I’m Blowing Up Everything!

For some time now I have been thinking about my social selling strategy which I have suspected to be … flawed. It is. The problem, as I see it, is that there is just too much data and then I find myself drowning in 1,000’s of social connections, on multiple platforms, that I cannot even begin to manage on any effective level let alone convert to paying clients. Productivity becomes easily confused with activity and that is never good. None of this is any good.

Now, for those of you who wish or need to cast a wide net based on your particular product or service, and/or for those of you who are highly social and maybe even thrive on chaos … there probably is no such thing as too much. Furthermore, if what you are doing now is working great, stop reading and get back to what you do!

I, on the other hand, have a narrow market, am barely social, and hate chaos. To further complicate matters, I am literally months away from being eligible for retirement and there is a part of me that says … “You know what? I is tired”. The simple fact is that I don’t need to work at this stage of my life and that is tempting. On the flip side, I also have no real hobbies outside of work so … what to do?[Tweet “Sometimes you just need to blow up everything! #socialsales”]

Therefore, and in reality, the timing for what I am planning to do is actually perfect. I can afford to experiment with my business model without having to worry about the outcome. If I fail miserably, oh well. I am going to turn things upside down and inside out and, when this is all said and done, I will either be fully retired or too greedy to retire. Either way, I win.

What I am about to do is not dissimilar to a decision that I made almost 10 years ago. After spending the largest majority of my professional career managing people, I came to the conclusion that I no longer wanted to manage others and nor did I wish to be managed. My background, and what I really enjoyed, was in the electric sign business. While I had never been a salesperson in that industry (manager and owner, yes) I was going to be one now and I wanted to work as an independent contractor on a straight commission basis.

New construction always means sign opportunities so I spent the first month driving around the city and writing down every commercial construction project that I could identify. At the end of 30 days, I had over 500 “opportunities”. Were they qualified? Hell, I did not know and I was not even sure how best to go about determining that factor.

After exploring several options I … ripped up the whole list. Yep, threw it all away and picked up the phone and started calling people that I knew in the industries that would be most likely in a position to refer me to some real business. I never made a single cold call during this final selling period of my life. Here we go again.

It is my plan to …

Simplify everything

Reduce busy work by matching up every activity in order to decide if it meets or supports a stated goal. If not, it is a non-productive activity.

Define what is important and what is not and then focus or cut where appropriate.

Create an entirely new, and very detailed, social selling strategy for success. This might entail completely tearing things down that have taken me years to create and then starting again from scratch. Oh joy.

My new strategy will include an emphasis on combining traditional selling methodologies with social sales as each is most effective when used to augment the other.

This project, while none of this is earth-shattering, could be the single most important effort that I have taken on to date. The simple fact is that social selling is evolving, my understanding of it is evolving, and the social platforms themselves are making changes that affect selling directly, and the impact of these modifications, must also be addressed.

What I have already done ….

Part of the new me is that regardless of whether or not I should be doing something, I am going to indulge myself and say “screw it” if I don’t wanna’. Age has it’s privileges. Since “trimming my bushes” and freeing up time are important elements of my plan, here’s where my clippers have already been …

Reworked my networking group (this is a business) to make it run more on it’s own by streamlining procedures and by having a designated person to cover for me on at least one meeting per month.

Discontinued my newsletter. I might start it up again but I never really liked doing it and I wasn’t very good at it anyway.

Greatly reduced my content subscriptions. I have unsubscribed from lists, sent other emails to unroll.me, and removed a ton of RSS article feeds from Feedly.

I have long since abandoned Facebook for business because it does not work for me and … age has it’s privileges.

I have raised my hourly rates. They are still more than reasonable but, If you want me, you are going to have to be willing to pay for me.

I’m going to attempt to work only on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Since my office is in my home, we will see what chance for success this goal has.

When I was first told that I needed to be blogging, and after it was explained to me what a blog was … my next question was … “O.k. … and I am supposed to blog about … what?” We went back and forth and settled on it being a journal of sorts and that is what it was … a record of my progress, my journey. This means that, as I blow stuff up, I am going to document that for your reading pleasure.

This task would certainly be one hell of a lot easier if I were just starting out and connecting with a purpose rather than having to sift through and evaluate thousands of connections in order to determine their value or their potential value. While age may have its privileges, it apparently has no effect on foresight.

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

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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!