The post How to hire a social media manager: 4 ‘red flag’ phrases to watch out for appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

The post Social Media for Sales Teams: Stop Waiting on Marketing & Start Selling More appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

The post Social Media in the Steel Industry: How Steelmaster Gets Leads on Facebook appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

The post Make More Direct Sales From Your Blog by Posting LESS appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

The post Successful Content Marketing Plans do 1 Thing Really Well appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

Time to read: 3 minutes. If you’re busy engaging with customers on Facebook or using LinkedIn for sales prospecting listen up. Being known, liked and trusted enough to earn the investment of fickle customers demands giving them the confidence they need to buy. Everything else is just wasting precious time. This is what the psychology of selling teaches us. Making social media sell for your business means focusing less on merely engaging with prospects and more on doing these 3 things—right now.

Whether you’re a business-to-consumer (b2c) or business-to-business (b2b) marketer your business is probably engaging customers on social media. It’s what “the experts” say to do, after all. Social media marketing and using LinkedIn for sales prospecting is a “must do.” But what if all that tweeting, posting, updating is just a chronic waste of time? Well, for most business owners simply engaging customers IS a waste of time. Are you one of them?

In your rush to “just do social media marketing” are you taking eyes off of the goal—selling?

Or do you think it’s not possible to sell on Facebook… or that using LinkedIn for sales prospecting is unrealistic?

Proof This Stuff Works

What if I introduced you to a one-woman marketing team named Amanda Kinsella who’s selling DOZENS of heating and air conditioning systems and service contracts each month on Facebook? Or a one-man marketing team named Marcus Sheridan of River Pools & Spas who’s selling more pools and spas than anyone in North America—all using his blog?

A handful of small businesses are creating sales with social marketing campaigns by using it to create confidence in customers. They’re literally offering prospects results in advance. By that I mean they’re either giving customers a “mini taste” of actual success or solving a problem for them that relates to their ultimate goal. In some cases they’re dramatizing the exceptional results of their service—the emotional end result of what it is they get paid to do for customers.

Focus on Giving Customers Confidence

There is power in making the buyer feel confident. Think: “yeah, I can have this in my life… I can have this situation go in a direction that gives me a promotion or won’t get me fired!” Or “I can get to that goal I want and get some help doing it the right way, on time and it without emptying my bank account.”

The opportunity is to take advantage of this power using social media in ways that get leads and sales—not re-tweets, follows or Likes!

Giving customers a sense of confidence is the best way to earn deeper levels of trust. Your business can give customers that kind of confidence using LinkedIn, blogs, Facebook or YouTube videos. How? It’s mainly about exploiting the remarkably good experiences your product, account or customers service team provides. And that takes a plan, a process.

Trust: The Outcome of a Process

In Marcus Sheridan’s case, Virginia-based River Pools & Spas is showcasing their ability to make all of those fears and doubts vanish from customers’ minds. Think about the fears involved in a typical in-ground, fiberglass pool installation involving bulldozers and tens of thousands of dollars. Marcus uses blogs, YouTube videos and ebooks to remove those fears and create confidence—first in the idea itself, not in his company per se.

This way the customer often asks YOU for the sale. How so? Because the customer feels so “invested in” that the idea of parting with their money is less about a sales transaction and more of a “next step” in a journey they’ve been exploring.

Hence, the process is all about solving customers problems in many cases… in ways that create confidence.

The 3 Success Principles

Whenever you’re using social media marketing keep these success principles in mind. Focus on:

1. Solving customers’ problems and/or showcasing the emotional end result (in ways that create confidence)
2. Designing social marketing to sell (create response from customers)
3. Translating customers’ needs (in ways that make it easy for you to know what problems to solve!)

Ask yourself now: What can you do to capitalize on the success created in your existing customers’ lives? How can you package up this success and use it to knock down barriers to selling to other people who need your service using social media?

Likewise, what problems do your customers need solved? Make the time to publish as a blog post—so as to have them discover while Googling’ around the Web. My FREE sales training course helps you do exactly that!

 Photo credit: I.. C.. U..

The post Psychology of Selling: How Engaging with Customers Can Hurt Sales appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

1. Have a very weak expectation of social media to begin with… they don’t expect it to produce leads nor sales
2. Focus energy on finding effective ways to measure social’s effectiveness rather than finding ways to sell with it
3. Make mistakes 1 and 2 because they’re looking to relatively in-experienced, unqualified people to decide what it is they should be doing with social media.

Expect Social Marketing to Sell

Your thoughts manifest reality. It’s a metaphysical fact. Maybe you follow the new age gurus or the Bible. Who or whatever philosophical belief system you turn to is aimed at creating emotional, spiritual and financial wealth. What you think becomes reality and if you’re thinking about marketing outcomes (engagement, clicks, visitors, customer sentiment, etc.) that’s what you’ll get—by law!

