10 Social Selling Commandments

THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS
OF
SOCIAL SELLING
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ENTERPRISE SALES MEETUP |
@ENTERPRISE_SALE

Introduction
• This presentation walks through the ten most critical
aspects of social selling
• It is common to see many salespeople and sales
teams make the same mistakes when social selling
• With increasing noise across all channels of
communications, greater competitive challenges, and
more content available to buyers, social becomes
more important
• Despite the negativity and haters, social selling is not
going to go away quietly
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Some caveats…
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Social Selling is a bunch of…
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Questions you must ask
• Who exactly are you targeting?
• Are your prospects really on social?
• Does what you sell translate to social?
• Is your industry an adopter of social?
• Have your competitors gone social?
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What social selling can’t do?
• Substitute for real life conversations
• Automatically generate qualified leads
• Take prospects from interest to desire
• Negotiate and close your deals
• Be your one sole sales method
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What can social selling do?
• Support marketing advocacy = clicks
• Improve prospecting results = meetings
• Nurture existing deals = wins
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The Ten Commandments of Social
Selling
1. You shall have no other ways before sales
2. You shall not worship any one method
3. You shall not have any goals in vain
4. You shall remember your plan
5. You shall honor your brand
6. You shall target your outreach
7. You shall measure your activity
8. You shall operationalize your process
9. You shall not give false hype
10. You shall not copy another’s playbook
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No other ways before sales
• Social Selling = Sales AND Sales is Social
• Have the fundamentals in place before
rushing off to the social selling gold rush
• Own your training & development in sales
and always be learning
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PRACTICAL TIP
Commit to reading one book about sales per
quarter or dedicating 15 minutes per day reading
sales blog posts
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SALES

Recommended resources
• Books
– Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount
– Snap Selling by Jill Konrath
– The Sales Development Playbook by Trish Bertuzzi
– New Sales Simplified by Mike Weinberg
• Blogs
– A Sales Guy by Keenan
– The Sales Blog by Ian Narino
– Partners in Excellence by David Brock
– HubSpot Sales Blog
• Training
– Kurlan & Associates
– Richardson Training
– Sandler Training
– VorsightBP
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MANY OTHER SOURCES, BE CURIOUS
SALES

Don’t worship any one method
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• Social selling is not something to use
exclusively outside of other approaches
• Mix and match different channels and
tools to increase your productivity
PRACTICAL TIP
The secret is to incorporate social into what you
are already doing today, so start with a broader
methodology + your own process
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MODEL

Plenty of sales methodologies…
• Miller-Heiman Strategic Selling
• Target Account Selling
• Solution Selling
• Sandler Selling System
• MEDDIC
• The Challenger Sale
• SNAP Selling
• Baseline Selling
• Value Selling Framework
• CustomerCentric Selling
• Insight Selling
• And many, many more vendor specific approaches…
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ADJUST AND CUSTOMIZE AS NEEDED
MODEL

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Don’t have any goals in vain
• Before using social selling, define your
why, your what, and your how
• Goals should be Specific, Measurable,
Achievable, Relevant & Time-bound
PRACTICAL TIP
Find people in your industry that are active on
social channels, observe what they do, then reach
out and ask them about THEIR goals
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FOCUS

Examples of social sales goals
• A smart goal
– Generate 5 substantive conversations with CMO /
VP Marketing level executive per week that leads
to at least 3 new deals per quarter
• A dumb goal
– Get to 5,000 connections LinkedIn and 10,000
followers on Twitter and get a bunch of likes and
shares and retweets
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FOCUS

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• Like any approach, it needs to become as
regular and automatic as a habit
• If it is not on your schedule, you never
make time and it never happens
Remember your plan
PRACTICAL TIP
Set 10 minutes before the workday and 10 minutes
towards the end of the workday for specific “social
activities” on your calendar & add alerts
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COMMIT

