# Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-13: Social Selling - **Source**: /library/Fanatical Prospecting/source-file.pdf - **PDF pages**: 123–149 - **Pages without text**: none --- 13 Social Selling Sales is a blend of art and science. The art is influencing people to make commitments. The science is influencing the right people. —Jeb Blount The influence of social media in today’s society is inescapable. Millions of people are linked together on social media sites— constantly checking and updating their status. As a business tool, social media has moved from cutting edge to ubiquitous. As I write this book, social selling is one of the hottest buzzwords in the sales profession. There is no doubt that the social selling (sometimes called social prospecting) channel is a critical component of a balanced pros- pecting methodology. I believe that for the sales profession, social media is the most important technological advancement since the telephone. 105 There has never been a time in sales when so much information about so many buyers was so easy to access. And not just contact information, but context. Through the social channel, we gain glimpses into our prospects’ behavior, desires, preferences, and triggers that drive buying behavior and open buying windows. The social channel gives us the ability to easily and economically build familiarity through low-impact, nonintrusive techniques. We can easily map the buyers, influencers, potential coaches, and other stakeholders at our prospective accounts and strategically uncover buying motivations and interests that lead to more impactful and robust in-person conversations. We can monitor our competitors and industry trends in ways that were not possible or economically feasible in the past. Technology that allows us to easily tap into, analyze, and use this endless stream of data is emerging at a lightning pace. Which is both good news and bad news. The good news is technology will make it even easier for you to utilize the social channel to build your pipe and accelerate the sales process. The bad news? As the data pool morphs and options for tapping into that data increase, the social ecosystem is becoming more overwhelming and the expense of tapping into this data is rapidly rising. The owners of the social channels—LinkedIn, Google, Face- book, and Twitter—are keenly aware that they hold all the data and all the cards. The companies that build software that unlocks this data are having to pay up to gain access to it. To make a profit, those costs are being passed on to you. In other words, in the future, to get the most out of social selling, you’re going to need to bring your wallet. Yet, social selling is inextricably woven into the fabric of fanatical prospecting. Top performers know this, and that’s why they are rapidly adopting social selling tactics for prospecting and are willing to pony up to pay for access. 106 Fanatical Prospecting What I am going to focus on in this chapter is giving you a framework for becoming more effective and efficient with social media in your prospecting routine. I’ll help you understand the core objectives and the five Cs of social prospecting along with the five categories of social selling tools that help you become more efficient and effective in your efforts. Five Objectives of Social Prospecting (Outcomes) The Five Cs of the Social Prospecting Process (Effective) Social Prospecting Tools (Efficient) Personal branding and building familiarity Connecting Engagement tools Inbound prospecting via education and insights Content creation Creation tools Trigger-event and buying-cycle awareness Content curation Curation tools Research and information gathering Conversion Distribution tools Outbound prospecting via direct engagement Consistency Intelligence and data tools Because the social selling landscape is changing so rapidly, though, I am going to avoid diving into the specific features/tactics of the major social media sites and tools. Frankly, because the social media sites are so feature rich, it would require several more books to give you everything you’d ever need to know, and by the time those books were published, they’d be out of date. Social Selling 107 So, instead of trying to cram everything you ever need to know about social prospecting into this short chapter, I’ve created a rich set of resources that are constantly being updated. You’ll find virtual training modules, tutorials, articles, comprehensive e-books, and videos on social prospecting at www.FanaticalProspecting.com. Social Selling Is Not a Panacea Along with the increased awareness of the power of the social channel, there has been a disturbing trend of newly minted “social selling” gurus proclaiming that social selling will solve all of your sales problems. I recently witnessed one of these “gurus” pronounce all other forms of prospecting dead and advise sales people to focus all of their energy on social selling (of course using his complicated nine-step system that he was offering at a special discount). Ironically and hypocritically, his pitch was made via a cold e-mail. Another expert cold-called my VP of Sales at Sales Gravy on the telephone to pitch her social selling program as an advanced lead generation program that would eliminate cold calling forever. He challenged her: “If your program is so good, why are you cold-calling me? Shouldn’t I be calling you?” That abruptly ended the call. Social selling is not a panacea. Contact and conversion rates from phone and e-mail dwarf conversion rates on social media. The social channel enhances, elevates, and sometimes accelerates your prospect- ing efforts. It certainly impacts familiarity. But it is not a replacement for focused and deliberate outbound prospecting efforts. The Social Selling Challenge From time to time, though, I’ll