5 Steps to Social Selling Success, by Jana Gering

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Jana Gering, Content Manager/ Senior Editor
Welcome to 5 steps to social selling success!
First question is, who uses any type of social networking account?
facebook
twitter
pinterest
instagram
yelp
vine
youtube
others?

The thing to realize is that the same important principles apply to social selling as apply in telesales, and in-person sales. It’s not a scary, crazy new medium (ok, there is a bit of a learning curve) but in it’s most basic form, it is really all about fostering and engaging relational connections, building trust and rapport, and, eventually, coming to agreement on some kind of partnership (the sale)

At the end of this session, we’ll have a little Q&A so you can ask me about specific strategies, but there is a lot out there that is available to anyone who wants to zero in on specific strategies and Return on Investment, measurability and reporting, so I’m going to keep it fairly high-level to begin with.

Because social media is (or was) essentially a free way to connect with people, and your business is about people, you should probably be using it. As you saw, after all, you are all on social media. Odds are that a good percentage of potential clients are, too. If they’re not, they are having their kids or grandkids look you up on Facebook to see if you’re legit.

However, most businesses who do have a social media presence are pretty much placeholders. They’re neutral. They don’t really sell. Sometimes they spend a lot of time talking about themselves, which you already know is not the best way to sell something.

So in the time we have here, I’m going to focus on some ways you can really work on developing a valuable voice, and why that’s important to social selling.

Be present.

This means having a presence online. You don’t have to be on all networks, but most likely, you should be on a few. You should own your twitter handle, your facebook business page, and have LinkedIn page for your company.

Some companies have whole divisions focused on facebook marketing, and a team of twitter minions, and one or two designers building shareable images, vine video clips, and more. You, like us, probably do not have all of that. You’re lean, you may or may not have a full marketing department. Maybe you put your niece in charge of your instagram account, or hand it over to interns.

You might not have all of tons of resources at your disposal, but there’s still value in presence, because your customers are there on those social networks, asking questions and looking for opportunities.

On Twitter, people are having conversations, following influencers, amplifying messages.

On Instagram, your prospects are sharing memorable and beautiful images, quotes, important moments, and visual ideas.

On Facebook, your potential buyers are looking you up to see if you’re a legit company, clicking through to your website, and sharing good content with their friends.

On LinkedIn, CEOs and marketing managers are asking for advice on the best ERP systems out there.

On Quora, try typing in “I am a __business role___ looking for ERP software,” and you’ll find many people looking for the answers you have ready to give!

There’s a lot out there about the right kind of content for each network. Each medium has slightly different content setup and mojo. Like I said before, there’s a ton of content out there to help you find that mojo for each kind, and I can offer a list of helpful folks at the end if you’re interested.

Listen: If social media is about conversations. Where do you do your best product selling? When it is the most fun and interesting for you and the client? Who are the clients who you’re happiest to talk to?

Things you don’t do when you enter an in-person conversation:
-Walk up to just any person and try to sell them your product. It’s the (find your influencers)
-You don’t start by talking only about yourself. (Conversations, not soapboxes)
-You don’t start by listing to them all the things you’ve noticed about them. (but noticing is part of listening) Someone tweeted the other day that a social account reached out to them by saying “I know you’re at the ___ Conference. Could I meet up with you for 15 minutes to talk about ___?”

How do you enter an in-person conversation?
-Show up
-Say hello
-Listen
-Interact
-ask a question
-share something valuable/memorable
-create ways to connect (RTs, favorites, shares)

One of the best guidelines that helps me cut through all of the possibility of social content and focus on the RIGHT things to do I learned from a friend of mine, Jeffrey Kranz.

When you push out a piece of content (or when you’re developing the type of content you’ll push out over the next week or month or year), consider what you want your audience to DO, FEEL, THINK, and REMEMBER

DO (click through to the blog or website? Share?)
FEEL (nervous about Windows 2003 server support ending? Excited about the partner summit?)
THINK (Maybe I should change my ERP system this year?) or
REMEMBER (Gotta talk to my IT person about the server support? I should really call my ERP partner to talk about upgrading? Oh wow, Acumatica 5.0 looks really awesome?)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/03/29/personas-are-the-future-of-enterprise-apps-lessons-learned-from-scribe-software/

One good way to think about this is to build personas for your ideal customers. Think about the clients you already have, and about what they value. Think about your industry influencers, and about what they value.