Ideas for social activities
• Scan your feed of news / blogs (use newsreader like
Feedly, Newsblur or Inoreader)
• Peruse tweets of a handful of people* you follow on
Twitter & LinkedIn
• Share one post you like on Twitter & LinkedIn, retweet
or like a few posts
• Send a few personalized LinkedIn connection requests
to potentially interesting people
• Respond to interactions with your followers,
connection requests & social activities you receive
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* These are your targeted prospects and industry influencers
COMMIT

Automation used wisely
Technology is not a substitute for thinking, but can
multiply your efforts
– Scheduled Posting – Buffer, Hootsuite, Twitter Ads,
Sprout Social
– Follower Growth – GrowthChamp, Followerwonk,
Manage Flitter
– Advanced Workflows – IFTTT, Zapier, App-to-App
integrations
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COMMIT

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Honor your brand
• Most salespeople neglect taking time to
build their professional image
• Credibility is built when prospects can see
your authentic POV (point of view)
PRACTICAL TIP
Build an online folder & spreadsheet of content
that can be used (your own, your company, other
sources) that align to your POV
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REAL

Doing a quick social makeover
LINKEDIN
 Avoid the resume approach
 High quality profile picture
 Fill-in your profile and make
sure its current
 Use a catchy tagline rather
than your company & title
 Get handful of
recommendations
 Use the summary to describe
your value and expertise to
clients
 Share relevant posts & content
that you collected
 Make your profile public
 Add your contact information
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TWITTER
 Use your name & a
professional handle
 High quality profile picture
(same as LinkedIn)
 Fill-in your bio and include a
company handle / hashtag
 Add location and website
 Schedule a series of relevant
tweets
 Start to follow more people you
want to target (watch your
follow ratio)
 Make your profile public
 Get alerts for certain targeted
profiles
REAL

The perfect social profile
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 Not simply a resume
 Professional headshot
 Personalized LinkedIn URL
 Complete profile
 Quickly understand value she provides
 Shares some relevant content
 Summary speaks to her “why”
 Good number of connections

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Target your outreach
• Define your audience, find prospects &
learn what they care most about
• Personalization is critical, remember that
content without context is spam
PRACTICAL TIP
Use tools such as Nimble, Full Contact, Rapportive,
Clearbit, etc. to find social profiles of targeted
prospects & reach out using across those channels
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TARGET

What social spammers do
• Refuse to customize LinkedIn connect requests
• Send LinkedIn connect request, then message you
immediately with a pitch
• Use automated messaging like Twitter Direct Messages when
connecting
• Like, retweet, favorite everything without reading or providing
intelligent comments
• Send out the same low-grade, non-personalized content over
and over again
• Do not engage in meaningful conversations other than to pitch
their stuff
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DON’T BE A NOISE GENERATOR
TARGET

What social winners do
• After having a conversation with prospect, send personalized
LinkedIn connection request
• Post a relevant and high quality post on LinkedIn that speaks
to your prospect’s need / pain point
• Follow company on LinkedIn and Twitter, observe stuff
company talks about and shares
• Visit a few other executive and mid-level employee LinkedIn
profiles and follow the more active ones
• Have a touch plan that incorporates LinkedIn & Twitter
outreach and share content that reflects need / pain point
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BE A VALUE GENERATOR!
TARGET

Secrets of a LinkedIn power user
WHAT TO DO MORE INFO
Upload your contacts This expands your 1st level connections, creating many more 2nd level connections
that are easier to reach
Viewers of this profile… When connecting to a prospect, use this section to see other relevant contacts,
then create the prospect org chart
Advanced search Find prospects by title, company, location, keyword, company size, seniority level,
groups, etc. (some of these require paid account)
Ways to keep in touch Respond to changes / updates of your contacts 1) let’s you know important contact
updates 2) puts you top of mind w/ contacts
Join groups Another access point to relevant prospects to connect to & discussions can lead to
reasons for making a connection
Follow companies Provides updates & content from companies to use in your outreach
Deep prospect research Lots of useful info; contact info & links, posts & media, work & schools, interests,
volunteer work, recommendations, groups, how to contact, etc.
Connect requests Personalize invite and use the 300 characters to 1) talk about them 2) why they
should connect 3) call to action
InMails Last rung of outreach, note that any response to an InMail within 90 days (even not
interested) returns your credit
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TARGET