hire a new sales rep who will challenge me on this premise. Last year one of my new reps walked 108 Fanatical Prospecting into my office and declared the telephone dead. He’d read an article by a social selling “expert” and then attended one of his webinars. My rep claimed that he’d learned how to eliminate cold calling (which meant all calling) with a more powerful LinkedIn strategy. “Besides,” he told me, “no one answers the phone anymore. Buyer 2.0 wants to talk to salespeople on their terms.” (I remember thinking to myself, “Buyer 2.0? WTF!”) He even uttered the words “old school” as we debated his position on calling versus LinkedIn and I pointed to the phone and insisted he pick it up and start dialing. So I challenged him. He could employ his “new school strategy” for a week, and I would go old school and open up our database of prospects, get on the phone, and interrupt “Buyer 2.0s” day. At the end of the first day, he proudly came into my office beaming that his contact requests had been accepted by seven people—“Good prospects,” he said. “Awesome! So how much did you sell?” I asked. “You don’t understand, Jeb. It doesn’t work that way,” he replied. “This takes time.” I looked down at my call sheet. I’d completed 73 dials, made 19 contacts, and sold two deals for which I’d collected credit cards— real money in the bank. We repeated this exercise for four more days. At the end of the week, I’d closed 17 new accounts and collected payment on all of them. He’d been successful in getting a whole lot of people to accept his connection requests, liked and commented on lots of posts, followed company pages, joined groups, posted a bunch of content, and . . . sold nothing. To be sure, I used social media too. I sold two deals when the prospects called me back after I left a voice mail, sent an e-mail, and then pinged them on LinkedIn. I also sent connection requests to the prospects I sold and the ones I’d had conversations with on the phone but was unable to close. While building my call lists, I Social Selling 109 scanned LinkedIn profiles for data points that might make my calls more relevant. In other words, I wove social media into a balanced prospecting effort rather than making it my exclusive channel. Following our exercise, the exchange of a $10 bet, and a coaching conversation that included a calculator on which I intro- duced him to how much commission he would have earned if he’d made those 17 sales, my new rep agreed that he’d fill up his bank account faster with a balanced approach that included interrupting people rather than hanging out on the social channel all day waiting for them to interrupt him. Before running headlong into this brutal reality, my new rep had adopted a methodology from a “guru” who promised an endless stream of prospects who were ready to buy, along with minimal effort and no rejection. If you decide to buy into this crap, you might want to keep your resume warmed up, and if you think social selling is the new magic fairy dust that will turn you into the next sales superstar, you are in for a rude awakening. Social selling will not solve your pipeline woes or provide an endless stream of inbound leads with little effort. It takes far more than a LinkedIn connection, content curation, and hope to move today’s buyers to take action. Social Selling is time consuming and intellectually draining, and it requires a long slog of consistent daily effort to see any results. So perhaps the best place to start is with what social selling is not. Social Selling Is Not Selling Let’s get this straight from the get-go. Social selling is not selling. If you are trying to sell your stuff on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, or Facebook, you are likely selling nothing while irritating your soon to be ex-connections and causing major damage to your reputation and relationships. 110 Fanatical Prospecting The bottom line is people don’t want to be pitched or “sold” on social media. They prefer to connect, interact, and learn. For this reason, the social channel is better suited to building familiarity, lead nurturing, research, nuanced inbound prospecting, and trigger- event awareness. With the exception of the social inbox that can be a supplement and alternative to the traditional e-mail inbox, social prospecting is about nuance, tact, and patience. With complex and enterprise prospects, the social channel becomes a core part of a strategic chess gamedesigned toinfluencethekeystakeholdersanddeftlymovethese deals into the pipe at just the right time. (I will address prospecting into the social inbox when we discuss e-mail prospecting.) Social selling is a collective term that encompasses a variety of activities—alldesigned toenrich the sales process and fillthe pipe with more qualified and motivated prospects. These activities include: ■ Social research ■ Social networking ■ Social lead generation ■ Social inbound marketing ■ Social prospecting ■ Social trigger-event monitoring ■ Social competitive intelligence ■ Social customer relationship management (CRM) ■ Social account management With that said, it is critical that you include social selling in your sales arsenal and work to become a master at leveraging the social channel. No matter what you are selling, integrating social into your prospecting and sales process is no longer an option. Choosing the Right Social Channels Question: Why do people rob banks? Answer: Because that’s where the money is. Social Selling 111 On which social channels should you be active? Where should you invest your limited time? The simple answer: Go where your prospects hang out. