PhillyTech eBook - How Social Selling Can Positively Impact Your Business - January 2015

How Social Selling Can
Positively Impact Your Business
Written by Michael C. Bertoni – Founder & CTO – PhillyTech
www.phillytech.co – info@phillytech.co
PhillyTech Launch Movie Trailer - http://goo.gl/Sqv08O

January 2015 Copyright© - All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Introduction: What is Social Selling?.....................................................3
Social Selling Platforms..........................................................................6
What is a Prospect? .............................................................................. 12
Social Selling Business Challenges....................................................... 14
Social Selling Solutions......................................................................... 17
Conclusion ........................................................................................... 20

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Introduction:WhatisSocialSelling?
here has been a paradigm shift in the way selling is done today compared
to just a few short years ago. Some of us might remember back in 1993
when America Online (AOL) sent discs in the mail to get people on the
internet. They ended up sending 660 million discs and spending over
$300 million to get to a peak of about 30 million users in 2002. In 2005, the
nation’s newspapers had peak ad revenues of $49.435 billion. By 2012, total
newspaper ad revenues plummeted to $22.314, a drop of 55%. In July of 2013, the
New York Times announced it was selling the Boston Globe for $70 million, after
buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion. Direct mail and print advertising used to be the
most effective way to reach potential customers. Today, these businesses are on life
support.
Two small companies were founded between the peak of AOL in 2002 and the
peak of newspaper ad revenue in 2005. Those companies, LinkedIn and Facebook,
spawned a new way of networking and selling. The former was founded in May
2003 and is the king of business social networking, with 332 million members. The
latter was founded in February 2004 and is the de facto standard in social
networking, with 1.35 billion members today. A third game-changing company was
founded in March 2006 and currently gives over 284 million users the ability to
send out 140 characters. The Big 3 in social networking and selling are LinkedIn
(May 2003), Facebook (February 2004) and Twitter (March 2006).
These social networking and selling mediums are not going anywhere and new
sites pop up all the time. 15 of the top social networking sites are Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, WordPress, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr., Instagram,
Flickr, MySpace, Tagged, Meetup, Ask.fm and MeetMe.
SocialSellingOverview
Social selling is a technique whereby products and services are sold via social
networks. Social selling is more than just using tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and
Twitter. Social selling is about salespeople, marketers, business owners and
entrepreneurs using written and visual content to build a strong, personal brand
and business community. These sites give you the potential to find business
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advocates that can spread the message of your content, products and services to
others across the social web.
WhattheAnalystsAreSayingaboutSocialSelling
The use of social media for sales is finally making a dent on the internet, according
to Gartner Analyst Patrick Stackenas. He mentioned that some vendors use Big
Data to rapidly sort through large quantities of social data internally, and
externally, to help you find optimal buyers. B2B tech buyers “find nearly 70% of
the content they need on their own, with only 15% sent by marketing and only 15%
sent by sales,” according to Forrester Research. These prospects go to search
engines and social networks first. In order to compete in today's market, sales
professionals and business owners need to implement social selling as part of their
daily strategy.
A business needs to become trusted, highly visible and a subject matter expert in a
given field. The Aberdeen Group surveyed 182 end users regarding their use of
social media to improve sales effectiveness. They found that three core
characteristics in sales professionals increased sales effectiveness by 25-35%.
These are:
 Social Collaboration: The ability to network internally within an
organization and externally within a business community to learn
information that shortens the sales cycle and increases the chances of
winning the deal.
 External Listening: The ability to identify trigger events that happen
across multiple areas, such as industry news, company news, blogs, social
networks and industry analysts.
 External Participation: The ability to put aside the natural tendency to
sell first and instead provide subject matter expertise and business value
before selling a product or service.
BusinessValueofSocialSelling
Studies show that 93% of today's prospects search the internet for your
company, your solutions and most importantly, your people, prior to meeting
with you. Today’s prospects are highly educated. At the bare minimum this
means you need to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile and the content you
generate needs to be valuable to your business community.

5
The bottom line is that 73% of sales professionals who used social selling
techniques as part of their sales process outperformed their selling peers and
exceeded their quota 23% more frequently.
When you implement daily or weekly social selling techniques this leads to
increased prospects, opportunities, proposals, closed business and revenue.