Finding ways to make social media sell for you requires not only a change in expectation but a process mentality that generates tangible outcomes. Marketing usually involves a creative process with fungible, intangible outcomes like “good branding” that somehow results in sales. What I’m saying is marketing is faith based.

If marketers could have anything they want when it comes to social media they want “better engagement” and better ways to measure it. The result is a world where marketers continue to put today’s interactive version of branding before revenue.

Get Off of Social Media and on to a List

What if we cast aside aspiring for “better engagement” (whatever that means!) and replaced it with a dream of creating leads? For instance, changing the goal from engagement to leads means changing what we do all day long—and how we do it. What if the goal was to get prospects OFF of social media?!

I’m noticing how social marketers who create revenue (and think about it all day long) think this way. They don’t care to spend 5 years wondering, “what’s the value of a Facebook fan?” only to find out that the question is as pointless as the half-baked answers self-appointed experts cook up.

Businesses that are discovering the best way to sell with Facebook or use LinkedIn for business leads ask different questions like, “Can we use what we already know works to start generating leads sales with social marketing techniques?”

For these companies the answer is, “yes, sometimes” but only when the social platform can be used in a way that moves sales prospects off of it and onto a lead nurturing program. In the end they rely more on traditional, process-driven database marketing—telemarketing, direct mail, email—and not johnny-come-lately metrics like “return on engagement.”

Believe in Yourself, Ignore Self-appointed “Experts”

In many cases the reason why marketers are making mistakes 1 and 2 is because they fall victim to the uncertainty created by self-appointed experts.

In a moment of remarkable candor, former Apple brand evangelist, Guy Kawasaki announced his secret to social media success: Do not have any plan whatsoever for it. Since you can’t understand these oh-so-new technologies he says the smartest way to approach them is to just do it.

You can understand Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs if your context remains founded in business principles that are not revolutionizing—no matter what the experts say.

Resist the urge to hire who you know are ambitious, bright yet in-experienced, unqualified people to decide what it is they should be doing with social media (and how to do it). The truth is most social media experts have one main qualification: “I use it more than you do” and (my favorite) “I ‘get it’ because I study other companies that ‘get it’” (when “it” is largely hot air).

So if you want to avoid the 3 most common mistakes, expect social media to sell sign up for this free social media sales training (consider programs a systematic way to make social platforms serve your business), stop trying to measure social’s effectiveness in intangible terms and trust your business instincts more than young social media experts.

Photo credit: alanberning

The post How to Avoid Getting Off the Sales Track with Social Marketing appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

This is a guest blog by Dan McDade, CEO of PointClear, a business-to-business sales lead generation company and author of The Truth About Leads. Mr. McDade is a recognized expert in lead generation for complex sales processes.

————————————————————————————————————————————————

I am putting together a presentation for an organization that has its own “university” for marketing folks. My topic is how companies go about defining a lead. For the most part they don’t do a very good job of defining leads and I understand why.

Competing Metrics

In most companies, at least historically, marketing and sales have been measured by, and hence driven by, different metrics. For marketing to be rewarded, they must create a certain number of leads within a budget. That does not necessarily line up well with sales’ expectations, and has exacerbated the age old problem of communication between marketing and sales (sometimes called lack of alignment).

This condition has been simply accepted by or ignored by most senior managers. This has only complicated the task of using social media to create leads and sales. I know this seems harsh, but it is still true today in many organizations.

A Better Habit

To help me understand, and perhaps solve the problem, I researched many articles and reread a number of books, including Stephen Covey’s (remember him?) “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.  While I have always agreed with and believed in every habit, I feel one of the “7 Habits” is most applicable: “Begin with the end in mind.”

The end is a sale and selling is based on effectively fulfilling need. Fulfillment of need is based on meeting the goals established by your business.  Of course, the most important goal frequently is revenue. To earn revenue, a company has to use a sales process. While there are literally hundreds of sales processes a company might follow, at the highest level the below is the process most sellers and buyers are navigating to win or lose, or choose or reject:

1. Find a pain (or need).
2. Get agreement that there is a pain.
3. Agree to do something about the pain.
4. Agree to a generic solution.
5. Agree to a customized, specific solution.

(The fact that most sales reps start the sales process at Step #5, regardless of the lead source or apparent stage, is the topic for another article.)

The Truth About Leads

Let’s say we run an online marketing campaign. Leads generated that identify people with a pain result in a bunch of Step #1 leads being sent to sales. Marketing may come in on plan and within budget (and begin celebrating—insert your personal vision of success here—mine is a good vodka martini). Meanwhile, sales is not impressed.

Even if the prospect has a pain, and agrees that their company has the pain, this individual may not be able to do anything about the pain (not a decision-maker and no access to power, other priorities, budgets) but they are a fully vetted Step #2 leads.  Hence, a lot of these leads go to sales immediately—and fall into a dark hole.