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Foursquare, Swarm, Ello, SoundCloud, YouTube, Snapchat, WhatsApp, SlideShare—the list of social media sites is long (I’m sure I missed a few), and new social channels will keep coming. It’s enough to make your head spin. The social media landscape is complex. The task of mastering and getting engaged on social media is daunting and, frankly, overwhelming—so much so that most companies have an individual (small companies) or entire team (large companies) assigned to manage social media. That’s how much effort it takes. As an individual sales professional, there’s no way you can keep up with them all and still have time to sell. Should you try to develop a presence on all of these channels, you’ll find that it is exhausting. This is why you shouldn’t try. I’ve found that I can effectively manage three to four major channels at a time, and I’m much better when I’m only working two. Beyond that it gets tedious and my efforts are diluted. Take a step back and answer these two questions: 1. On which social channels will I find my customers and prospects? 2. On which social channels do I feel most comfortable? The first question is, by far, the most important. If your customers aren’t on Twitter, for example, don’t worry about it. But if your customers are on Twitter, you’d better figure it out. The ROI on your social selling investment (time, money, and emotion) will increase significantly if you are playing in the same sandbox as your prospects. For example, if you sell cloud-based software to financial services companies, you wouldn’t attend a trade show for farmers. Same goes for social. It’s also important to engage in channels you’re comfortable with and enjoy. For example, I spend a lot of time on Twitter 112 Fanatical Prospecting because I love it. My audience spans almost all of the major channels, but Twitter is by far my favorite, and it shows in my follower base (follow me @salesgravy). If you don’t enjoy a particular channel, you’ll tend to ignore it and your activity won’t be consistent. But let’s keep it real, if your prospects are on a channel that you detest, I suggest you figure out how to like it so that it becomes part of your sales day. For most salespeople, though, LinkedIn will be the primary social channel. First, you need to have a presence there because LinkedIn is the social channel for professionals. Second, if you are in B2B or high- end B2C sales, LinkedIn is where your prospects hang out. Third, LinkedIn has a robust set of tools and capabilities that are designed for salespeople and will help you across all of your prospecting channels. (I have included a comprehensive social channel guide on FanaticalProspecting.com that is updated regularly and will help you choose where and how to spend your time.) Five Objectives of Social Prospecting Do you hear that giant sucking sound? That is social media stealing Golden Hour time from salespeople across the globe. Hours upon hours of prime selling time wasted with heads stuck in laptops, tablets, and smartphones—“social selling.” The social channel is mesmerizing and addictive. It is designed to be that way, to hook you so you keep coming back for more. That’s why those likes, shares, stars, notices, and little numbers on the social apps on your phone exist. They trigger your curiosity and competitiveness. Social media is a big, money-making machine that devours your data and time and sells it to advertisers. To do that, it needs you to be hooked. When you spend your entire day on social media, don’t think for a minute that it is any different than parking yourself in front of a TV screen. Social Selling 113 Of course, the difference between the TV channel and the social channel is you can actually accomplish something on social when you gain the discipline to focus your time on creating specific outcomes that help you identify prospects and move them into the pipeline. These outcomes include: ■ Personal branding and building familiarity ■ Inbound prospecting via education and insights ■ Trigger-event and buying-cycle awareness ■ Research and information gathering ■ Strategic prospecting campaigns ■ Outbound prospecting You must learn to use social media the right way so it is a good use of time. Efficient and effective are the name of the game. Your time investmentinthesocialchannelmustbefocused onincreasing the size and viability of your pipeline. Otherwise, you’re just wasting it. Personal Branding Here are two questions you must constantly be asking yourself as you engage in social prospecting: 1. Does my presence online support my efforts to build my reputation as a sales professional who solves problems and can be trusted? 2. Does it help people become familiar with my name and brand in a positive way? If the answer to either of these questions is “no” or “I’m not sure,” it’s time to make an adjustment in your strategy. The primary, top, number-one reason why you should engage in social selling is to improve familiarity and build trust. You want to be seen and heard, and you want to be viewed as a credible resource for potential buyers. 114 Fanatical Prospecting At a basic level, prospects will look you up online in an effort to get the gist of who you are and what you are all about prior to meeting with you. What they find will cause them to make instant judgments about you. Those judgments will impact your ability to influence and persuade them to make commitments to give up time, resources, and money. You want your professional presence online to position you as the one person who is most capable of bringing solutions to the table. Like most people, you make quick judgments or build quick impressions about others when you are introduced for the first time. It is just how we operate as human beings. With so much incoming data attacking our nervous system, our brains have evolved to quickly grab available information about others (how they look, talk, act) and compile that information into a snapshot of that person. Those first