Be social to be seen

Understand the context

Digital Selling DNA

Getting Started

Build your process

Sales OS - Connected Sales Workflows

Why change? Selling is tougher than ever

The job of a B2B sales professional is getting harder, actually is now hardest than ever. There are talks questioning the future of salespeople and even sales as a profession. Artificial intelligence, big data and social technology are changing the relationships between business and customers. And is true customers are changing too. But all this hype misses one key factor, how savvy professionals will adapt to master disrupting technologies to work on their behalf.

According to the Gartner group most of those salespeople who do not reach their targets work with traditional sales methods . Using list based on attributes like company sector, size, revenues or people titles.

78% of salespeople who use social channels and data outperform their peers.

Social data is updated and can be used to assess the interest of a person in a subject so as a proxy for buying interest.

But having a list of potential customers is not going to get you any sales done. You need an effective way to get in touch with them.

Any way to get in touch could work as long as involves a personal and it can scale to reach your prospect market.

You need the personal interaction because we are blind to generic messages and ads. And you need the scale because selling is still a numbers game.

Channels like phone calls are not scalable for prospecting (also calls are not well perceived in most places).

Advertising is generic by definition and every time less effective. But it can help as a complimentary reinforcement as re-targeting to a segmented list.

Emailing used to be an effective channel as is personal and scalable. But the abuse of massive cold emailing have made it not effective or even legal for prospecting ( Europe GDPR) .

98% of executives never respond to a cold email.

We are aiming to get opportunities to interact with our target prospects . Social networks are the best cost-effective, scalable way.

Yet a multichannel approach is always more successful than any single method. The combination of the social process outlined in this guide with other methods as email, phone or even targeted advertisement will multiply results..

How may calls or emails just to set up one meeting?

Social data is mostly updated and can be used to assess the interest of a person respect a certain subject so in that sense could be used as a proxy for buying interest.

But just having a list of potential customers is not going to get you any sales done, you need an effective way to get in touch with them.

We are all overloaded and the average number of interactions required for a customer to acknowledge “us” has increased to more than 10.Most salespeople (about 80% ) stop a second attempt; a first call or message and a follow-up.

On the other hand there is a rise in the use of drip mailing sequences. While is true that might marginally increase your response rates , there a cost in the damage of your personal and business brand when you are perceived as sending too many .

It is about getting more results by sending more of the same.

And everyone knows about email automation , so you are not perceived as taking a personal interest. You have to differentiate.

Scale up with Micro-interactions

You can find people related to what you are selling in Linkedin and Twitter. You have access to their contact details to get in touch and send them a message. A personalised message on Linkedin has several times the response rate of a cold email.

But it takes time.

It takes time to research each profile and to write something personal each time . At the end of the day is still a numbers game that requires putting much work daily if you want to get something out of it.

We are all overloaded. The number of interactions required for a customer to notice us has increased to more than 10. Most salespeople (about 80% ) give up on the second attemp; the first call or message and a single follow-up.

Interactions are not only messages but any exposition to ourselves or our content. Interactions are anything that "exposes" your profile to your target profile.

Actually, a popular way to get visitors to visit your profile is to just visit theirs. This "reciprocity" or better "curiosity" is said to work in around 10% of your visits. Of course to use it as a sales technique you need tools to scale it.

There are other interactions that you can use, easy ones as "liking" their content or more impactful like commenting or connecting.

Sharing content via messages is a powerful interaction, especially if is something relevant to the prospect

If these interactions happen over a period, across social channels there will be perceived as more natural.

That natural flow also gives the opportunity to the customer to mature your association with any of their interest or needs.

The key is not to try to sell on the first occasion. But use it to trigger a connection between your headline and an existing issue in the prospect mind.

That "click" just need an instant for your prospects to see your headline. If that happens your next move ( message, proposal, content ) will be perceived differently. As a potentially relevant source worth of listening to.

