In the rush, rush, rush that defines most businesses today, we are trained to cram every possible activity we can onto our calendars. The fine art of saying “no” is a masterful technique in and of itself, IF, you can pull it off that is. Often, we are at the mercy of others who have requests that demand our time, which we cannot ignore. Still, with all of this so-called multi-tasking going on, I wonder, are we really any more effective?

For years, we have been seduced into thinking that multi-tasking is a good thing. Sales people are given atta-boys for their ability to juggle multiple priorities at once. Sales managers praise their people for being able to take customer calls, do email and text all while taking a potty break. Nothing is more disconcerting than listening to someone take a business call from the bathroom stall next to you by the way. The reinforcement of this multi-tasking mania has now led to people texting and answering email on their iPhones and Blackberry’s while driving! Absolute madness.

Quite an industry has sprung up around this notion of “managing time”. The myth is that multi-tasking isn’t managing time, it is only wasting it. An August 2009 research report from Stanford University shows that so-called high achieving multi-taskers are only frying their brain. Guru’s far more experienced than me will tell you that time management has always been a myth. All of us have the same 24 hours in the day. The #1 key to social selling success comes from a single minded focus on the “right” priorities. Your objective is to focus on the one thing – the big rock – that you complete before moving on to the next. This is especially important as you integrate social media into your sales process. The idea is to save time not waste it!

As I talk to groups about social media and how to integrate it into their sales/networking approach, I always ask, “What are your top two or three concerns about using social media?” Predictably, someone always says, “I don’t have the time.” That attitude springs from the belief that you are “adding on” to what you already do now. In reality, you need to let something else go. Everyone has time wasters disguised as results driven activities hidden somewhere on their calendar. Many are hidden in plain sight.

Try this exercise. Write down how many face-to-face networking events you attended in the past month. Even if it’s 1 per week, you probably spent at least 3 hours when you include drive time plus the event time itself. That’s 12 hours – more than a full business day each month. Now consider your hourly billable rate and ask yourself if you secured enough clients from those activities to make it worth it. The answer – based on experience and the answers I receive from every group that I poll – will likely be a resounding no! Not even close. That’s why the effective use of social networking tools like LinkedIn is such a beautiful thing. Done right, you spend “less time” actually getting better results.

How we view time is in direct proportion to our attitude about time. Your peers, your competitors and your friends don’t have any more hours in the day than you do. It is all about how you use them. If you ever want to invest in finding out how you prioritize, I encourage you to check out our Time Mastery assessment. For as little as $31 and the investment of a 10-15 minutes, you will discover just how well you work with your daily 24 hour allotment.

Time management is a myth. How you choose to spend your time moment to moment is what counts!

Utilizing the appropriate social media to tools to improve sales performance represents an investment of time, and depending on the types of tools that you are using, money.

A common myth is that social media doesn’t actually work; in terms of driving the sales process forward. It does, IF, you have an open mind, you know what you are doing while participating online and you are very clear about the results you want to achieve.

That’s the rub. Too many sales people get started with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo or any other social tool because someone else invited them or suggested that they should. Maybe that happened to you. Or, one of your bosses heard social media was cool, so they told you to get going. So, you dutifully went and signed up. You probably then said to yourself, “OK, I’m here. Now what?”

To make the most of your investment in the social sales space, here are 6 behaviors to avoid if you want to achieve sales success.

