E-Rep

Your No-Nonsense, 7-Step Guide to Social Media and B2B Sales

February 2, 2012 By Todd Schnick Leave a Comment

OK CEO guy. I don’t want to hear “social media” doesn’t affect sales” in my industry anymore. It is bunk. You know it, and I know it.

Here are SEVEN reasons why I am right:

DISTRIBUTION
Yes, the social web is an important way to distribute your content and knowledge. People aren’t going to learn about what you can do if you don’t tell them. Sharing and promoting, or more importantly, having your social graph promote or share your content, is one way to get better known to an audience. But distribution, as evidenced by too many people, is NOT the sole purpose of the social web.

EDUCATION
What is marketing and sales, after all? To put it simply, it is educating your market. There are probably a BILLION (or more) people active on the social web around the world. If you don’t think your market is here (somewhere) than you are missing the boat. Likely, you aren’t looking hard enough, or unwilling to roll up your sleeves.

ENGAGEMENT/RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
Sorry, but social media isn’t an if you build it, they will come scenario. You have to participate. You have to connect. You have to engage. It is modern networking, but you have to actually talk to people. You won’t sell million-dollar pieces of business on Twitter, no. But you will meet people who might ultimately spend a lot of money with you, or who will connect you to someone else who will. The game is being played. Shame on you if you are sitting on the sidelines…

LIST BUILDING
The money is in the list, so everyone says. Yes. This is true. But you have to build the list. And the better approach is the slow, methodical, one-at-a-time approach…verses the spam the heck out of people and hope a few pay attention approach. But you get connected to people via the social web, and if you are engaged, many will follow and join for more.

LISTENING
Social media is a great way to observe the marketplace. Business people-watching, if you will. You can see what your potential customers are doing, saying, and thinking. You can see what the competition is doing. You can see what needs are being fulfilled, and what needs are left unmet. But you have to have your eyes open. If potential customers express pain publicly, and you aren’t listening, is that prospect really there?

CUSTOMER SERVICE
Consumers are becoming more and more vocal about their business experiences on the social web, and are publicly communicating their happiness or displeasure. You had better be listening to respond. Oftentimes, the bigger crime is NOT paying attention. The public will forgive a bad experience if they see you actively doing something about it. And more and more, customers are seeking “tech support” online, verses calling on the phone. You had better be listening…

POLLING/RESEARCH
Most organizations cannot afford to do complex industrial and market research. But yet, the social web offers all kinds of ways to do polling, and to get feedback from your social graph. Pose questions on Twitter or Facebook. Ask people to vote by giving a statement a +1 on Google+. Or drop surveys into LinkedIn group discussions. Easy. When I explain to clients that they need to better understand their market, their competition, or their customers, I am often asked, “Well, how in the heck do I do that?” The social web is a great way to study, research, and observe. And learn.

Notice that “SALES” wasn’t one of the seven. You want to know why? Because selling – at least in B2B world – still is a human conversation and transaction. But you have to connect with, educate, and engage with human beings.

And social media is an important tactical way to do that in the modern world. You had better jump on. Your competition is already on the bus…

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[content marketing is an important element of your social media strategy. sign-up for our course here]

[drawing by hugh macleod]

Filed Under: E-Rep, Sales, Social Media

When They Google Will You Be There?

January 23, 2012 By Todd Youngblood Leave a Comment

A simple, yet vital question. When they Google, will you be there?

Why so vital? Pick your survey… Dan McDade in The Truth About Leads lifted the fog for me by explaining his research showing that 80% percent of the time buyers find sellers. How does that grab you, sales professional?

You spend your life knocking on doors, trying mightily to get in, and just about the only time you DO get in it’s NOT due to your knocking! The facts demand a rethinking of our prospecting priorities.

THE focus must be on becoming highly visible to the search engines.

How? Let’s first strip away the cacophony from the hoards of self-appointed social media, SEO, etc. gurus and focus on the single, simple thing most critical to being found – content. Content is king. Waste not a minute more time on anything else until you have 50 pieces of great content. Not on key words. Not on page views. Not on bounce rates. Not ANY of that stuff.