In the book " Thinking fast and slow" Nobel prize Daniel Kahneman talks about the "priming" effect. It makes people see more favourably anything familiar. And that can be achieved just by briefly exposing them to it, even without noticing.

There is also the familiarity effect by repetition. That is what publicity is based on. People - we - trust more people which are familiar and whom we have seen before.

That " trust" zone is a good place to be in sales, is a place where they are open to listening. That is the power is the power of micro-interactions.

You can achieve that with your target market using social networks and automation.

There are email software services that help you to create automated cadences to mailing list. That may work statistically as a small percentage over a large mailing list will give you some results. But it will also antagonise many others, so it is not a sustainable strategy. Email is a saturated channel and just sending more will not make it better.

You could also use LinkedIn inmails ( although a series will be expensive). But they arrive categorised under "promotional". What obviously is not the best way to establish credibility.

A better option is to use Linkedin extensions. They can send automatically messages or connections request to a Linkedin results list

But those tools work with the results " as they are showed" one after the other. Your ability to segment the message and thus make it relevant will be limited

Is much more beneficial to segment your targets by something specific. You can relate to it when getting in touch later.

We are aiming to get the attention of people by being relevant to their interest. The idea is to think first about topic of interest. Only after that use the particular title or position to adjust the messaging. We will see how to do it in the next section

As a general rule of thumb , social pretargeting works better with"normal" people vs. "celebrities." Normal means people who are occasional users of social networks vs celebrities. Normal people tend to interact with their network vs. celebrities who have " audiences" of thousands of followers. They mosty use the network only to broadcast content so are not usually so easy to engage.

The approach is based in making relevant connections in social networks and then gain their attention by being relevant.

Is still a numbers game ( as most things in sales) that need some automation to scale up. But is not a massive, indiscriminate approach as you would do with a emailing list. It works by being selective.

To prepare for this play, you need 2 ingredients

A prospects list with a particular interest

A way to get their attention

3 Steps to get Started

#STEP 1. Have a social profile that tells something to your target

This guide is not about the basics of personal branding, but you will need a good targeted profile.

There are tons of advice and resources on how to create one.

(here one checklist )

One thing make sure is that your headline profile have a sentence that “clicks” inside your customer's brain.

Pro Note- you can actually change your headline as often as needed in case you want to adjust it to target different segments

#STEP2 . Build your Lists and choose your targets

Build a list of prospects interested in what you sell is half the job.

They are many services where you can create list of targets with names and profiles from Linkedin or other sources . So why would you want to “own” contact data already available and updated elsewhere?

Traditional contact list offers personal data; name and contact information, job title, location. Or company like company size, industry, revenue. .Some others offer specific information like the technologies in their stack or their most recent funding round.But this view of your leads is becoming outdated. Instead, challenge yourself to think of a lead profile as a series of actions across their entire online and offline experience. The influencer they followed on Twitter, the question they posted on Quora, the roadshow they attended, the follow-up email they opened, and the web page they visited three days later. These actions provide you clues about leads’ purchase intent.

This information is not ready on any business intelligence tool to tell you exactly who is ready to say “yes” when you offer your product. Gathering all this data is right now impossible ( disperse proprietary systems). Will be be not legal to analyse (data privacy ) or not good enough ( predictive systems are not so good). if that moment comes , your job as sales will be done by a machine.

But all this data is available to you as an individual.You are the best capable to interpret it to know how the move the sale forward. All you need is a bit of help to get actionable data.

You should group the people you want to engage in a certain way, send a similar message or share specific content. Use lists to segment the universe of contacts and prospects you want to engage or follow up actively.

The Important point is to build a list of people that are already interested in something related to what you sell.

You can know them by heart. They might be existing customers, contacts or a list of your competitors. Or could be new prospects

you find on Linkedin or Twitter.

Why to track them ?

The key element to engage with someone is to follow their activity across social media. To do that you have to find their social profiles and follow their timeline.

The good news is you dont have to spend all your day watching it.

There are tools to do it automatically for you.