• Failure to begin with a social sales strategy. Yes, I know, planning is sometimes about the last thing you want to sit down to think about, but it’s critical if you expect to see an ROI. Failing to plan how you will use social tools is a recipe for failing altogether. If you don’t have a plan, how can you measure success? Would you really hit the highways expecting to get from Atlanta to Los Angeles without a map? Sure, you would probably end up there eventually (well, maybe not), but doesn’t it make a lot more sense to first determine where you are headed? Of course it does. Same thing with social media.
  • Solution: Sales executives should schedule a social media planning session with their teams. Make sure that everyone on the team has the same understanding of what and why you are participating online. Discuss how you will measure and track results. Following that initial planning, discuss progress, lessons learned and share best practices during regular team meetings. This will help to keep everyone on track.
• Lack of buy-in from top management. Many sales executives (and their bosses) are, unfortunately, still living in yesterday’s business world. They either see social media as a passing fad or a threat to their view of how the sales process works. Fear of what they do not understand keeps them rooted in outdated approaches to acquiring new customers and serving the ones that they already have.
  • Solution: Education. And, I don’t mean a Twitter training class. Bring in outside help to properly educate your management teams on the business value and benefits to using social media. Recently, Dell announced that they’d sold an estimated $6.5 million in products and services using Twitter. LinkedIn has 70 million+ users with 66% of them listed as “key decision makers”. Are your sales people in front of them?
• Lack of adequate training. Sales managers often assume that understanding and learning how to use social media tools is easy as learning email. Not so. Most of the tools themselves are fairly easy to figure out, but do your sales people understand how to create dashboards to “link” their various social sites, instead of having to visit them individually? Your sales team members probably understand how to invite colleagues to join them on LinkedIn, but do they know how to create dynamic lead generation lists that they can use for their prospecting efforts? Inadequate training is guaranteed to deliver lackluster results. Make the investment. It’s worth it.
  • Solution: Provide the team with webinar training, classroom sessions, accountability telecalls and team coaching. The tendency is to go cheap, but the investment in proper usage training on the front end will give you a huge leg up in achieving your objectives. You may need to bring in outside help, and it would be a good idea to hire someone who has extensive sales and technology background. Anyone can teach your sales people to click on buttons, but I’m pretty sure you need them to understand more than that.
• Expecting immediate results. This, very unrealistic, expectation will bite your sales people in the backside fast. Using social networking to further your sales efforts takes time. By the way, this isn’t all that different from traditional offline selling. The likelihood that one of your sales people meets that next million dollar customer at the one networking meeting they just attended is pretty slim. Not to mention that sales people often attend meetings that probably will NEVER produce a sales result.
  • Solution: Keep your focus on the bigger picture. More than ever, a sale is about building a relationship with someone that advances the sale forward. The more expensive your product or service, the longer the sales cycle is. You already know this, so why insist that if you use social media it must deliver a result today? Here’s the good news though. Using social sales tools effectively will SHRINK the sales cycle, because your sales people will be reaching the right decision makers faster without driving all over town. Isn’t that what every sales organization wants…to close sales faster?
• Sales people are supposed to sell not hang out on Facebook.
  • Solution: Change your ‘tude. If your attitude is that your sales people are just “hanging out” then you either never helped them create their plan for being there, or you believe that this social media stuff is just dribble. Here’s the thing. If your ideal customer isn’t likely to be on Facebook then, of course, your sales people shouldn’t be spending time there. But, what if your perfect client does participate on Facebook? Shouldn’t your sales people be engaged where their buyer is likely to be? The answer is easy – yes! It is time to accept that integrating social tools into your sales process not only makes sense, but is critical.
• No time. This is a common complaint. The reason that people get hung up on the time thing is that they consider the use of social media an “add-on” to an already packed day. The reality is that there is wasted time on the calendar of every sales person in your organization. Meetings with non-decision makers. Networking events that fall flat. Chasing down leads that are poorly qualified.
  • Solution: Put all your sales people through a time tracking exercise. Have them track every activity on a daily basis for one week. Each activity should note the length of time it took to complete. At the end of one week, I think you will be surprised by the results. If, at that point, your sales people haven’t found at least 30 minutes a day of wasted time that they can instead use for online networking – it would be a first. But, just in case it ends up being true for your sales team, please drop me a note. I’ll need to award you a prize to celebrateJ.

If you’ve written a book (like I have with co-author, Joan Curtis), congratulations, because you’ve crossed a major hurdle. Now that I’ve gone through the process myself, I truly understand why writing a book can seem like such a daunting proposition. But, you’ve done it. Now what?

Writing the book is one thing, but how you will market and sell your masterpiece is another. The following is a guest post from top blogger and best selling author, Chris Brogan

Read on to learn how Chris suggests you prepare for your book launch utilizing the power of social media.

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
5. Have a blog post that’s a list of all the places one might buy your book. I did this for both Trust Agents and Social Media 101.
6. Make any really important links trackable with a URL shortener. I know exactly how many people click my links.
7. Start listening for your name, your book’s name. ( Covered in this post about building blocks.)
8. Consider recording a video trailer for your book. Here’s one from Scott Sigler (YouTube), for his horror thriller, Contagious. And here’s one from Dallas Clayton for his Awesome Book. (Thanks Naomi for pointing this out).
9. Build a Facebook fan page for the book or for bonus points, build one around the topic the book covers, and only lightly promote the book via the page.
10. Join Twitter under your name, not your book’s name, and use Twitter Search to find people who talk about the subjects your book covers.
11. When people talk about your book, good or bad, thank them with a reply. Connect to people frequently. It’s amazing how many authors I rave about on Twitter and how few actually respond. Mind you, the BIGGEST authors always respond (paradox?)
12. Use Google Blogsearch and Alltop to find the people who’d likely write about the subject matter your book covers. Get commenting on their blog posts but NOT mentioning your book. Get to know them. Leave USEFUL comments, with no blatant URL back to your book.
13. Work with your publisher for a blogger outreach project. See if you can do a giveaway project with a few bloggers (here’s a book giveaway project I did for Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years book).
14. Offer to write guest posts on blogs that make sense as places where potential buyers might be. Do everything you can to make the post match the content of the person’s site and not your goals. But do link to your book.
15. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
16. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
17. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
18. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
19. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.
20. Start showing up at face to face events, where it makes sense, including tweetups. If there’s not a local tweetup, start one.
21. And with all things, treat people like you’d want them to treat your parents (provided you had a great relationship with at least one of them).