Without great content, all that other gobeldy gook is W-O-R-T-H-L-E-S-S.

It’s trying to run before you walk; to walk before you crawl. Do you need a robust, highly optimized, replete-with-all-the-bells-and-whistles e-Rep beloved by Google? Absolutely!

Just please… Do not start with the bells and whistles. Start by extracting all that glorious insight, knowledge and experience from you brain and embedding it into electronic formats. Create great content first.

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: Blogging, content marketing, Content Strategy, e-rep

“It Won’t Work For Us,” Said The Blind Man

January 11, 2012 By Todd Schnick Leave a Comment

“So, gentlemen, I want to thank you for your time. I appreciate, and have listened to, what you’ve had to say, and I just want to tell you, I’ve been around this business for thirty plus years,” proclaimed our host.

“And I just got to tell you, this social media nonsense won’t work for us,” he said, and promptly crossed his arms.

I looked down, glanced at my partner, who had just spent the better part of thirty minutes walking our prospect through a presentation about social media, and how integrating it into his marketing program was an important way to get the edge against his market space competition.

“Well, give this some time to percolate, and we’ll continue our dialog in short order,” said my parter.

“No no, my friend,” laughed the host. “I am just telling you, this dog won’t hunt.”

My partner slowly nodded his head, thought for a moment, and was about to respond when our host said “Wait, you guys have to see this video that someone emailed me from YouTube!”

He swiveled his squeaky old chair around to pull up his email on his desktop. Spent a few moments muttering to himself as he thumbed through a bunch of emails, and ultimately found what he was looking for, and said “There. I just emailed the link to you. I think you’ll love it. I really like what that company is doing with their new product! Really creative stuff.”

I coughed up the stale coffee I was politely trying to sip to be nice to the secretary who had delivered it to me. I tried to get my partner’s attention via eye contact, when all of a sudden…

“You know, both you fellows should sign up to their email mailing list. They are always sending out really great videos, podcasts, and other cool stuff. I think you’ll find it a great resource,” said our host, excitedly.

“Um,” I said, “Do you realize what you’re saying,” trying desperately not to come across as an asshole.

Our host looked at me confused, paused for a moment, and then said “But yeah, this social media stuff will never sell anything to old guys like me.”

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[editor's note: this was a true story. the names are removed to protect the innocent.]

[drawing by hugh macleod]

Filed Under: E-Rep, Social Media

You Have Referral Partners – 5 Ways To Stay On Their Radar

December 15, 2011 By Todd Schnick Leave a Comment

Ok, so over the years, you have cultivated meaningful relationships with many people who are serving as referral partners to your business. They occasionally refer business to you. Some may even be incented to do so.

So, in these busy times, how in the heck do you stay top of mind, how do you complete for their mindshare, so that they are always thinking about you when opportunities present themselves?

Well, here are 5 strategies – using social media – to achieve just that:

1. Twitter — First of all, I’d recommend using a Twitter platform such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. With these apps, you can create a special column that you can lable “Referral Partners.” Next, I’d suggest placing all your referral partners, those with Twitter handles anyway, and add them all to this list. Once this is set-up, it becomes easy to keep an eye on what your partners are doing and say…providing you easy opportunities to connect and stay top of mind.

2. Google+ — You can do virtually the same thing with Google+ circles. Google+ is a growing network, and the individuals and brands investing time and building a community there are going to be the early influencers on this network. So, it is worth it to compete for their attention here. But by placing your referral partners into a circle entitled “Referral Partners” — you can keep tabs on what they are doing and talking about, and maintain dialog.

3. LinkedIn — I’ve talked before about the power of feeding your LinkedIn connection’s status updates to your RSS feed. This is a great way to receive a digest of what all of your connects are doing, saying, and connecting to. You can have all your connections go to one place, where it becomes easy to quickly scan and look for opportunities to connect. I have landed business this way too.

