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 about how Neal Schaffer does social selling!”]
Today we are joined by Neal Schaffer of Maximize Your Social and Maximize Social Business! Neal 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, Neal!
Could you please tell our readers a little about you?
I am a previous international B2B solution selling sales executive who since 2008, beginning with a blog, and then a book in 2009, and then a consultancy in 2010, helping businesses and professionals Maximize Your Social. Currently, I do social media consulting, coaching, speaking as well as am founder of the Social Tools Summit social media conference, Maximize Social Business social media for my business blog, and Social Media Center of Excellence community for social media professionals.
How about telling them a little bit about your business?
My primary business is in social media speaking and consulting. “Speaking” actually consists of both speaking as well as training while “Consulting” consists of consulting, coaching, and advising, depending on the client. I added the Social Tools Summit as another part of my business and am looking forward to officially launching the Social Media Center of Excellence as another new business unit.
How did you get started in selling and when did you begin adding social selling to your business?
I began selling when I launched the China Sales Office for my Japanese semiconductor employer, ROHM Semiconductor, back in 1995. I first realized the power of social media to augment my sales toolbox back in 2008 when I was in transition for the first time in the United States, and I already started social selling at that job that I found that year.
I had been doing LinkedIn for Sales training since 2010, so that has evolved into my current Social Selling training. In fact, I wrote a book in 2011 called Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing which talked about Social Selling before we had a word for it!
What are your social selling goals, objectives, and strategies?
Wow, that’s a broad question! At the end of the day, I see Social Selling as being the ultimate connector, so I tend to have Social Selling goals of helping me find and connect to decision makers or those in my target audience. The strategy has always been to use social when it makes sense and don’t use it when it doesn’t make sense based on my business needs. Different social networks also operate differently, and there are different social media tools for different social networks, so often my strategies will be dictated by social network and/or tool.
Do you have regular routines?
You know, I should be more regimented than I am, but on strategic projects I do define frequencies and touches in weeks and then, as deadlines or go/no-go decision points get closer, days. I use either Pipedrive for strategic projects to do this or Boomerang for Gmail for non-strategic projects.
How do you integrate social selling with traditional selling methodologies?
To me the integration is natural. Social Selling helps me get discovered, connected, and all along the way provides me clues (outbound) and helps me maintain mindshare (inbound) to keep my potential clients and current customers close to me at all times. With so many people using social media, and with social media so accessible – especially on public platforms like Twitter and Instagram – social media is the great source of information and people finder/connector. Social selling really is a natural component to a salesperson’s job.
How do you manage to stand out from the noise?
You can’t organically stand out from the noise. You can, however, make connections with other people. That’s the only way to stand out, to be remembered as someone uniquely engaging, uniquely resourceful, the sharer of uniquely valuable content, or the creator of uniquely valuable content. Just being active on social media will do little to differentiate yourself from the competition. You need to be different.
Could you please share with us a few of your favorite social selling tools?
My current favorites are:
- Nimble: The ultimate Social CRM. Period.
- Socedo: Allows me to scale and automate special campaigns to a Twitter audience.
- OneQube: Allows me to utilize Twitter like my own database in a different way than Nimble.
- LinkedIn Paid Account: InMail 😉
- Paid Social (Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads): Allows you to be seen above the noise.
How do you track your results?
At the end of the day, I look at every lead and sale and try to see how much of a role – if any – that social media played in it. Of course, leads on my website are easier to measure via Google Analytics, but from an analog perspective, there is no doubt that social media allows you to be seen by many more people than you think. Add this to the fact that buyers are constantly scouring social media for information, and it leads me to believe that social plays some sort of a role in most of my own deals. Our customers are omnipresent on all channels and will look for you on social whether you are there or not.
What do you feel are the biggest challenges facing salespeople as it pertains to social selling?
Time management. It’s a challenge for EVERYONE in social media. As I like to say, social media replaces nothing yet complements everything. Find smart ways to use social media intelligently and implement on them to help your sales. It’s OK to have fun and networking in social media – because that’s what it’s intended for – but it can become a big time suck, which is why social selling will already require salespeople to be time-challenged.
What about their biggest mistake that salespeople make when trying to implement social selling?
When salespeople implement social selling, they mistake the easy way to interact with others through social media as a free license to sell in any matter they see fit regardless of who they are selling to. It’s what gives us social sellers a bad name ;-(
What is your “social selling superpower”?
At the end of the day. “relationship-building” is the ultimate social selling superpower. You can’t expect to win every customer out of the gate, but you CAN begin to build a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship with them, whether you receive immediate business from them or not, that is ultimately more valuable in the long run.
How can our readers get in touch with you to learn more?
You can listen to my podcast and find out more about my business at http://maximizeyoursocial.com . I blog at http://maximizesocialbusiness.com . I co-founded the Social Tools Summit, a corporate social media conference, which you can find out about at http://socialtoolssummit.com . And I am excited to soon launch my own community to propagate best practices in social media called the Social Media Center of Excellence, which you can find at http://socialmediacoe.com . Outside of that, wherever you are in social media, I am there as @NealSchaffer, +NealSchaffer, /in/nealschaffer, etc.
Please nominate somebody to answer these same questions!
I’d like to hear how Jill Rowley works it!
Thanks, Neal!
Craig M. Jamieson
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