impressions—regardless of how valid they are— influence our feelings towards the other person. True, in the physical world, you sometimes get a second chance to make a good first impression. In the virtual world, however, you have zero chance of changing first impressions that are made about you online. When potential customers view the “online you” and don’t like what they see, they just move on. Of course, the vast majority of sales professionals have the good sense not to berate their boss, post inflammatory political or religious commentary, or toot their horn about how drunk they got the night before on online venues. Instead, they create poor first impressions online in more subtle ways. I’m constantly shocked at the shameful way some salespeople manage their social media image. The most common mistakes are: ■ Poorly written profiles ■ Incomplete and outdated profiles ■ Unprofessional photo or no photo ■ Extremely opinionated political or religious postings and discussions ■ TMI—too much information about personal issues Social Selling 115 Your social media profiles are a direct reflection of your personal brand. These profiles are the tip of the social selling spear. Until your prospect meets you by phone or in person, who you are online is who you are. So you must invest time in developing and perfecting your social profiles. Today, not tomorrow, take action to ensure that your online image casts you in the best light. We have a comprehensive guide to building winning social media profile pages at FanaticalProspecting .com that provides detailed instructions and tips for each of the major social media networks. Here are some of the basics: Headshot According to PhotoFeeler.com, a website that helps people choose the right photo for online profiles, “Profile photos are so essential to modern communication that a good one’s become a basic necessity. And that couldn’t be truer than for those of us whose professional lives are tied to social media profiles.” Ensure that you have a professional headshot on all your pro- files—including Facebook. Professional means you leave your cat, dog, kids, vacation, college buddies, cool sunglasses, and bottle of beer out of the picture. Make sure the picture is taken in good light and at a flattering angle and has a neutral background. Lose the cheesy poses— like with your arms crossed, hand on your chin, or cocking your eyeglasses. You don’t want to come off looking like a schmuck. Instead, smile and put a pleasant look on your face. In a study1 based on over 60,000 ratings, Photo Feeler found that a genuine smile has a significant impact on other people’s perceptions of your competence, likeability, and influence based on your profile picture. A best practice that I highly recommend is posting the same headshot on all of your social media profiles. Your image is like your logo. You want it to stick. 116 Fanatical Prospecting Cover Image Inbound marketing and CRM juggernaut HubSpot.com says that “having a social media profile without a cover photo is like having a brick-and-mortar business without a store sign.” Most social media sites allow you to upload a cover image to your profile. This is usually a background placed on the header, but sometimes it can be the background for the entire page. It is a free way to let an image tell your story. Make sure you have a professional cover image on all of your social profiles. The image dimensions and specs for each social network are different and have a tendency to change. You’ll find dozens of resources online that provide detailed information on cover images. If you are not a graphic artist, creating your own professional cover image can be daunting. The good news is there are many experts online who will help you create professional covers at a nominal cost. I suggest you look to Fiverr.com first for help. For a low-cost self-service option, I recommend Canva.com. Summary/Bio/About You Personal branding expert William Arruda says that “an effective LinkedIn summary makes people want to know more about you and, ultimately, connect with you one-on-one.” This is also true of the“aboutyou” and biosections oneachofyoursocialmediaprofiles. You can go long form on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ and get creative with short and sweet descriptions on Twitter and Instagram. Writing a perfect summary that connects with the reader requires thoughtfulness and effort. It’s your story, and it should make people want to meet you. It should be well written, compelling, and truthful. Write in the first person and make it conversational. Your bio should explain who you are, what you are all about (values), what you do best, and Social Selling 117 why customers and clients count on and trust you to solve their problems. Contact Information Privacy? Forget about privacy. You are in sales. The very best thing that can happen is a prospect calls and interrupts you. If you make it hard for them, they won’t. If you don’t provide contact informa- tion, they can’t. So make it easy. Put your contact information, including phone, e-mail, and website on your social media profiles. Media and Links Ensurethatyouarecross-linking eachsocialprofilepagetoyourother profile pages along with any place you are blogging or contributing content. In the case of LinkedIn, you have the opportunityto add rich media including documents, photos, links, presentations, and videos. Take the time to add information that will be interesting to your prospects, educate them, and give them a reason to connect with you. (Be sure to check with your marketing department to get permission to add content related to your company brand.) Custom URLs Most social media sites will allow you to create a custom URL for your page. A custom URL makes it easier for people tofind you and to share your profile. History Be sure to complete your entire profile. Don’t leave gaps, holes, or partially completed profiles. This sends the message that you cannot be trusted. 