You can get alerted when a profile activity matches any of your key terms. Even set up automated Messages to be sent if some conditions happen. So you don't miss opportunities to engage with existing or new prospects

The idea is to get in touch with people who are interested in what you want to sell them, , at the moment, they have the interest.

You can do that by using signals of interest.

A combination of work-related data like their titles, companies or job descriptions. And their online presence and social activity, like what articles there have shared, liked or commented.

The traditional way of looking at a title or other static data like the company name is less efficient. There are too many job descriptions. Often you will miss the ones that are actually looking for what you sell. What if is the VP of new growth ( or any other exotic title )the one that commented an article about one of your key product areas?

When you use interest keywords to segment your list you are creating a group of people that are related to the topic.

Iit will be easier to find and also to communicate something of interest to them .

So easier to get their attention.

You could use many ways to learn that someone is a good fit for your products.

Or perhaps is just someone that you would like to get in touch with.

you can put these people into a list to engage straight away, sharing content. If they do not "react" to the line of content for that list, you can "move" them to another track

Or you can follow them and wait until they do share something related to a keyword and then send a message in the right context.

Either way, the lists will be useful containers to segment by interest and targeted messages.

Think first WHAT do you want to tell, then WHO do you want to say it to

I personally have found it helps me to think in that order instead. Is like thinking about the need or pain you solve and then about the different buyer personas that can benefit from it.

This is an essential point as the quality of the list you build is one of the most significant factors in the success of the campaign. The other, you guessed it, is the relevance of the message

If you think first, who is your customer as a TITLE, you will end up with an undifferentiated proposal, that will likely be ignored. "Dear CEO, we are the best for your "CEO-generic-problem" can we have a meeting?

‣

Example; To make the point clear I am going to share my own customer discovery process;

The point here is to think first in pains and specific problems that what you are selling solves. Then you could adjust the wording to suit any subsegment of this group, like CEO, head of sales, head of marketing etc..

Add this step -Fine tuning the message with tags and profile properties

Tagging contacts and connections is the great productivity habit

Tags are a great way to manage contacts and segment them .

The most modern app allows you to define tags for your contacts or profiles. Gmail, intercom, sequences, mailchimp and Linkedin all have tagging capabilities. We are working in a tool to auto-tag contacts and to have a cloud exchange to sync all this isolated tags.

Tags offer great flexibility and could be used for something temporal like a campaign or an invitation for an event. Or more permanent characteristics like VIP or their preferred languaje

Applying TAGS are a great way to create subsegments of people within a list with something in common.

Tags are essential when you want to tailor a message to the specific audience within a segment. For example within people interested in Big Data send a different message to technical or business people.

#STEP 3- Warm the List

Every time you follow someone, comment or even like any of their content shared , it triggers a notification from the social network.

The notification appears in their Linkedin/twitter homepage and in their web browser. They also receive an email with your name and profile.

Those micro-interactions are small signs of interest that will create a small positive reaction

You want to create the impression of developing a relationship - not just a one-shot - to differentiate yourself from a cold email.

Also nobody pays attention to all these sales pitches sent just right after a connection is made or all the twitter autoresponders

You can do that by starting with a pre-warming phase where you interact " like or comment" the content the prospect has shared. Then "establish" a connection and finally the stage of the actual messaging. Your next message should keep that warming up going on.

If you have done the previous steps, you will have now many people in a list that are interested in something specific. And you have gained access to their social inbox. Use it to make them come to you by sending something relevant.

There is a potential upside in that you will be more active online. Some people will reciprocate and like some of your content .

That for start is a great way get your share mind in case they have a project related to your speciality. On top of that when they do give you a Like , it will be shared with their network so you will have more exposition to them. And by the principle of social affinity many of them will have a similar profile to your customer so also potential customers.

Just a quick note here in case you wonder. Your activity ( likes, comments, and replies) will also be in the timeline of your connections. So basically it means that they will see you more often, that in general is a good thing again to have mind-share.