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 David Brock does social selling!”]
Today we are joined by David Brock of Partners in Excellence! Dave takes the mystery out of social selling by consistently demonstrating key elements including …
- Authenticity
- Personalization
- A desire to share, educate, and to promote others
Welcome, Dave!
Could you please tell our readers a little about you?
First Craig, thanks for asking me to participate. I’m actually probably an “odd” person to be in sales. I was trained as an engineer and physicist, and saw myself in a research or academic role. In college, I got involved with a start up. We ended up crashing and burning. But the business bug had bitten me and I realized there was a lot more to business than hot products. After getting an MBA, I went to the DARK SIDE. I started my sales career selling mainframe computers for IBM.
I grew into management positions in IBM, was recruited to do several very successful high tech turnarounds, and ended up starting Partners In EXCELLENCE in the early 90’s.
How about telling them a little bit about your business?
I run a few companies, but the core business is Partners In EXCELLENCE. We’re a consulting company focused on helping our clients outperform their competition and grow faster than their industries. We typically work with them in developing and executing disruptive business strategies, grow through strategic alliances or partnerships, or driving higher performance and effectiveness through their sales and marketing teams.
We have a global business, with our people scattered throughout the world.
How did you get started in selling and when did you begin adding social selling to your business?
As I mentioned, I started selling mainframe computers for IBM in the very late 70’s. In those “olden days,” there were a lot of face to face meetings and telephone calls. We would network by going to trade shows, conventions, industry events. We always looked to “hang out” where our customer hung out—when I was selling to NYC banks and brokerage firms, that meant we spent a lot of time at Harry’s of Hanover Square 😉
Nominally, I started blogging in 2005, I think I did one post. I basically stopped until 2008, that’s when I started blogging regularly. I also was very early in joining LinkedIn. I joined because one of our clients was an investor, and they asked us to help build up the participation by joining. At that point, LinkedIn seemed to be a “resume” site, so I wasn’t very active.
Social selling became a cornerstone to our business strategy in 2008-2009. We started with the blog, it was syndicated in a number of sites. Being very active in LinkedIn groups was another part of the strategy, and Twitter was the third.
Our goal was to start engaging people in conversations. We would also offer eBooks and white papers.
We would attract people to move the conversation to email or to the telephone, or we would reach out proactively ourselves.
What are your social selling goals, objectives, and strategies?
Social selling is a key part of our business strategy, both in prospecting and new business development and in continuing to maintain visibility as well as teach our current clients.
The blog is the real driver for our “thought leadership” strategy (which is very important as a consulting company. We have a very different point of view in leveraging the blog. We try to be provocative with our content, getting people to think differently. People who really like our blog and other materials are attracted because it focuses on issues they are worried about. Things they are looking at to grow and improve. Whether it’s an individual or an organization. Our target client is the CEO, or a C-Level executive. They care little about tips and techniques, they want to think about their businesses differently.
Since helping people think about their organizations, strategies, go to customer strategies differently is where we excel, our social strategy has to be consistent with that, drawing people who are trying to address those issues in their organizations and who want a provocative point of view.
Do you have regular routines?
Early on, I discovered social channels could consume as much time as I devoted. I’m, personally, very focused on how I invest my time.
I typically reserve an hour in the morning for “social selling,” which usually includes writing a blog post, reviewing/commenting on some LinkedIn articles, and Twitter. I write very quickly, so it takes me 20-30 minutes to do a blog post. On Twitter, I like to promote articles I find interesting and that might be intriguing to my followers. Unlike most people, I never do a blind RT. I read every article I retweet. I want to make sure it’s something relevant and that my followers might learn something new. The added advantage of reading the articles, is it keeps me learning things new. I limit my time on Twitter to 20-25 minutes (I actually set an alarm). I do schedule my tweets to appear every 15 minutes through the day.
A couple of times in the day, I might revisit LinkedIn, commenting on articles or returning messages, or Twitter. But I’m ruthless about the time I spend. Usually about 5 minutes at lunch and perhaps 10-15 minutes after dinner.
Craig, out of curiosity, I made a quick calculation on twitter:
- I joined in January 2008
- I’ve done 36K tweets. Probably about 3K are tweets automatically generated when I write an new blog post or from a plug in that recycles a few older blog posts a day.
- That leaves 33K tweets.
- I probably spend about 4 minutes on each tweet. That’s finding it, skimming the article and RT. It’s actually less time, but I’m adding it a buffer about 30% of the articles/tweets I read, I don’t RT. So I boosted the real time up by 30%.
- Taken over the course of 8 years, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, which is how I tweet, it means I spend about 44 minutes a day on twitter.
- Pretty consistent with my 20 minutes in the morning, and a little more time spread through the day.
- From this, I’ve developed an amazing following, and developed great relationships—you included.
- So it really doesn’t take a lot of time, but has huge payback.
How do you integrate social selling with traditional selling methodologies?
Social selling isn’t a methodology. I think people who believe that are wrong, or they have something they are selling. Social selling tools are just that, tools and different channels to reach the customer.