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SocialSellingPlatforms
he 15 social networking sites discussed in the introduction act as social
selling platforms for those who use them strategically. More than 90% of
the people on these sites use them to connect with like-minded people,
share content about their lives, be part of a greater community and feel
connected to others. Almost every person on Earth wants to feel connected to
others within a community. Many of these people are looking for content and ideas
that will enhance their daily lives or motivate them to take action. This feeling of
connectedness and community plus a product or service that benefits the buyer is a
winning combination. This is nothing new.
Before social networking sites dominated the marketing scene, people
recommended products and services at social events such as cocktail parties,
business events and community outings. Social networking sites make it easier to
ask your community for a recommendation or for help finding something specific.
This is why it is important to brand yourself daily by putting out value-added
content about your products and services. If you do this effectively, your network
will grow, people will have an easier time finding you and you will make more
money.
In this chapter, we outline 15 of the top social networking sites and the specific
business value of each.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world's largest professional business network with more than
332 million members, and is growing rapidly every year.
The business value of LinkedIn is to:
 Establish your professional brand and control one of the top search
results for your name.
 Build and maintain a broader network of trustworthy professionals.
 Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates.
 Learn about other companies.
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 Leverage powerful tools to find and reach the people you need.
 Tap into the knowledge of your network.
 Discover new opportunities.
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users
to send and read “tweets,” which are text messages limited to 140 characters.
Twitter currently has more than 284 million users.
The business value of Twitter is to:
 Increase brand awareness.
 Keep up with the latest trends in your industry.
 Promote your blog content, videos, presentations, etc.
 Boost your website SEO.
 Drive website traffic.
 Get instant feedback about your products and/or services.
 Increase the reach and impact of your PR initiatives.
 Gather real-time competitive intelligence.
 Monitor your brand reputation.
 Support your recruiting efforts by connecting directly with potential
employees.
 Gain direct access to high profile individuals.
Facebook
Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world with more than 1.35
billion users. Users have the ability to create personal pages, business pages and
group pages, as well as follow those pages.
The business value of Facebook is to:
 Increased exposure to potential customers.
 Gather more leads.
 Lower marketing expenses.
 Reach a targeted audience.

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 Use Facebook insights.
 Build brand loyalty.
 Increase web traffic.
 Boost SEO.
 Allow users to view your page on their mobile device.
 Research your competition.
YouTube
The Google-owned video site is the second largest search engine in the world with
more than 5 billion videos watched daily.
The business value of using YouTube is to:
 Conduct how to videos or webinars.
 Promote events.
 Communicate to your marketplace.
 Communicate to your clients.
 Increase SEO.
 Build your brand.
 Create a buzz.
 Educate your audience.
GooglePlus
Google+ is Google’s social networking platform with over 300 million users that
allows you to create a community of followers. It is also connected to your Gmail
account and gives you robust content management capabilities using Google Drive.
The business value of using Google+ is to:
 Optimize Google search.
 Increase web influence.
 Page rank boost.
 Connect to Gmail.
 Connect to YouTube.

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 Connect to Chrome.
 Content management.
 Reach of Google.
Instagram
With more than 300 million users, Instagram is a photo-sharing social network. It
has a larger percentage of young audience members, but at the same time is a very
popular application for small businesses because these younger members are
familiar with purchasing products and services over the web.
The business value of using Instagram is to:
 Market your products or services in very unique ways.
 Post behind-the-scenes photos.
 Update people on your latest promotions.
 Create more personal brand awareness with pictures.
 Target a younger audience.
Pinterest
Pinterest has over 70 million users and is a digital pin board of pictures that gives
users the ability to categorize and collate anything they deem visually appealing. It
is the second or third largest social network in the world.
The business value of using Pinterest is to:
 Communicate with your target audience if your brand deals with
interiors, DIY, cookery, fashion, hobbies and crafts.
 Be creative with pins and pictures to create a unique brand experience.
 Post a picture with a price, increasing interest.
 Take advantage of better click-through and sales conversion rates than on
Twitter or Facebook.
 Experience a user base that tends to have a high disposable income.
 Work with shoppers who, when referred to a website via Pinterest, will
spend 10% more than those referred by other sources.