118 Fanatical Prospecting Update Your Profiles Regularly Make a commitment to manage your online presence by reviewing, updating, and continuously improving all of your online profiles at least once a quarter. Things change. Make sure your profiles are changing with you and that they stay fresh. As you review your online profiles, answer this question: Would you buy you? Building Familiarity The social channel is the most efficient and effective way to build familiarity. To build familiarity, you must be present and consis- tently engaging with prospects online so they see you often and over time become more comfortable with you. Engaging means liking, sharing, and commenting on their posts as well as content they are commenting on and sharing. You also need to post content that is of interest to them, congratulate them on achievements, and be present in groups where they participate. Be aware that you are always onstage. Everything, from your profile picture to the things you post, like, share, and comment on, is being watched by potential customers, so it’s critical that you manage your message. We live in a hypersensitive world. People are easily offended by the smallest things. Political correctness has run amuck. The wrong words, wrong like, wrong comment can make it impossible for your prospect to do business with you and in extreme cases can go viral and ruin your career. You want people to know your name and face, but in the sales profession, “all publicity is not good publicity.” Familiarity is a two-edged sword. When impressions of you are positive, familiarity can cut through a lot of friction and help you gain appointments and enter sales conversations with prospects. When prospects have a negative impression of you, they will erect walls to keep you out. Think before you post. Social Selling 119 Inbound Prospecting Through Insight and Education The very best outcome of the investment you make in social media is to entice prospects to contact you. An inbound lead is much easier to convert into an appointment, sale, or qualifying information than an outbound prospecting call. Familiarity plays a key but passive role in inbound prospecting. When you are well known to prospects, from time to time they will contact you as they move into the buying window for your product or service. Sharing and publishing relevant content that is intriguing to prospects and helps them solve problems, answering questions in groups, and posting thoughtful comments can also open the door to prospects contacting you for more information or to ask you questions—especially when these posts position you as an expert. A more active way to generate inbound leads is to directly share white papers, e-books, and reports that require prospects to enter contact information to get the content. This direct approach on social media, however, can come off as pitchy or spam, and can be perceived as overt self-promotion—which may not create the best impression of you. I use a more subtle method. When I publish original content or link to a blog page, I include links to white papers and reports embedded in the content. That tends to generate leads without hurting my reputation. You can use a similar tactic with content that has been generated by your marketing team. Leveraging Insight and Education to Power Up Strategic Prospecting Providing insight and education to prospects is also a brilliant way to nurture high-value prospects as part of a strategic prospecting cam- paign (SPC). Strategic prospecting is a long-term, comprehensive 120 Fanatical Prospecting effort that spans multiple prospecting channels. SPCs are designed to warm up and nurture contact relationships in anticipation of a future buying window. The core objectives of strategic prospecting are: ■ Decision-maker and influencer mapping ■ Warming up and nurturing the right contacts ■ Identifying and developing relationships with potential coaches ■ Creating personal and brand familiarity ■ Generating goodwill and tapping into the Law of Reciprocity by offering value first ■ Getting invited in by the prospect when the buying window opens or reducing friction when you make contact to set the initial appointment(s) For most sales professionals, SPCs will be limited to a handful of conquest opportunities, primarily because SPCs are time consuming and require ongoing attention. With the right focus and tools, you can leverage social channels to cover more ground and connect with and nurture more contacts than ever before. When you combine social with phone, in-person, e-mail, networking, and trade shows, you build a robust strategic prospecting machine that is almost impossible to beat. A complete dissertation on developing effective SPCs is beyond the scope of this book. However, you may download the Ultimate Guide to Strategic Prospecting at FanaticalProspecting.com. This com- prehensive ebook gives you the tools and techniques for launching and managing effective SPCs that get results. Trigger-Event and Buying-Cycle Awareness Trigger events are disruptions in the status quo that open buying windows and compel buyers to take action. For some prospects, buying windows are predictable because they’re based on set budgetary or contractual time frames. With other prospects, buying Social Selling 121 windows are unknown and random and can be triggered by internal issues or external industry, economic, environmental, safety, employment, and other market-based trends. Additionally, when people you have sold to in the past move to other companies, the door is opened for you to step in. Most social networks give you the ability to follow people without being directly connected to