Learn Social Selling and Outbound Sales

[jpanarra]

Hey JP here,

I wanted to share a bit of my own notes of my experiences and learning in the past year. I've learned that the best way to start out with sales is a combination of Social Selling and Outbound Sales (in any form). The combination is a powerful tool if you utilize it correctly, you shouldn't have a problem gaining sales.


I still have a long way to improve on my social media sales strategy, but I wanted to lay the foundation down. I'm stronger with my outbound sales strategy, but social selling will help me in that territory and is what I believe will take me to the next level of profitability.


Before I start going into details, I want to make sure that your message you deliver on social media and during your outbound sales should be the same. I know this might seem trivial but if you don’t have a consistent message it can depreciate your reputation instead of helping your personal brand. In this first post I'll go over Social Selling, and I'll dive into outbound sales soon.


Social Selling


No doubt that social selling is a critical portion of a balanced sales strategy. There are 5 goals(results) you should strive to achieve when it comes to social sales.

1. Personal Branding
2. Inbound Leads
3. Trigger Events (inbound leads take action on your website/profile etc.)
4. Research/Data ( learn about who's listening to you)
5. "public" outbound sales (Sell to people on a social media platform where everyone can see them)

Now for this to happen, you need to have a process or system that makes it possible. I get that social selling is not a panacea, but once again, It allows me to establish a brand and increase visibility which will allow me to leverage my value on what I'm trying to sell. Now Social selling is not typical trying to sell to others individually like a slimy car salesman, but rather a methodology to fill up your pipeline with a prospecting process and boost your personal brand.

I came across this group of 5 "C's" of social selling in a book and I thought it'll be good to paraphrase it and share with you all and Is the foundation of my social selling strategy.

Connecting -

• Don’t be afraid to send a 'friend' request and connect. Start an conversation with individuals and find out about their business situation, see if you can discover a problem you can help with.
  • Even If its not a direct prospect, more connections means more views and possibly more 'shares' by others increasing your visibility which will improve your personal brand.

Content Creation -

• Creating & Publishing original content that is directly relevant to what you have to offer and can solve, this will allow people to perceive your brand as an higher quality and trust your valuation. Understand you don’t do this to try to get 'more' sales, but rather to help others and the valuation in what you have to offer will naturally go up.
  • I've seen awesome examples of this on the Forum, for instance @Fox Fox's web school is an perfect example of this social 'selling' strategy, it helps people and it helps you build a powerful network/community.
• Content Examples are such as Articles, Videos, Slides, Podcasts, Infographics, Books, Case Studies, Webinars, and the list goes on and on.

Content Curation-

• What's the point of creating content and its not being shared!? Makes sure you share your content across all platforms, don’t be afraid to ask people to share it for you.
• Make sure that you are clear on the intent to help, and not just hire a VA to do the work for you (we had an example of that yesterday and MJ shut them down.) Make sure you're trying to help and be patient, with that in mind people will listen.

Conversion-

• Make sure you have a system in place to collect your email list, your interactions, conversations, etc…
  • Use an excel sheet for a simple solution of this and log all of the people you feel like could lead to a referral or sale. This will help you be more efficient in your outreach side of things.

Consistency

• This is the most important one in my personal opinion, be consistent. Don’t forget that this is a grind!

I will add more about how this ties in with my outbound sales strategy soon, but this is the foundation of how I'm going to approach Social Selling. I hope this will help you as much it'll help me.

I started doing the social selling side of things around February and fell off the wagon a bit because I got soaked with web development work and direct outbound leads, but is I'm still getting connections and referrals for the small amount of work I did in February. The 'C' I failed is the consistency side of things. Soon I'll share with you how I handle the outbound side of things, but If you want to start selling and finding 'leads' through social media this is a solid place to start.

 

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