4. Facebook — After all, aren’t these people your friends? And Facebook is great for keeping up with friends. But acknowledging birthdays, and admiring their recent family trip to Disney World will go a long way towards deepening the connection with your referral partners.

5. Email Autoresponder — Put your critical referral partner contacts into a separate email list, and just naturally feed them a weekly, or even a monthly, digest of helpful and meaningful content that serves them and their clients well. And don’t force them to join this autoresponder list. Let them opt-in. If they don’t want to be on this list, connect with them via the four ways above.

Finally, you don’t have to have a doctorate and send these folks Pulitzer-prize winning content every day to keep mindshare. Sometimes it is the simple things…noting a birthday, saying hello, recommending a good book, wishing their child well when she is battling a cold…

It is those kinds of little actions that mean a lot to people. Even business people (yes…we are humans too). The beauty of the social web is that the applications make it easy to keep in touch with people important to your business.

You don’t have to sell them every day. They already know who you are and what you can do. But you do have to keep yourself top of mind, and demonstrate that you are evolving with the times…

What do you think? And what are some other ways to do this?

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[drawing by hugh macleod]

Filed Under: E-Rep, Social Media

Sales Rep as “CINner”

December 12, 2011 By Todd Youngblood Leave a Comment

All professionals, sales reps included, can (must!) sort the activities they perform into three categories. 10% of what they do is Critical to success, 30% is Important and 60% is merely Necessary.

Stage 1 CIN-ing consists of explicitly identifying each activity performed, determining – with brutally pragmatic honesty – their relative priority and dumping them in the appropriate bucket. (You’ll experience real trauma when forced to place interesting, challenging, fun tasks into the “I” and “N” buckets.)

Stage 2 CIN-ing consists of relentlessly investing 60% of the day executing that handful Cs, 30% of the day on Is and 10% on Ns. Think this is easy? Even when your boss agrees that Task X is an N, you’ll still move it to the top of list because the boss’ boss wants it ASAP. Even though task Y is an N, you’ll move it to the top of the list because it’s fun and you’re really good at it. Even though task Z is an an N, you’ll move it to the top of the list because you’re just too darned pooped to do something more challenging right now.

If you think successfully executing Stage 2 CIN is tough, wait for stage 3!

Continuous progress is essential. It’s the only way to stay ahead of your competition. And progress means learning or inventing new critical tasks, then executing them well to create differentiation. Ooops! Adding a new critical task means an old C needs to get demoted to I, which in turn means demoting an I to an N. Repeating this Stage 3CIN process quickly generates an impossible workload unless some delegation of work happens.

But there’s nobody there to delegate to! Something’s gotta’ give.

Just stop doing a few of those N tasks, you say? Au contraire, Kemo Sabe. N’s are by definition necessary. What’s a sales pro to do???

An essential part of the answer is e-Rep. Create and offload tasks to your electronic assistant.” Use all those (largely free) functions in the “The Cloud” and embed your knowledge, insight and experience into it.

How? Start here, then surf around here to get yourself started.

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: Differentiation, e-rep, Sales Productivity

Build credibility BEFORE you meet the customer

December 6, 2011 By Todd Youngblood Leave a Comment

As a sales rep, you know better than anybody what your customers and prospects need to know. You’ve done your research. You know their issues, challenges and objectives. You know the value they could accrue by using your stuff. They just won’t take the time to meet with you and listen! Well, maybe it’s you that needs to listen up. I think there’s a question that needs answering…

It’s harder and harder these days to get a face-to-face meeting with a decision maker. They’re all so darned busy, busy, busy. If they won’t take the time to learn, how can they possibly solve their problems and implement key initiatives?

Hold on a minute here. If someone earned the rank of decision-maker and has the wherewithal to keep that role, by definition, that person IS learning enough to solve problems and implement key initiatives. In other words, it’s you that has the learning problem, not the decision-maker. You haven’t learned that tactics for getting in the door have radically, dramatically and forever changed.