them. Twitter and Google+ go a step further and allow you to create lists and circles, respectively, that make it easy to monitor segmented groups. LinkedIn also offers tools (some free, some paid) that provide updates on the people you are following. It is important to consistently monitor your news stream, lists, update alerts, and discussions in the groups where your prospects hang out for trigger events. Research and Information Gathering Social media is a smorgasbord of data. You can gather an impressive amount of information about prospects that can be plugged into your CRM, used to develop prospecting messages, and leveraged for decision-maker mapping and precall planning. LinkedIn, Face- book, Google+, and Twitter offer powerful search capabilities that give you access to detailed information about prospects. You can also keep tabs on your competitors. For social search shortcuts, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Sam Richter’s book, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling. Sam’s book is the bible on using online and social resources to gather information. Outbound Prospecting The social channel also allows you to directly engage prospects to ask for appointments or gather additional information. You can message them directly through the platform—for example, in a 122 Fanatical Prospecting LinkedIn mail, Facebook message, or a direct message on Twitter— or just pick up the phone and call. A surprising number of people include phone numbers and e-mail addresses on their profiles. The Five Cs of Social Selling There are five behaviors/activities that define social selling. Master- ing these behaviors and activities makes the time spent on social channels effective. Connecting There is one question I ask at every Fanatical Prospecting Boot Camp: How many of you send a LinkedIn connection request each time you meet a new prospect, potential customer, or someone who might be a valuable addition to your professional referral network? Rarely do more than 10 percent of the hands go up. For centuries, highly successful people have understood the power of connections and how to leverage these connections to accomplish their goals. Connections get you in the door and in front of the right people faster. When your connections introduce you to people inside of their network or company, your message has immediate relevance. Everything on social media begins with a connection. When you meet prospects by phone and in person, you’ve opened the door to familiarity. At that moment, after they’ve just met you, you have the highest probability of them accepting your social connec- tion request. By sending them the connection request just after they’ve met you, they see your name again, anchoring familiarity. (Follow that connection request with a handwritten thank-you note and you’re a superstar in their eyes.) Social Selling 123 On LinkedIn, once a person connects with you, you gain the ability to see all of their connections, which helps you develop a more detailed buyer and influencer map and determine if they are con- nected and engaged in conversations with your competitors, or connected to contacts at other companies you are trying to penetrate. This is why it is in your best interest to send a LinkedIn connection request every time you meet a potential customer, new contact at a prospect, and people who have the potential to become a core part of your professional network. Your professional network can be more powerful than any other means of prospecting. LinkedIn offers both free and paid tools that give you the ability to tag, add notes, add contact information to profiles, organize, search, label the contact source, and manage your connections. LinkedIn is becoming a CRM on steroids. With LinkedIn’s mobile apps, you have a massive and very powerful contact database in the palm of your hand. There are three ways to create connections: ■ Direct: On both LinkedIn and Facebook you may initiate a direct request for a connection. On Facebook, the process is straightforward: You just click “Send a Friend Request.” On LinkedIn, you have the option of sending a standard, generic connection request (you may be asked to say how you know the person) or you may customize your connection request. I highly recommend sending a personalized note with each connection request that references any past meetings or conversations and gives a reason for your connection request. Though Facebook has primarily been an entertainment tool for keeping up with family and friends, I’m finding I’m having more business conversations on Facebook and through Facebook Messenger than ever before. ■ Reciprocal: With Twitter and Google+, you can gain connec- tions by simply following people because when you follow, people will reciprocate and follow you back. The probability that they will reciprocate is determined by their level of 124 Fanatical Prospecting familiarity with you, so it makes sense to follow or circle people as soon as you meet them. ■ Passive: When you publish original or curated content that connects with your audience and is shared, people will connect with and follow you. This is the most powerful way to build connections because the person connecting with you is making a conscious choice to add you to their network because they believe you add value to their career or life. Content Creation Creating and publishing original content that is relevant to the issues and problems your prospects are facing is the most powerful way to build trust and credibility with your prospect base. Original content will typically be in the form of: ■ Articles ■ Videos ■ Slide presentations ■ Podcasts ■ Infographics ■ White papers ■ Case studies ■ E-books (and traditional books) Publishing original content positions you as an expert. It makes you a valuable resource. It