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Meetup
Meetup allows users to join or create their own online community in any unique
niche that they are involved in. There are more general business communities as
well as specific communities that you can use to target specific types of people.
Unlike typical social networking sites where you might never physically see the
person you are interacting with, Meetup, as the name states, enables you to
physically attend local events in your area. Meetup has 20.32 million members and
is growing fast.
The business value of using Meetup is to:
 Create your own community to showcase your brand and invite people to
events for no cost or for a fee.
 Join communities that you are interested in networking with.
 Find new hires.
 Find potential partners.
 Find new prospects.
 Practice your pitch.
 Find events to attend in your area for free.
WordPress(orOtherBloggingPlatform)
Most people don’t realize that WordPress is the largest application in blogging and
general corporate websites. There are more than 75 million websites that use
WordPress. It is the underlying platform for most blogs and websites people view
every day. More than 409 million people view more than 14.4 billion pages each
month. Each month, users generate 40 million new posts and 50 million
comments.
Other top blogging or content management systems (CMS) on the market include
Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, Sbvtle, SquareSpace and Wix. If you do not blog about
the business value of what you do and how you help your customers, you’re
missing a huge opportunity to connect with customers.
The business value of using WordPress or blog is to:
 Easily write and publish valuable content.
 Allows you to integrate your website and your blog.

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 Increase SEO.
 Communicate with current clients and prospects.
 Build your brand.
 Educate your audience.
 Generate leads.
 Build a database of contacts.
 Build landing pages or squeeze pages to give something of value and
capture an email address.
EmailMarketingPlatforms
Email marketing is one of the more important things that you can do to build your
business. Building a database of emails that wish to receive valuable information
from you daily or weekly is critical to your company’s ability to grow and scale.
There are so many to choose from in the marketplace, many with free monthly
send limits, but the top five are Constant Contact, Mailchimp, iContact, Aweber
and Express Pigeon. As of February 2014, Reachmail, allows you to send the most
free emails per month.
The business value of using an email marketing platform is to:
 Build a database of people that you can directly message daily.
 Communicate news.
 Communicate events.
 Communicate promotions.
 Communicate new products and services.
 Communicate partner products.
 Send valuable content and information.
 Help you promote content through social media.
 Generate new leads.

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WhatIsAProspect?
hether you are a marketing professional, business owner or
entrepreneur, the most important component of your business is
bringing qualified prospects in the door. With a good product or
service, you are almost guaranteed results if you have a steady stream
of prospects. If you want to grow your business, you need more prospects. There
are five main types of prospects.
PotentialClient
The prospect that most of us typically think about first is a client, either an
individual or a business, who may purchase your product or service. An individual
purchases your product themselves with their own assets, while a business
purchases your product using the business’s assets. Once you have brought in a
new client, most of the time they want to help your business grow and you also
want to help them grow.
BusinessAdvocate
A business advocate is a prospect who works with you to help your business grow.
A business advocate can do this at no cost if they know, like and trust you and
there is some mutual benefit, or for a fee. A business advocate is anyone in your
network who helps your business grow by sending your content to their network,
giving you information, mentoring, passing you leads, making a referral or
introduction at no cost to you. Anyone that you pay for products or services;
partners, vendors, suppliers, manufacturers, are also business advocates. All
business advocates want to help your business grow and you also want to help
their business grow.
Investor
An investor is a prospect who will give your business money in order to launch,
expand or otherwise grow. Investment may come from individual investors,
angels, angel groups, incubators, organizations and/or venture firms. An investor
wants to help your business grow and you want to help them grow.
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NewHire
A new hire is a prospect who will do work for your business either as a 1099,
contractor, consultant or permanent hire. Once you bring in a new hire they want
to help your business grow and you want to help them grow.
YourBoss
Your boss is a prospect whom you will work for either in a permanent position or
as a consultant, contractor or freelancer. Once you have a boss they want to help
you grow and you want to help them grow.