There are tens of thousands of companies (and hundreds of service providers) that are providing Step #1 or Step #2 “leads” to their sales team. That itself is really a problem. In fact, fulfilling the first 3 are not enough to get a prospect to do something about the pain or need.

Unless you can help prospects to agree to a generic solution (which includes asking them to help you create a vision of what success looks like) it is unlikely that you can close business. Only when a prospect has a vision of success can you effectively sell your customized solution—and then only if it is actually a fit.

Setting the Hook

In Jeff Molander’s book, “Off The Hook Marketing”, he states:

“…what separates professional fisherman from the novices?  Believe it or not, it’s not the fancy equipment.  … Catching more big fish more often means spending less time worrying about attracting them … [and more time] learning how to set the hook…”

In other words, if you don’t know how to properly set the hook you may as well forget about attracting more fish. If you don’t understand the sales process there is no sense in generating more leads. My article, “Why Your Sales Force Needs Fewer Leads!” goes into more detail about this.

Netting Leads with Social

Think through the steps in the sales cycle and how various social media resources might apply. Let’s assume that you are in B2B (business-to-business) and are selling something that is not a highly commoditized. A tweet (or a LinkedIn Update, or Facebook’s “What’s On Your Mind”) can and should be used aggressively for Step #1, identifying pain.

In fact, Jeff makes the point in his book that the best way to engage a reader is to solve their problem.  What better content to publish than solutions to problems your target market has? What better way to start a dialog?

Exploiting Social in a Multi-Faceted World

Social media has been called democratic or “like being at a cocktail party.” In reality, social is like any other media. When the 800 telephone number was introduced (free inbound was once a novelty), everyone predicted the end of the post office. Now you hear everyone talking about social, “inbound marketing,” mobile and how “outbound marketing” (sometimes derisively and incorrectly called “interruption marketing”) is dead.

The reality is that a blend of media is required to move prospects through the sales cycle (or, to be politically sensitive, “the buyer’s journey”).

Understanding the sales cycle helps you determine what medium to use when or where.

For example, we believe in what we refer to as multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle prospecting to multiply results. They key is multiple. A blend of media is required; and Optimized Prospect Development requires multi-cycles to stay in front of the right prospect with the right message at the right time.  In addition to knowing how to set the hook, it does not hurt to know where the fish are. So, using social media to identify pain (Step #1) and keep the hook in front of the right fish at the right time, by positioning yourself as a resource instead of a vendor, is essential.

I am going to declare victory and go make a vodka gimlet.

Photo credit: contemplative imaging

The post How to Align Social Marketing and Sales to Create More Leads appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

Time to view: 90 seconds. The social media revolution is a lie. Yes, this new phase in marketing is exciting but successful social sellers know something most of us don’t: That social media marketing so over-hyped and so sensationalized that it is what prevents success—blocks us from actually selling with social media like Facebook, blogs and Twitter. Here’s what you can do to overcome this critical, strategic roadblock and make social media sell.

The post What Social Media Experts Don’t Want You to Know appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.

Time to Read: 2 Minutes.

“How much time do I need to devote to LinkedIn per day?” is a valid question. But when you ask it you’re invested in lack—what you do not have. Time. But you do have time to invest in saving time, right? That’s what LinkedIn is, after all. I’ll prove it to you. Let’s start by changing your question to…

“How can I determine what LinkedIn’s purpose is for me, how I can best use it to achieve that goal in shorter time?”

See the difference? What if your purpose was to find a faster way to net a sales lead—rather than seeking out a silver bullet amount of time? What if your purpose was to meet the right prospect and pitch them in less time, get hired faster, have your manuscript discovered by a publisher sooner, speed up the conversion to sale process… whatever. This is how I approach it in running my publishing and professional speaking business.

I don’t read trendy “_________ (insert social media platform) An Hour A Day” books. I approach social media with a focus on abundance, not lack. I have all the time in the world to save time! This way the time question works itself out effortlessly.

Put as much time into LinkedIn as is needed to complete the task and generate a better outcome. Period.

For instance, I’m constantly targeting people within a company based on current position, experience background. I’m finding faster ways to increase the relevancy of my entire sales approach by monitoring what my targets are saying or asking for in discussions in groups or on Twitter. I combine this with tools like JigSaw.com (securing contact information) and Google (getting around LinkedIn’s paywall). I invest as much time as I need to achieve my goal.

“It all goes back to attaching value to the time you spend on LinkedIn,” says J.D. Gershbein, one of the top LinkedIn strategists in the world and a pioneer in LinkedIn educational programs.

“Once that trade-off leads to a positive outcome—however that is defined—it makes the difficult pill of logging the minutes or hours easier to swallow.”

Take the stance that LinkedIn ROI is qualitative—that results can be traced to activity, as opposed to actual time on the site—and you have a nice framework within which to work.

Photo credit: Jason A. Samfield

The post The Amount of Time You Invest in LinkedIn is Irrelevant to Results appeared first on Sales Prospecting Tips & Methods | Jeff Molander.