If I go back to my statement, “You have to hang out where your customers hang out,” a lot of them are hanging out in social channels, so it makes sense for us to engage them there. We leverage all the tools and channels we can, though not equally. We participate in industry conferences, trade shows, and various other things that our clients find useful.
How do you manage to stand out from the noise?
This is a fantastic question. The social channels are losing their effectiveness by the sheer volume and noise. 95% of the stuff is garbage, there is too much self promotion, and the majority of strategies seem to be focused around escalating the volume, both figuratively and literally. I’m surprised at the number of “experts” that leverage social purely as a broadcast channel, not an engagement channel. They are intensely worried about the noise they create, how much more they can broadcast.
I think we try to stand out by not playing—that is not trying to add to the noise, but being consistent with the tone, volume, frequency, and most importantly the quality of the content. We actively try to engage in each channel we leverage. Whether it’s the comments on the blog, LinkedIn discussions/comments and Twitter discussions. This engagement is so powerful for listening and learning.
It works very well, the people that we want to find us find us. Our approach to not trying to be the noisiest or to be a broadcaster seems to resonate with them. I’ve discovered most of the highest quality engagement it actually happens through non social channels like word of mouth, email telephone and meetings.
I don’t know how many conferences I go to, where C-level exec finds me, introduces herself and talks about an article. They say how they have shared it with their organizations and their peers. A number of organizations have made the blog mandatory reading material for their people, a few even are licensing the blog for republication on their internal sites.
Could you please share with us a few of your favorite social selling tools?
The tools are very simple. For the blog, I use a WordPress platform. We use LinkedIn extensively. We leverage Twitter heavily. As a result, I use TweetDeck or Hootsuite, primarily for scheduling tweets.
We do have minor presence in Facebook and Google +. Facebook isn’t where our clients hang out—at least for business purposes. I’m distrustful of Google social platforms, they seem to remove/reduce their commitment to the platforms without a lot of notice. I know lots of people who’ve invested a huge amount on Google +, only do see Google de-emphasizing it.
We are increasing our use of video and podcasts, so I’m exploring Blab, as well as YouTube (as a general platform for video). We are using Podbean to host our podcasts (which we are ramping up tremendously), but our goal is not to have people go to the Podbean site, but to use ITunes, or listen to the podcast at our blog site.
How do you track your results?
As a consequence, we don’t pay a lot of attention to the analytics and other vanity metrics that most people care about. I don’t track followers, likes, retweets, or the vanity metrics. Our target audience is actually measured in thousands, to tens of thousands, but is never 100’s of thousands. So many of the metrics people care about are irrelevant to what we are trying to achieve.
It’s the anecdotal pieces that give us an indication of the impact we are having. Whether it’s an email, phone call, a meeting at a conference, we figure for any one of those that we are aware of, there are dozens who feel the same way, but haven’t shared it.
I suppose I should care more, but it seems we are having a high impact and a high rate of interest with our target clients and personas, that are most important to us.
What do you feel are the biggest challenges facing salespeople as it pertains to social selling?
I think there are a couple of problems. The first is too many are oblivious to social channels and how to leverage them. As a result, they are clueless about what they are missing. Of course, since they aren’t using them, it’s impossible to reach them through social channels. You have to use traditional channels and show them how to use social channels.
Then there is the opposite problem, sales people who are listening to too much just bad advice from the so called social selling experts. There are too many that believe, all you have to do is use social selling and the PO’s will flow in.
Social channels and social tools are very powerful. But just like any tool, we have to choose the most appropriate tool to accomplish our goals. The other thing is our customers don’t limit themselves to one channel, so if all we are doing is focusing on social or one or two social channels, we aren’t hanging out where they are, we aren’t engaging them as effectively as we can.
What about their biggest mistake that salespeople make when trying to implement social selling?
To some degree, it’s the view, driven by the so called social selling experts, that all you have to do is social. Of course, those “experts,” are promoting social because that’s what they have to sell. So figuring out how your customer leverage social, where they hang out, how they engage is really critical. Most sales people don’t take the time to figure this out, or have bad guidance in figuring it out.
The second mistake is not sticking with it. It takes time—sometimes years. I see too many sales people try social tools, don’t see results within 3-4 weeks, then give up. Social, just like anything else, doesn’t work that way.
What is your “social selling superpower”?
Listening/learning. Too many think social is about broadcasting. Social is where I listen and learn about key issues in the industry, with my customers, or their customers. I’m really good at leveraging social tools for that. I’ll take what I learn and may pick up the phone and call a client or prospect, by passing social in the engagement piece.
How can our readers get in touch with you to learn more?
Socially, at my blog http://partnersinexcellenceblog.com. On twitter @davidabrock, At LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/davebrock. Or through the old school methods, email: dabrock@excellenc.com or my phone +1-949-305-7146.
Thanks for the opportunity!
Please nominate somebody to answer these same questions!
I’d like to hear how Ginny Rommety of IBM works it!
Craig M. Jamieson
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