it substantially easier for us to monitor and manage them.

Focus on the few to develop relationships – By focusing on the few, you will be placed in a much better position to really get to know them and to begin to develop a relationship via a program of progressive engagement. We begin with baby steps and we gradually build these relationships to the status of mutually beneficial fruition.

For more detailed information on how you can put these concepts to work for you today, I would suggest that you might want to follow my “Focused Social Selling” article series (found on this site) and you can be taken to those by simply clicking this tag.

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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!