draws prospects to you and entices them to engage with you or share your message with others in their organization. When people that were previously unknown to you like or share your content, it reveals new prospects and develops additional contacts within organizations you are working with. You also gain insight into trigger events and buying windows. When people like, comment on, or share your information, you learn about the problems they are facing, their emotions, their urgency, and opportunities to help them. Social Selling 125 Creating high-quality content is powerful, but is very, very difficult. It requires a significant investment of time and intellectual resources. If you work for a large organization with a robust marketing and branding team, there is also a very good chance that they will discourage you from creating content without their express approval and oversight. I highly recommend investing the time to create and publish original content because the benefits to your reputation and career are massive. But if developing original content is not your thing, an easier way to leverage content is through curation. Content Curation Intuitively, we know that salespeople who can educate, offer insight, and solve problems are far more valuable than those whose primary sales strategy is to pitch products and services. However, to add value, you must be valuable. Trust me on this: Salespeople who lead with self-promotional company, brand, product, or service plugs on social media get banned, blocked, reported as spam, and ignored. Don’t do it! In the social channel, the primary way you provide value is through content that educates, builds credibility, anchors familiarity, and positions you as an expert who can solve relevant problems. The right content shared at the right time with the right prospects can create important connections and convert passive online relationships into real-time conversations. The challenge is that the social channel is a voracious and insatiable beast that devours content. It must be fed daily for you and your message to remain relevant and present. Even if you had the time to create loads of original content, it would never be enough to keep up. So, the solution is something called curation. A simple analogy for curation is the act of clipping articles from magazines and newspapers and sending them to someone. Except 126 Fanatical Prospecting that on social, you are doing this digitally and amplifying the impact by going from a one-to-one analog footprint to one-to-many digital distribution. Insteadof publishing your own original content, you leverage the content that is being created and published by others. Essentially, you become a maven who aggregates the most relevant content for your audience and shares it through your various social media newsfeeds. Sharing can either be a direct link that you post or a share/ retweet from a source you follow. The beautiful thing about sharing content is even though you didn’t produce it, some of the credit for the content rubs off on you. There are three pillars of content curation: ■ Awareness: You need to be aware of what is happening in your industry—trends, competitors, and movers and shakers. Have youreyesand earsopen, payattentiontowhatisgoingonaround you, and consume industry-specific information. Discover and follow the thought leaders who are shaping the dialog in your industry and know where great content is being published. ■ Intent: When you curate with intent, you begin linking together relevant content based on an overall strategy, rather than just randomly and disparately sharing. You take time to read and understand what you are sharing, which allows you to add comments and insightful takeaways to the shared content, which further burnishes your expert status. ■ Tools: Content curation is extremely time consuming, so you’ll want to leverage tools that deliver relevant content to you and automate the distribution of the content you wish to share. Conversion Let’s get real. You want the time and effort you invest in social prospecting to produce real, tangible results. You want more deals in your pipeline, to close more sales, and to increase your income. Otherwise, what’s the point? Social Selling 127 The social channel leveraged the right way can and should generate inbound leads. Although it is somewhat an oversimplifi- cation, social prospecting is like building your own little inbound marketing machine. This is where intent comes into play. You have to actively plan for and work to generate leads and engagement that opens sales conversations. Consistency Social prospecting is a grind. It takes work. It is not easy, simple, or automatic. Getting value from and adding value to the social channel requiresconsistent, focused, and regimenteddiscipline. Consistency is crucial. Social doesn’t work if you show up some of the time. You dilute your efforts if you are random and hit-or-miss. Time blocking and the deployment of tools that automate some of the activity are the keys to being efficient. You must block 30 minutes to an hour each day (preferably before or after the Golden Hours) to engage in planned, intentional social prospecting activi- ties. Have the discipline to limit your activity to the block of time you have set aside for your social selling activities and no more. You may feel that you are not accomplishing much in short daily social prospecting blocks, but the cumulative impact of daily activity is enormous over time. Social Media Prospecting Tools Leveraging the right tools for social prospecting allows you to work the channel while remaining focused on high-value activities. There are myriad tools that automate social selling activity for you. Some tools are as close as your CRM, some are embedded in the social channels themselves, and there are dozens of apps that can easily be loaded onto your phone or Chrome browser. 