You need to establish your credibility before you ask for a meeting. You need to get the decision-maker to realize that he or she needs more perspective and context about some issue, has three or four questions to ask, and that you are uniquely qualified to provide the perspective, context and answers. And you need to do all that without ever having any direct contact. In fact, you really need to avoid asking for a meeting at all – to avoid pushing yourself into the decision process. You need to get the customer to pull you in.

Impossible? Only if you think cold calls, schmoozing the assistant and clever mailings are your core techniques. They may well still be necessary, but you need some additional weapons in your arsenal. You need to be where the decision makers are already hanging out. When they reach out for info, you need to already be there – directly in the path of that reach. You need to create a digital extension of yourself!

How tough is it to create and continually enhance a digital extension of yourself? Actually, not much tougher than what you’re already doing. It’s just two extra steps:

Build an “E-Rep Infrastructure”
Embed everything relevant you know and learn in that E-Rep

DO NOT succumb to techno-phobia!!! If the technology overwhelms you, either get over it or find a geek to help. Frankly, if you put your mind to it, you can learn all the tech you need over a single weekend. For your E-Rep Infrastructure, get a blog, some simple audio recording/editing software for your PC and a video camera. (There are loads of choices out there. I use WordPress for my blog, NCH Software for audio/video editing, iTunes, a Flip Cam and YouTube.)

DO NOT succumb to I-don’t-know-what-to-write-or-talk-about syndrome. Are you kidding me? You make your living talking for crying out loud. Every time you learn something, write it down and/or record it. When you have a new flash of insight, write it down and/or record it. Think through all the potential problems, issues, concerns, projects, solutions, initiatives, etc. that your products and services can address, then write them down and/or record them. When you read something interesting, attach it to your E-Rep self.

Neither of these two new tasks presents much of a challenge. Do them, along with whatever of the traditional techniques work for you. Can you really afford not to? Don’t you need an E-Rep version of yourself to be available 24 X 7? What if it’s 2:00 AM on Saturday and the hottest prospect in the universe is looking for a sales rep that can help?

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: Blogging, content marketing, Differentiation, e-rep, Podcasts, Radio

On Facebook, Activity and Content Matters…

December 5, 2011 By Todd Schnick Leave a Comment

One of my Facebook pages... Click image to enlarge...

See if this sounds familiar…

“Well, Todd, I’ve done all I need to do with social media. We launched a Facebook page!”

Whoop. Dee. Doo.

Are you doing anything with it? Are you posting content there? Are you engaging with people there? Are you learning more about the people who invest time on YOUR page? Are you converting these people to extend their relationship with you?

Here is what most people say when I ask these questions about their company Facebook page:

“Huh?”

Right.

Look at the pic at the top of this post. Look at what happens around November 27th…

This page is one of my many (too many) projects. As you can obviously tell from the graph, the page was dormant for a while. The project has been on the back burner for a while, but I am making a big end-of-year push to move it along.

The project is actually the publishing of an e-book, called Kicking Fear’s Ass. It helps people combat fear.

The Facebook page is merely one means to help promote the book’s idea, and build a community around the movement and the concept.

On the page, I share videos, quotes, articles, and images — all meant to help you think about, and combat fear.

Why does this matter to you…the owner of a hapless, meaningless Facebook business page?

Because look what happens when I engage… When I go from posting NOTHING, to posting every day. To sharing. To engaging with people who engage themselves.

Page traffic and sharing picks up. Big time. I mean, really, you can’t argue with that graph. And it wasn’t rocket science. It was merely the act of posting content.

[and if the concept of posting content spooks you, you should probably take this FREE content marketing course...]

So, this is merely a plea to ask you to engage on your Facebook page. Don’t let it sit there dormant. Don’t just post YOUR blog posts there. You aren’t getting it. That isn’t enough.

You need to share the work of others, share interesting videos, share interesting photographs, ask people to sign-up for other things to extend the relationship. For instance, I have set up a means for people to sign-up to receive a FREE copy of the Fear e-book when it comes out.