Most companies build between 2-5 personas for their customers, some break it down per product as Microsoft has done here for Office 365. A good persona acts as a reminder to you about what kind of content you’ll be putting out AND how you’ll reach the client. Louis Columbus wrote about this for Forbes 2 years ago in an article titled “Personas are the Future of Enterprise Apps”

It also helps you really easily answer the questions posed by DTFR, by the way.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/03/29/personas-are-the-future-of-enterprise-apps-lessons-learned-from-scribe-software/

Social selling right now is changing rapidly. One of the biggest predictions this year is that the major players will have in-app purchasing capability soon. Just this month, Pinterest started removing all affiliate links in preparation for enabling users to buy things from within the app, twitter is looking into a similar thing.

I’m not sure you’ll ever see people purchasing an ERP system directly on twitter, but you do know that your customers are doing a lot of their research about you (and us) before they ever pick up a phone these days.

You already know that good sales is not about sitting at a cash register and waiting for people to walk up to you. You have to connect with people and offer value to make a good sale.

On social networks, offering value looks like giving something useful to your readers/clients in the form of conversations, shared information, and knowledge leadership.

I like to focus on valuable content with a core of three words: uncomplicate, educate, grow.

Many of our prospects, and probably some of yours, value content that focuses on these things. They’re not the only things I talk about, but they are key drivers.

If I can uncomplicate a big, complicated idea, educate with good information and resources, and help people grow their businesses with that content, that creates a trust relationship. People now care what I think (what acumatica thinks) in that sphere.

This takes us back to the idea of a content net, where you are again creating an appealing environment for you clients to explore on their own. This is especially helpful today, where customers are often doing ¾ of their product research online before they even contact sales.

Creating valuable content isn’t easy, so you’ll want a good mix of the three options here:

1. Creating your own customized content helps to develop your unique voice, but it’s time-intensive. This is generally highly trusted by customers, ESPECIALLY when you’re acting as an advisor, as many of you are.

2. Sharing Branded content: this is relatively quick if it’s prepared. It is essentially PROMOTION or another very popular word in social networks, AMPLIFICATION, so if your social net is made up entirely of RTs or branded content, it doesn’t build trust. (backlinko: no more than ¼ of your content should be sales pitching.

3. Curate 3rd party interaction and content: This is where you bring in your influencers. This is where you RT articles by your favorite business writers, and they in turn might share yours. This is where you start replying to good articles, or writing short blog posts summarizing a new report on ERP, or sharing the report with someone who asked a question on Quora. This stuff is incredibly valuable, for amplification, but it also acts as a huge trust builder. If someone customers trust treats you with respect and trust, you are not only getting amplified, but getting a trust bonus.

Social selling right now is changing rapidly. One of the biggest predictions this year is that the major players will have in-app purchasing capability soon. Just this month, Pinterest started removing all affiliate links in preparation for enabling users to buy things from within the app, twitter is looking into a similar thing.

I’m not sure you’ll ever see people purchasing an ERP system directly on twitter, but you do know that your customers are doing a lot of their research about you (and us) before they ever pick up a phone these days.

You already know that good sales is not about sitting at a cash register and waiting for people to walk up to you. You have to connect with people and offer value to make a good sale.

On social networks, offering value looks like giving something useful to your readers/clients in the form of conversations, shared information, and knowledge leadership.

I like to focus on valuable content with a core of three words: uncomplicate, educate, grow.

Many of our prospects, and probably some of yours, value content that focuses on these things. They’re not the only things I talk about, but they are key drivers.

If I can uncomplicate a big, complicated idea, educate with good information and resources, and help people grow their businesses with that content, that creates a trust relationship. People now care what I think (what acumatica thinks) in that sphere.

This takes us back to the idea of a content net, where you are again creating an appealing environment for you clients to explore on their own. This is especially helpful today, where customers are often doing ¾ of their product research online before they even contact sales.

Creating valuable content isn’t easy, so you’ll want a good mix of the three options here:

1. Creating your own custom content helps to develop your unique voice, but it’s time-intensive. This is generally highly trusted by customers, especially

2. Sharing Branded content: this is relatively quick if it’s prepared. It is essentially advertising, so if your social net is made up entirely of RTs or branded content, it doesn’t build trust. (backlinko: no more than ¼ of your content should be sales pitching/talking about yourself.

3. Curate 3rd party content. This is deceptive, but smart. This is where you bring in your influencers. This is where you RT articles by your favorite business writers. This is where you start replying to good articles, or writing short blog posts summarizing a new report on ERP, or sharing the report with someone who asked a question on Quora. This is where you become a thought leader, and that’s why customer trust for 3rd party content is at it’s peak.

One of the most important things about social media is to be consistent with your plan for delivering valuable content.