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SocialSellingBusinessChallenges
here are some core business challenges for sales and marketing
professionals and business owners that hold them back from being
successful, maximizing revenue and growing their businesses.
LackofProspects
Most business professionals are extremely challenged to identify exactly who they
should be targeting and build a database of prospects.
LackofQualifiedLeads
The biggest challenge for most business professionals is a lack of qualified leads
and inadequate levels of sales activity. This has a lot to do with having a lack of
specific prospects to target, but a greater reason is that they don’t understand how
to proactively message prospects based on business value in order to generate
large amounts of qualified leads.
OutdatedandDisconnectedToolsandTechniques
Many professionals struggle with using outdated, disconnected tools and
techniques from the 20th century. Others struggle to use many disconnected tools
not built for generating leads. The biggest outdated tool is your company website;
97% of all websites are static brochures that nobody reads. Typical websites add
zero value to your prospects. Prospects have no idea what you do or where your
value lies.
The phone is another outdated tool from the 20th century. The phone should still
be utilized, but never as the primary vehicle for prospects. If you’re still cold calling
as your primary vehicle for generating leads, your business is a dinosaur.
Email is a 43-year-old technology. Email can yield good results when used
properly, but most professionals don’t understand how to create business value-
focused emails that get results.
Let’s shift to the 21st century tools. You might have a blog, LinkedIn, Facebook,
Twitter, YouTube or other social networking accounts. Within all of these you have
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to manage comments, groups, personal connections and messages, plus try to gain
intelligence about prospect triggers that you have to take action on.
Next, there is the dreaded CRM that you use, or don’t use (but don’t tell your boss).
You also might be paying a company for SEO because you are trying to do PPC or
PPV on all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. The 21st century
tools are great if you have the entire day to manage all of the disconnected tools
yourself or have the budget to hire an internal or external marketing army that is
sometimes misaligned with sales and how they are generating leads.
DisconnectedInternalTeams
The organization you work for and all the people within are typically disconnected.
Your employees and their networks are rich in leads, but there is no way to
effectively mine their networks or collectively message social networks in order to
generate new prospects and leads.
InabilitytoHireGreatPeople
This is a challenge for most organizations, but the best hires typically come from
internal referrals. Your employees and their social networks are rich in potential
hires, but there is no way to access these networks in a managed way that produces
results.
InabilitytoTapintoYourPersonalBusinessNetwork
This is an extremely large challenge that most business professionals aren't even
aware of. You probably have between 150 and 250 people that know, like and trust
you, who want to help you succeed in business and life. This is not your email list,
Twitter followers or Facebook likes. There is no efficient way to tap into the
collective knowledge and network of your personal business advocate community.
These would be the people that you could call, email or text message and they
would take action for you right away.
InabilitytoTapintoaLargerCommunityofFollowers
Most social marketers and business professionals realize that they need to grow
their list of followers on their social networks, but many don’t understand a
strategy for tapping into this community of followers or why they need to focus on
identifying and promoting their business advocates. Many professionals have

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thousands or tens of thousands of followers, but don’t understand why they aren’t
getting the results they want to achieve.