128 Fanatical Prospecting What you may want to brace yourself for is cost. While most tools offer some level of free access, that access has a tendency to shrink as the tool gains popularity. The developers of these tools are not building them for altruistic reasons. They are keenly aware of the high cost in time and resources to fully and effectively leverage social for prospecting. They know that time is money, and as long as you are willing to part with money, they promise to save you time. The good news is almost all of these tools, with the exception of enterprise level-solutions, allow you to try or use a limited number of features for free. And, your company may provide some of them for you. As I write this chapter, new tools are emerging and others are being discontinued, rebranded, or acquired and rolled up into other tools. Yesterday one of my very favorite tools was made unusable because the social channel it helped me manage cut it off from its API. This is happening more often as the major social channels are intent on limiting access and charging more. Because of the dynamics at play, I am providing a limited list of tools in this section. You’ll find a comprehensive, regularly updated Guide to Social Selling Tools and reviews at FanaticalProspecting.com. Tools for social prospecting fall into five basic categories. ■ Content curation: These tools help you easily find and/or bank new content to distribute on your social channels. Tools like Feed.ly, Google News, and Sprout.it make it easy to identify the type of content that you want to share, aggregate that content from multiple sources, and deliver it to your desktop or smartphone. Tools like Pocket (one of my absolute favorite apps) allow you to bank content you find online to share at a later time. ■ Content creation: Tools that help you create your own content abound. LinkedIn Pulse is a fantastic publishing tool that allows you to post full-length articles directly on LinkedIn. Likewise, Tumblr is an easy-to-use social blogging tool. For video, YouTube, along with a host of mobile apps, offers an array Social Selling 129 of editing and publishing tools. SlideShare allows you to post presentations and is owned by LinkedIn, so you can post them directly to your LinkedIn profile. Canva.com is an outstanding tool for editing images and creating infographics. ■ Distribution: Posting content you create or curate to multiple social sites many times over each day is extremely time consum- ing and tedious. Distribution tools like HootSuite, Buffer, and HubSpot (very expensive) allow you to load the content you wish to share during nonselling hours and automate the distri- bution of that content on a set schedule. Set it and forget it. ■ Engagement: Tools like HootSuite, HubSpot, Bit.ly, and TweetDeck, along with the analytics tools embedded in the major social channels, allow you to view and analyze how people are engaging with your content and if that content is effective. ■ Intelligence: These tools help you gather information about companies, people, trigger events, and buying windows. My absolute favorite is Google alerts. You will also find a growing suite of intelligence tools being built by and embedded into the major social networks. Social Prospecting + Outbound Prospecting = A Powerful Combination The problem you face is, in the ocean of content flooding the social channel, it’s getting more and more difficult to stand out and get noticed (which is why the social channels are making so much money selling sponsored posts). If you are starting from the ground up with no followers or a small audience on established social platforms like LinkedIn, it can take from six months to two years to create enough gravity to pull prospects in to you. That does not mean that a targeted and narrowly focused social selling strategy can’t be effective. It just means that it will require more and more effort and money to get a reasonable return on your investment. 130 Fanatical Prospecting This is why even HubSpot, the granddaddy of the inbound marketing movement, and LinkedIn, the grand pooh-bah of the social selling movement, combine inbound and outbound pros- pecting strategies. Outbound prospecting and inbound social prospecting go together like mashed potatoes and gravy. Social selling impacts familiarity, is an excellent for research and trigger-event awareness, and will generate inbound leads. It is, however, a long-term, passive strategy that requires patience and nuance and is unlikely to produce immediate results or to ever scale to a size that generates enough inbound leads to allow you to reach your sales and income goals. Outbound prospecting, on the other hand, is an active approach to filling the pipe by engaging prospects in person, by phone, by e-mail, through social inboxes, or by text. It is the art of interrupting your prospect’s day, opening a conversation, setting an appoint- ment, or gathering information. Combined with social prospecting, outbound becomes enor- mously powerful. The combined benefits include: ■ Amplifying familiarity, which increases the probability that your prospect will engage ■ More targeted prospecting lists focused on the highest-qualified prospects and individual buyers ■ Leveraging trigger events to open or walk through buying windows at just the right time ■ Nurturing and educating prospects ahead of expected or projected buying windows ■ Research to gain contact information ■ Buyer-influencer-coach (BIC) mapping ■ Qualifying ■ Refining and making your outbound prospecting message relevant Once again, it comes back to balance—balancing your pros- pecting channels, methodologies, and techniques to be efficient and effective with your scarcest resource: time. Social Selling 131