Whatever plan you decide on is really up to you. There will be people telling you to schedule exactly 48 tweets per day. Some will say 5 per day, etc. There are a million best practices guides for social media out there, trying to scare you into following their plan (and then sharing and RT’ing about it)

Because most of you are running lean marketing just like us, what’s more important than pushing out tons of content is to be consistent with the plan you set. It’s categorically better to start with good content sent out a few times a week, or even a few times per month, than to post a lot of content at once, and then nothing for 3 months.

Here’s a quick overview of tools you can use to help with being consistent. We can come back to this if you want to , but I just want you to take away the sense that you are not in this alone, really. Some tools are expensive, some are free, and most offer both free and paid versions.

You’ve got things to help you schedule, Content aggregators that help collect content you might be interested to one location so you can pick and choose what to share, you’ve got tools for measuring performance, and you’ve got the option to do paid advertising on some networks.

________
Bonus content:

Pocket is a new tool I’ve been using that allows me to save articles, blog posts, infographics, or other great content to one place. Then when I’m ready to schedule a lot of content at once in Hootsuite, I can go and review the things I’ve saved to Pocket to make sure they are good, shareable content I want to share. Once I decide what I want to share, I’ll use the tool bitly to create a shortened link (bitly also tracks the number of people who click on the link) to the content, and schedule it in Hootsuite.

As an example, I like to have 3-5 scheduled posts per day on twitter. Then I fill in with comments, retweets of influencers or partners, and other current content.

Content Aggregators, like #Tagboard are also helpful. Tagboard allows you to search for a term, and see everything people have written about that “tag” on twitter, facebook, or Instagram. So, I’ll do a daily search on the term “Acumatica”, and I can see when people have mentioned us. I can share their content, favorite it, or even block it if it’s spammy. Hootsuite in the premium version offers “suggested” content based on what you’ve shared before.

It’s also important to measure your success. SimplyMeasured is a great tool that offers some really fast reports on your social networking efforts, Bit.ly counts the number of people who have clicked on a bit.ly-generated link you’ve shared, and Moz helps you find influential people in your potential network. (for example, you can run a search on twitter accounts with high follower accounts, who follow Sage and Netsuite, but not Acumatica. Then you can start following, listening, and sharing content from them by way of introduction!)

Promoted or boosted posts are becoming more important as social networks move to advertising in order to generate revenue. Sharing content on a business facebook page is now practically invisible, even to those who “Like” your page, without promotion (It’s still important to share content there for those who might be searching for you.).

But when you do promote a post, the rewards are high. Typically a post on Facebook might get a few hundred views. But I recently spent $10 to promote a post for 7 days, and we reached nearly 5,000 views, and increased the number of click-throughs by 400%.

Paid promotions are less advertising, and more a way of being findable now, and you don’t need to spend a ton of money on it, either. It’s way cheaper than a television commercial! If you budgeted as little as $20-$50/month and spread out a few boosted posts over Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you’d see a pretty big bump in traffic. It’s worth considering setting up a $5 per month boost to a few posts to see where it goes.

Lastly, it’s important to be flexible and responsive. Have fun, be human, and make conversation. It’s actually amazing how far this will take you in regards to the trust of the people who find you through these growing social channels.

This is Tennis great Roger Federer, one of the most consistent players of all time in his heyday. I sometimes imagine social media is a lot like a really excellent tennis match. first, you develop a consistent swing, so you are hitting the ball at the same point with the same balance, as often as possible. From there, you develop responsiveness to adjust your posture, balance, and position on the court so that even when you have to run for it, it’s still possible to get a racquet on the ball at the right angle.

Last, you’ll need to recognize that even when you’re playing singles, there’s a lot to be said for the fact that you’re never alone on the court. Keeping up a good game requires graciousness, humor, and sharing. People will amplify what they like—a great shot down the sideline just begs for another great return shot.

Promote other people’s work (just not sage or netsuite), share, be gracious and grateful. People will amplify what they like, and amplification is just now the ultimate metric for success. You want people talking about you and sharing your work with their friends.

Sainsbury’s fish puns.

Here’s another example on the right where Tmobile gained a customer. Notice the customer had already done a lot of research, so he was already probably biased toward Tmobile.

T-mobile wins a customer by being human. asking questions, twitter as a service line. redeem

By the way, what does this shape of how I’ve arranged the tweets look like? Bit like a Sales funnel?

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5 Steps to Social Selling Success, by Jana Gering

Acumatica Cloud ERP

5 Steps to Social Selling Success, by Jana Gering