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SocialSellingSolutions
hese business challenges seem impossible to solve, but there has to be a
better way. If you are a small business you may not have the time or energy
to manage all of these things. You also most likely don’t have the budget to
hire an army of people to do everything for you. If you are a medium or
large business, you might have the budget to do all of these things, but typically
results are poor because marketing teams, sales teams, product teams, support
teams, HR teams and IT teams are not aligned to exceed customer expectations.
Remember, the single biggest challenge to solve is a lack of qualified leads from
prospects and inadequate levels of sales activity. Solve this business challenge and
you are almost guaranteed to succeed as long as you have a good product or
service. What if it was possible to solve all the other challenges and also align the
solution with bringing more qualified prospects in the door? Here is an overview of
the social selling solution areas that will accomplish this.
Content
Content is the most important and foundational component of social selling. If
your content does not focus on how you can provide business value to your
customer, your business will never be as successful as it could be. Content is any
type of information that you or someone else writes or says to your prospect. It also
includes information that your prospect reads about you or your organization or
data that you review about your prospect or their organization. Think about where
all of this content resides and how it is delivered below. Many of these areas can be
consolidated and aligned back to bringing prospects in the door.
 Company websites, internet, intranet, extranet
 Phone
 Email
 Email Marketing
 Direct mail
 Print advertising
 Printed brochures or glossies
 Traditional networking
 Events
 Blogs
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 Social networking accounts – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
 Slideshare
 Business groups or communities
 Personal connections
 Comments and messages
 Business intelligence systems
 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
 SEO (Link Building)
 Pay Per Click (PPC)
 Social Media Marketing
Community
Every individual has between 150 and 250 people in their business advocate
community that know, like and trust them. These are people that you can call,
email or text and they will take action on things you want them to do right away.
They can be family members, friends, colleagues or even company employees. You
and others in your community might have thousands or tens of thousands of
followers on the major social networks. Followers are not business advocates, but
at the same time, they are part of your community and you have the ability to
influence them. They will take action at a percentage based on how much business
value you are giving them on a daily basis. Business value can be measured by the
amount of good content you are sending out on a daily basis to your community
that is not just about you and your product or service. Think about the power of
these statements for finding new prospects. Imagine if you had the ability to know
who your business advocates were and who wants to help your business succeed,
and you understood the percentage of your followers that would take action on
your campaigns.
Collaboration
Within your business advocate community you should have the ability to
collaborate or work with each other accomplish tasks and share common goals.
When you have the ability to directly collaborate and communicate with your
community and you know who your business advocates are, you can dramatically
increase your productivity. Tasks get completed and goals are achieved 15-25%
faster. The effect of this is dramatic because daily tasks and goals never stop

19
happening. The compounding effects of better collaboration can transform how
you do business.
KnowledgeSharing
You have questions every day and your community gives you expert answers or
refers you to the right person who can help you. Knowledge-sharing is a two way
street. You have to be willing to help others before you ask for help. You have to
give to get. You have to make deposits daily. If you do this properly, when you ask
community members to get your message outside the community to their social
networks, a larger percentage of them will want to help you.
SocialSharing
Social sharing gives you the ability to directly message and send the content from a
web page to individuals or your community via email or any of the social
networking sites from the web page you are on. When you are browsing around
websites on your mobile device, desktop or tablet in the future, pay attention to
whether the social sharing buttons (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.) are
there on the page and highly visible. In 97% of all websites, there are no social
sharing buttons, but even when there are, they’re not highly visible. Social sharing
buttons are extremely powerful because they give you a simple way to share good
content with your community.
SocialFeatures
Social networking sites have common social features that we all have become
familiar with. These include activity streams, direct messaging, @mentioning,
sending content, creating events, reviewing profiles, following, searching, liking,
commenting and sharing. These social features will become the standard way we
communicate in the future over the all web and mobile applications so it is
extremely important to educate yourself on them.
BusinessIntelligence
Business intelligence gives you the ability to understand data on what users do on
your site and how users share the content on your site. You have the ability to view
canned and custom reports, as well as analytics, that allow you to take action and
make decisions on how to improve your business, generate more leads and
communicate better with your community. Data comes not only from your site and
the users on your site, but it can also come from external sources across the web.

20
Data coming from users on your site is easy to understand, but external data
sources involve open and closed Application Programming Interfaces (API) and
data that can be purchased from places such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The
ultimate goal is use internal data and external data to make better business
decisions, generate more prospects and grow your business.
Conclusion
ccording to Jim Keenan from “A Sales Guy Consulting” and Barbara
Giamanco from “Social Centered Selling,” social selling positively impacts
revenue. Jim and Barbara co-wrote a new study called “Social Media and
Sales Quota.”
Here are some findings from the survey of 511 sales professionals:
 72.6% of sales professionals who use social media in their sales process
outperformed their selling peers and exceeded quota 23% more often.
 Of those not using social media, 21.7% said that they did not see the value
and 45% did not understand it.
 75% of respondents stated they never received any training in the effective
use of social media.
 LinkedIn is the number one site for sales activities.
The bottom line is that social selling will get you results, so just go out and do it!
Good luck! Mike
Written by Michael C. Bertoni – Founder & CTO – PhillyTech
www.phillytech.co – info@phillytech.co
PhillyTech Launch Movie Trailer - http://goo.gl/Sqv08O
A

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