Secrets of a Twitter power user
WHAT TO DO MORE INFO
Upload your contacts Increases your number of connections, growing your credibility and more
importantly the reach of your tweets
Who to follow Recommendations on like accounts to build your network; also note the “You might
want to follow these similar accounts” right after following someone
Advanced search Can use https://twitter.com/search-advanced to find similar users or users
interested in similar topics
Hashtags Three ways to leverage 1) add one relevant hashtag to your bio 2) add one or two
hashtags to enhance visibility of your tweets 3) follow hashtags for discussions
Build lists Build a few lists to capture 1) industry leaders 2) prospects – both people and
companies 3) industry / profession tips & tricks
Follow lists Lists provide a way to follow a curated set of users, look out for lists created by
industry leaders / influencers
Deep prospect research Read through tweets of active prospects and see who they follow, what hashtags
they follow, and which lists they joined
Like and retweets Use these as icebreakers a couple of days before OR after following a user you have
targeted; avoid creepy, but continue to do so sparingly
Direct messaging Can be effective if not used as pitch, apply same rules as LinkedIn InMails or direct
emails; best way is to share useful content like a post or webinar
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TARGET

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Measure your activity
• Remember the point about goals is that
they need to be measurable
• Avoid vanity metrics and things that do not
have a line of sight to revenue
PRACTICAL TIP
Track social engagement in your CRM / sales tool,
have designated activities & tasks for different
social channels
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MEASURE

Tracking social to revenue
• What is your return on investment using social? More than
source!
– Lead source is not enough, track task level and identify the
CHANNEL of engagement
– Use automation to capture LinkedIn & Twitter activities in the
CRM / sales tool
• What does not lead to revenue…
– SSI – LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index
– Klout and Kred scores
– Number of connections / followers
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MEASURE
MONEY METRICS MATTER MOST

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Operationalize your process
• New approaches take time to refine and
become comfortable with
• Once you have learned and adjusted the
approach, begin to scale out to team
PRACTICAL TIP
Compare social activities in CRM sales tool vs. each
other & phone / email outreach. Look for # of
activities, # of deals, deal size, length of sales cycle.
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LEARN

Building repeatability
• A/B test your messaging for connection requests, tweets,
LinkedIn posts, LinkedIn shares
• Test different touch plans, time between touches, and number
of overall touches
• Build templates for messaging and centralize all templates for
easy access
• Create standard process and setup within CRM / sales tool
• Add automation and alerts where applicable to ensure
compliance and discipline of social selling habits
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LEARNING BEGETS SUCCESS
TARGET

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Don't give false hype
• Easy to put on the “Happy Ears” and base
results on anecdotal evidence
• Ask hard questions and do not support
activities and effort without results
PRACTICAL TIP
Set goal of one or more deal reviews per quarter
with sales team that originated from social activity.
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RESULTS

Sharing is caring (and winning)
• Story telling is core sale skill, create case studies that show
social selling success
• Create a Slack channel (or other app) to continuously share
tips across team
• Incorporate social as a category on sales analytics
dashboards and share with team
• Support each other’s social selling activities with retweets,
share & likes
• Add an MBO (management by objectives) to quarterly
bonuses for documenting social selling successes
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BUILD ON SOCIAL SUCCESSES
RESULTS

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Don't covet another’s playbook
• There is no one-size-fits-all approach or
strategy in sales
• Hone in on the unique model that works
for you and for your team
PRACTICAL TIP
Your sales playbook should have social engagement
plays and have your repeatable social activities
incorporated
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UNIQUE

Let’s Talk
• Follow me and send a tweet
@marksbirch
• Connect over LinkedIn and mention this
presentation
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch
• If you sell to enterprises, join us for the Enterprise
Sales Meetup
http://enterprisesalesmeetup.com/
• If you are focused on prospecting, join us for the
Sales Development Meetup
http://www.meetup.com/Sales-Development-
Meetup/
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THANK YOU!

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