With a grateful nod to Heinz Marketing, Lifehacker, Inc. Magazine and others who regularly publish “This is How I Work” articles, which I love to read …. welcome to “How I Work It – Social Selling”.
I try to watch and emulate others and you probably do the same. There is a lot of confusion, particularly with B2B, regarding how to implement social selling. Our hope is that these folks will inspire those of you are still on the fence and our goal is to share with you some of the best-proven selling practices that you might wish to emulate![Tweet “Learn how Barbara Giamanco does social selling!”]
Today we are joined by Barbara Giamanco of Social Centered Selling. Barb takes the mystery out of social selling by consistently demonstrating key elements including …
- Authenticity
- Personalization
- Uniqueness
- A desire to share, educate, and to promote others
Welcome, Barb!
Could you please tell our readers a little about you?
Professionally I focus on doing my part to elevate the professionalism of the sales industry. I’ve carried a bag, managed corporate sales teams, busted quota through the years across multiple customer types: enterprise, small/medium business, distributors, retailers, and channel partner customers. On the personal front, I’m mom to Lily, my Black Lab/Boxer mix, and I’m an avid world traveler and self-professed foodie and wine lover. In fact, I just returned from England and Russia.
How about telling them a little bit about your business?
Social Centered Selling is a sales and social selling consultancy. We work with sales and marketing teams to develop their social selling strategy, align the right type of training programs to support the organizational objectives, and we stay engaged with clients to provide the needed reinforcement coaching to ensure that sales reps adopt the new skills they’ve been learning. www.scs-connect.com
How did you get started in selling and when did you begin adding social selling to your business?
I’ve always been enterprising. My sales career officially started as a kid. I had a babysitting business, newspaper route and mowed lawns to make money. Then when I got older and moved into corporate business, I began my sales career selling technology solutions and never looked back.
Once I retired from Microsoft in 2001 to start my own company, I began experimenting with the early social media channels. They were basic and rough but I was intrigued about how social media would shake up the business landscape. Then LinkedIn came along. I joined the platform in the very first year as member #874,098. Even then, I realized that if LinkedIn could be used for job seeking, it could also be used to network and surface sales opportunities. By 2006, I was out in front evangelizing the use of social media in selling, which led to my book The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media being published in 2010.
What are your social selling goals, objectives, and strategies?
My primary goal with social selling is to use the channels to expand my networks and build relationships with buyers in new ways. I’m a big believer in giving first, an area often overlooked by salespeople who are in a hurry and too focused on their own agenda. The give first mentality, though it may feel counterintuitive, speeds up your ability to develop relationships with potential customers. The key is to be sincere in what you are doing. People know when you have an agenda.
I strive to provide educational content that demonstrates my credibility and capability. And I absolutely love connecting people to others in my network. It is not uncommon for me to connect buyers I’d like to work with to people I think they should know or sales opportunities for their business. People remember when you helped them without expecting something immediately in return.
Of course, one of my other goals include driving more inbound sales conversations, because after all, I have revenue goals to achieve too!
Do you have regular routines?
Yes. I follow a daily process, which is why I’m a constantly banging the drum about having a social selling strategy. You need one for the sales organization and salespeople also need one for themselves. In your plan, you determine your goals, strategies, and tactics to support those goals and determine what you will measure and track.
I generally check in with my networks first thing in the morning, even before looking at email. I start with LinkedIn first and then move to Twitter. I share content, respond to comments on my posts or tweets, catch up with what prospective buyers and customers are sharing, share tweets, and do any needed research to prepare for sales calls. I typically check my social channels about three times a day. Once you get into the habit of following a process, and you are clear about what you want to accomplish, participating in social channels need not become a time suck.
How do you integrate social selling with traditional selling methodologies?
I continually say that the telephone is NOT obsolete technology. You can start conversations with buyers on social, but at some point, you need to move that conversation offline and talk to them personally to discuss opportunities to work together. I use email, of course, but not in cold outreach trying to secure a meeting. Buyers are so under water with email spam that I don’t consider it effective to send emails to people who don’t know me yet. The research backs me up on this point.
How do you manage to stand out from the noise?
I focus my attention on demonstrating that I have real depth in terms of my understanding, knowledge and experience in social and how it fits selling, but also in the art of sales itself. Even though I have many years of sales experience, I focus daily on learning something new. And, as I mentioned earlier, I’m constantly looking for ways to be of value to other people. When you help others, you stand out.
Could you please share with us a few of your favorite social selling tools?
LinkedIn – No better place for B2B networking, credibility building and research based on the content and personal data that prospective buyers share.
InsideView – This is my go-to business intelligence tool. I use in combination with LinkedIn and LinkedIn Navigator. I can get deeper information about decision makers and their companies because InsideView is sourcing public data from thousands of sources including social channels.
Twitter – No barrier to starting a conversation with a prospective buyer. I’ve started many a conversation with Sales VP’s and Chief Marketing Officers that then led to connecting on LinkedIn. I start by observing what they tweet about and look for opportunities to share their content, engage them in conversation or even introduce them to other execs.
Feedly – Content news aggregator. Helps me find content I’d like to share with my networks quickly.
Blog – Built on WordPress, I use my blog as an opportunity to educate and share my thoughts with prospective clients. Hopefully, my experience and credibility shines through.
Hootsuite – This is my social media dashboard, which allows me to quickly organize and access the information I want to see most. Rather than jumping around to different social media platforms, I can share messages with my LinkedIn and Twitter networks from one place. I also organize information streams based on prospects, customers, competitors, influencers, etc. Helps me minimize the time I spend searching for what I need.
How do you track your results?
Everything I’m tracking – related to people – goes in my CRM and is attached to a contact. I track more than likes, comments and follows, although those things are good, but I’m measuring sharing of my content, engagement through comments, number of inbound leads that I drive as a result of my work in social networks and more. From the business marketing point of view, I use tools like Google Analytics to see how well the blog is doing, Hootsuite analytics to determine the effectiveness of my online interactions, etc.
What do you feel are the biggest challenges facing salespeople as it pertains to social selling?
A refusal to accept that buyer behavior has changed dramatically, which means they aren’t adapting their sales approach. Next would be thinking that by using social selling tactics you can short-cut the sales process. I see too many salespeople – probably frustrated that cold calls and cold emails are not working – simply moving over to LinkedIn to push their sales pitch and propaganda. Spam is spam folks. All you are doing is turning buyers off and damaging your reputation as a salesperson. There are no short-cuts.
What about their biggest mistake that salespeople make when trying to implement social selling?
No plan. No training. Trying to take shortcuts. Simply broadcasting spam. Making it all about them. The list goes on.
What is your “social selling superpower”?
Probably my strong sales background, depth of strategic understanding of how social channels fit sales and marketing objectives, and the fact that I know I don’t know it all. I’m learning something every day from everyone I meet.
How can our readers get in touch with you to learn more?
www.linkedin.com/in/barbaragiamanco @barbaragiamanco on Twitter, call me at +1-404-647-4925 or reach me on Skype – barbara.giamanco and visit my blog at www.barbaragiamanco.com
Please nominate somebody to answer these same questions!
I’d like to hear how Doug Lehman works it! He has a great perspective on how video fits social selling.
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- How I Work It – Social Selling with Barbara Giamanco - August 3, 2016