If you want to avoid social selling pitfalls, have more fun and get greater results learning from others is an EXCELLENT place to start. Figuring things out alone can be painful.
Over the last year, I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of offline conversations with experts from the Nimble community. I often refer to them while creating new outreach strategies and figured “Why not share some of this genius that’s sitting in my notebooks?”
This time the focus is on how to stop wasting time reaching out to the wrong people and how to have a method to your madness for scaling your marketing. Here’s what I discovered:
Discover And Share Your Genius First
Before you run out to sell or fill your pipeline with prospects you need to know what you’re going to say. Brynne Tillman (@BrynneTillman) shared with me that It’s about more than “Show up, Sell Something, Go Home”. That kind of sales mindset is transactional. You need to recognize your genius and how you’re helping other people. Here are three questions to answer before your next outreach campaign:
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- Why do people buy from you? That will get you started.
- It’s not about WHAT you do. It’s explaining WHY you’re the BEST at what you do. Why are YOU the best at what you do?
- To define why you’re best at what you do answer this: What is the POSITIVE impact that you’re making on other people?
Learn more about “Ditching The Pitch” with my video interview with Brynne here.
Focus On The RIGHT Numbers
When you jumpstart your social sales and marketing initiatives the most common problem is that: People think it’s all about numbers. They think the more pitches they make and more followers they have, the more sales they’ll make. Focusing purely on the numbers burns through a LOT of time. Here’s what Viveka Von Rosen (@LinkedInExpert) shared about finding meaning and focus with your outreach.
- Successful outreach is about building TRUST with your audience. That comes from the in person or phone conversations you have with them AND what you do to follow up after each conversation.
- In some ways YES. It’s “about the numbers”. It’s about the numbers of MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS that you’re having! Not random outreach.
- Meaningful conversations are related to the CONSISTENCY in your outreach: Consistently sharing your branding and value proposition, consistently interacting with the RIGHT people and consistently measuring your results.
Find more focus in your sales outreach with my video interview with Viveka here.
MEASURE The Right Numbers And Scale Faster
Once you start more focused outreach, according to Koka Sexton (@kokasexton), the next question to answer is:
How are you tracking your online activity? Is your goal 10,000 new followers? If so ask: What’s the ROI on that and where did that number come from? You need to create actual business growth, not just a bigger number of fans or followers.
Consider this: Two calls with potential clients and one new closed sale that result from social media conversations this week are MUCH BETTER than a bunch of new followers and no results.
Realize which activities have an impact, then optimize those activities. Look at time spent on getting new followers vs. time spent creating meaningful interactions. If cold calling gets you a 2.5% success rate, email gets you a 10% success and social media conversations create a 15% – 20% success rate you know what to do more of.
It’s about SCALING your opportunities by QUANTIFYING your opportunities and then repeating your successes as you track them.
