This is the fourth of a five-part blog series based on the SalesGuru Community Event “Social Selling in Action: Best Practices from Eloqua’s Top Salesperson“. Special thanks to DocuSign for sponsoring the community and this event. Catch up on part one here, part two here and part three here.
Part four of this series focuses on Jill’s tips for beginners – those who aren’t yet using social selling techniques but want to get started.
Matt:
If someone is starting out, are there 1 or 2 things you would recommend they start with to start building momentum for themselves? You’ve given so many great examples of what to do and so many things to do, where do you start? If someone is a little overwhelmed by all the things they could be doing and clearly I’m assuming you didn’t start by doing all these. Over time you sort of built this into your system and the muscle you use.
Jill:
Sure. The easiest place and the most valuable place I think still to start is in LinkedIn. It is the most valuable tool that I use for social selling. Create a profile, a complete profile, and keep that profile current with books you’re reading, by joining groups that are both good for you personally but also groups where your buyers are.
Be where your buyer is but don’t be selling in that group. If you are responding to a question and pushing your product you’re not doing social selling. You’re doing social annoying. It’s inappropriate and you’re not going to get the respect you deserve.
Start by joining some groups and then inviting some people to connect in that group via the group connection. On LinkedIn add your Twitter handle. I know it’s another channel to think about, but create a Twitter handle and think about when you’re connecting with people on LinkedIn, look to see if they have their Twitter handle on their LinkedIn profile. If they do follow them on Twitter right from their LinkedIn profile.
When you begin to follow people on Twitter, you can also check to see who they are following Click on their followers to see the list and you can very easily scroll through that list and you can start to follow some of the people that person is following. Especially if it’s an account you’re going after, so let’s say Brocade is an account I would like to get into. So I would go into LinkedIn and look at some folks who are connected with some folks at Brocade and then I would go to Twitter to follow some folks on Twitter who are from Brocade. I would retweet some of their tweets and I would see who Diane Schmidt, Director of Demand Gen, who is she following on Twitter? Who is following Diane? So that’s my social surround strategy.
And a really simple trick and tip is if you get an out of office responder and it says if you have questions about this, then contact this person. Go to LinkedIn and who is this person, is it someone you should be connected to? If you get an RFP and it lists a bunch of names, go to LinkedIn and who are those people and what role do they play in the buying process? What is the relevant content you can serve up to them proactively?
We use Eloqua. The other day I got a notification that someone had done a search on marketing operations and ended up in our community. I’ve got some great research on marketing operations. I put it in a nice email and shipped it over to my contact there and I’m adding value.
So there are lots of little things you can do and build it over time.
SlideShare is a relatively new channel for me. So on SlideShare what I did is I went and I followed someone I love and respect, Joe Chernov. He is our VP of Content at Eloqua. And so I followed Joe at SlideShare and I looked at who does Joe follow and who follows Joe and I start to follow those people. And that’s how I got the notification of Jeremiah’s Social Business presentation being available on SlideShare, real time notification. So I’m one of the first people to break that piece of content to the network. Because I got the immediate notification that it was posted, I viewed it, I loved it. It was spot on and I shared it in 3 channels and it took me no more than two minutes to do all that.
So take some courses, find some people who are doing this well within the organization and ask them if they’ll share how they’re doing it and how they got started. And then make it a discipline, make it muscle memory and make it a part of what you do.
Matt:
Can you talk about what role Facebook has in this social selling world for you?
Jill:
Yes absolutely! So like a lot of people on this call and I’m presuming but the data shows it, Facebook was initially where I would connect with old high school friends and keep in touch with family. My family is in Virginia and my husband’s family is in Florida and so it was an easy way for us to see what we all were doing. I have over time been using Facebook for business as well. I look at it as another channel for me to curate content. I said this before, I’m not really a content creator and I actually struggle with original writing. I’m just not naturally a writer, I’m more math minded, but I curate a lot of content and Facebook is one of those channels that I use to share and curate content and to consume content.
So I use Facebook (1) to consume content, (2) to share content, (3) to network and to get to know my buyers on a more personal level.
Matt:
One thing you mentioned in the middle of one of these stories that I want to touch on is the idea of social buying signals. So it’s one thing to find someone that you want to build a social relationship with and use the strategies you talked about here to build that relationship and eventually find a way to help them solve problems or make connections. It’s another thing to use the buying signals themselves to try and find prospects.
For example, yesterday one of the wireless Wi-Fi routers in our office started to peter out and I’m overwhelmed by the different choices online and I’m not an IT guy. I posted on Twitter a very explicit buying signal that said. “Hey, I’m looking for a router for one of our offices. What should we buy?” I had zero responses to that.
Now someone in one of our offices working on our team could have given a more subtle buying signal, which could have been something like, our Wi-Fi sucks in here. So it would seem to me that those kinds of buying signals of either “I need a new router” or “Wi-Fi sucks” could be signals you are looking for across the web to identify the right person at the right company with context in which to engage. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jill:
One of my columns in my Tweet Deck is Marketing Automation. Another column is Lead Scoring and another column is Lead Nurturing. And when I go to events or participate in web events I follow the hash tag. And so I put the hash tag in a column.
Let’s just go back to the term “marketing automation.” If someone is tweeting that they are looking at marketing automation…in the beginning I was doing this individually but then we created a social media SWAT team at Eloqua so that I wasn’t the only one monitoring the social channels. So we monitor now, at an organized level, many channels for those social selling buy signals.
And Matt, shame on all the companies that sell routers. Someone should have immediately reached out to you. There are dozens if not hundreds of companies that sell routers. So, yeah, you have to be in the channel listening for social selling cues and then quickly follow up to that social selling buying signal.