Starting a Facebook page for your business isn’t enough. If all you will do is push your own stuff, you probably shouldn’t bother.

Instead, engage with real people on your page. You’ve seen, from the above image, what can happen…

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Filed Under: E-Rep, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook

What’s a silver tongued devil to do?

November 29, 2011 By Todd Youngblood Leave a Comment

The same two statistical insights have been popping up on my radar screen for the past year. Every time they whack me upside the head:

80% of buyers find sellers vs. the other way around
70-80% of the buying process is complete before the buyer contacts the seller

And now yet another has emerged. There’s a downward trend – a 14% annual downward trend – in the number of sales professionals per inflation-adjusted dollar of stuff sold.

What’s a silver tongued devil to do?

The answer lies in a combination of something old and something new. The old part is to be proactive vs. reactive. If the customer already knows (or worse, merely thinks he knows) what all the requirements are, the sales rep faces an uphill battle. Anticipate! Be the one who identifies the problem or opportunity for the customer and lays out the plan of action.

OK, you already knew that.

The new part is to stop depending on your sliver tongue! Yes, you still need to constantly improve your verbal skills, both face-to-face and on the phone. That differentiator will always be vital, but it’s no longer enough. Customers are well past the getting-used-to-it stage of using electronic media to learn, research and make decisions. It’s now their standard procedure.

The new part is to make all of your knowledge, insight and experience deliverable via electronic media. Actually, not only deliverable, but searchable. Actually, not only searchable, but eminently findable.

Trust me, that’s exactly what your competitors are doing.

Build an e-Rep. Learn a bit about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Embed what you know in blogs and social media. Use text. Use images. Use audio. Use video. Think electronic silver tongue!

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: Differentiation, e-rep, Podcasts, Radio, Video

Magic Selling Arrows

November 22, 2011 By Todd Youngblood 6 Comments

The “Arrows-In-The-Quiver” perspective is one of many compelling reasons to develop and implement your own personal e-Rep. In a nutshell, the idea is to create a collection of electronic sales calls.

You could, for example, record a short video of yourself really nailing an objection that surfaced in your customer meeting this morning. You upload it to YouTube, than send an e-mail to that exec with a thank you, a recap of your discussion and a link to your video. That’s an e-rep in action.

This chunk of your electronic alter ego (e-mail + video) is like an arrow from your quiver that you fire off to advance the sale. It’s a great supplement to your personal efforts.

Better yet, your “e-Rep arrow” can do a few things even the amazing you can’t do!

1) Your e-Rep arrow magically regenerates itself! You reach into your quiver and fire the arrow. You reach into the quiver again and ta-da… it’s still there! You reach and fire again and again, and it’s always there. Unlike you, your e-Rep arrow never gets used up. It’s kind of like one of those Star Trek replicator things, spitting out copy after copy.

2) Your customer can – and often will – fire your e-Rep arrow at him or herself – repeatedly. How cool is that? You don’t have to lift a finger, or even know about it, and your customer is actively taking advantage of and gaining value from your expertise. (Re-read #1. It applies here too.)

3) Your customer can – and often will – fire your e-Rep arrow at somebody else. They might shoot it at the boss, the co-worker, the decision influencer, the colleague in another company. You did your customer a favor by sharing valuable insight, and they pass it along as a favor to others in their network. (Re-read #1. It applies here too.)

4) Your e-Rep arrow never disappears to do mundane things like eat, sleep or have a life. It’s loyally on duty and available on-demand 24 X 7 X 365.

5) Your e-Rep arrow never gets cranky or has a bad day. (Not to imply that you ever get cranky or have a bad day…)

You know… sometimes I wonder if I’m repeatedly repeating a redundant refrain not in need of repetition. Isn’t it painfully obvious that every sales pro needs a personal e-Rep, complete with a chock-full quiver of magic arrows?

Filed Under: E-Rep Tagged With: 24 X 7 X 365, Blogging, content marketing, e-rep

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