Five social selling missteps that can easily be avoided with a little thought and a lot of powerful features from Nimble:
Don’t Push
Push marketing is about you. Social selling is not about you. It’s about your prospects and customers — what they need and the questions they have, and about building trust and confidence in you and your brand.
Make Use of Nimble: Use Nimble saved searches to uncover content to share. Search on hashtags, keywords, industry, even location.
Don’t Be Self-Centered
Don’t just share information about your brand. Broaden your curation horizons and think about the topics that will be of interest to your prospects and customers. As Chris Brogan says, “Don’t speak AT people, speak WITH them.” Helping others succeed is building a relationship — making a weak link into a strong one. Without a relationship, there is no sale.
Make Use of Nimble: What are the top questions prospects ask at each stage of their buyer’s journey? Monitor and uncover these questions with the Signals Tab to listen in on what’s happening in your funnel. Then you can enter the conversation and provide valued expertise.
Don’t Intrude
Don’t interrupt people, or bury them in emails and phone calls and tweets. Yes, be visible on all the sites where they live and play, but don’t be intrusive. Instead, be available, be accessible, be curious, be interested.
Making Use of Nimble: Use Nimble’s Last Contacted feature to make sure you’re not overwhelming and wearing out your welcome. Be judicious about when and how you reach out.
Don’t Be Negative
Don’t badmouth anyone — competitors, commenters — anyone. This is not high school. When you talk negatively about others, people only begin to wonder how long it will be until they themselves are your target. Sales is a profession, not a football rivalry.
Make Use of Nimble: Monitor competitors networks with Nimble’s social tools; then beat them fair and square by being better, not nasty.
Don’t Be A Bull in a China Shop
Don’t enter the conversation blindly, before you know the lay of the land. Do your research. Know the players. Your first impression can be ruined by clumsiness and ineptitude. You and your brand will not recover from bumbling around arrogantly before you know the landscape. We’ve all done it, and it’s not an experience you want to repeat.
Make Use of Nimble: Add a contact. Enter just their name and email. Watch the record unfold before you with no data entry. Now hover over each feature of the record and get to know them, read their social stream, and find exactly what is interesting them. Now you’re informed. Now you’re Nimble.
Alyson Stone is Director of Content Strategy, and writes often for the Nimble blog.