This sounds like a lot of steps. It is. But this is how people are finding success. Should this be the publicist’s job? Not even a little bit. The publicist has his or her own methodology. The author will always be the best advocate for his or her own work. Never put your marketing success in the hands of someone else. Always bring your best efforts into the mix and you’ll find your best reward on your time and effort.

You might have found other ways to be successful with various online and social media tools. By all means, please share with us here. What’s your experience been with promoting your work using the social web?

Chris Brogan is the New York Times bestselling author of the NEW book, Social Media 101. He is president of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and blogs at [chrisbrogan.com].

I am a huge fan of the Did You Know Video’s that have now been carried forward by Erik Qualman at Socialnomics. Social Media Revolution 2 is a refresh of the original video with new and updated social media & mobile statistics that are hard to ignore. Based on the book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman.

If you watch this and still think that social media is merely a fad, there is just no hope for you, as you are still stuck in the land of what was, but not what actually now is!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng

I so love LinkedIn! This amazing business networking site boasts an impressive 65M+ user base and climbing. Roughly 65% of LinkedIn’s users are tagged as key decision makers, which is sales code for…they can buy from you! That, in and of itself, is a HUGE reason for you to use LinkedIn as a sales relationship tool that becomes a part of your natural sales/networking process. Decision makers, with money to spend, are using LinkedIn to check out your capabilities (and that of your competitor), polling colleagues for recommendations and doing research into what is available. They are talking about their like’s, dislike’s and sharing their current business frustrations and challenges. Are you listening? For sales people, LinkedIn should be the #1 place they go to prepare for their sales meeting. The amount of real-time information to be leveraged is…well…just plain staggering.

Speaking of leveraging conversation and information…I want to tell you about a really great question that was posed recently by Dana Detrick-Clark in one of my LinkedIn groups. She’s curious about the approach that others are taking in determining their blogging voice. And because the question is so applicable to “What approach do I take/voice do I use when answering group questions in a social community?”, I wanted to share Dana’s question and a part of my response.

Dana asks…Which is more important in a blog: speaking to a particular kind of reader, or speaking in your own ‘voice’? I’m curious as to what other business owners prefer, especially in business and/or marketing related blogs. Do you like the more journalistic approach, where you get “just the facts” for the information you’re after, or would you rather read a blog that’s more personal (even if that means at times it can be irreverent or reveal more personally about the author than what you normally find in a biz blog)?

Here was a portion of my answer…

You asked a great question that comes up a lot with clients. How much is too much information? Of course, like all such questions, the answer invariably is “it depends”.:)

Given that I own my business, I have more latitude with the approach I choose to take. So to be fair, I have a little more freedom when it comes to the information that I share in my blog posts. Each company has to decide what supports their core values and customer loyalty statement. But I urge companies to move away from their fear of “what could happen if someone says the wrong thing” and embrace the opportunity for building brand loyalty through media like blogs. There are a number of great stories about how companies were humanized in the eyes of their buyers and all because they “got real” on a blog. Sure, guidelines need to be established so that people know what’s cool and what isn’t (had to do it with email, remember?). From there, give employees training and then hold them accountable to be responsible when having conversations in the social space.

So what’s your take? Real in the blogosphere or not?

Today is an interesting birthday for Axel Schultze, founder of the Social Media Academy and founder and CEO of Xeequa. Axel was a contributor to my book “The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media”, and in an impromptu interview today, I talked to Axel about his experiences with the world of social media during these past seven years.

Many of Axel’s early experiences mirror my own, except for perhaps Twitter. Until late 2008, I admit that I was clueless about Twitter’s potential. More than just a rehash of social tools, Axel and I talked about the companies that get it, and the ones that don’t. We discussed why it is so important for a business to stop “protecting” assets and instead be willing to “risk” in order to move beyond where they are today. Finally, we talked about what sales MUST DO to adapt to this new world of customer expectations and buying habits.

The guts of my conversation with Axel are below. I’d also highly recommend you listen to the interview here, because there is no way that I can capture, in writing, of all the juicy tidbits that came from my conversation with Axel!!

In Axel’s words…

“Seven years ago Konstantin Guerke, one of the LinkedIn co-founders invited me to join LinkedIn. I had no idea what he was talking about – but my instinct told me: “go – this is interesting”. My LinkedIn ID: 8573.  I wasn’t too embarrassed not understanding the full scope because he didn’t either! But after a few exploratory meetings with Konstantin I got it. This was the birth of a new era. It was so much more than a new technology – we were on the verge of a new society. A year later I was quoted in Forbes Magazin as we started to hire people via the new media instead of expensive recruiter; I saved approximately $50,000, $30,000 on one search alone.

In 2005 I began to blog and was named one of the first executives freely blogging about my company, our strategy and our directions. The board didn’t like it – in particular because of my grammar and typos. I had to choose between authenticity and an PR department reviewed text. Here is why I voted for authenticity and why. Over the course of the next few years I learned a lot about blogging and commenting. My main takeaway: You don’t have to be nice to everybody – but focus on a value to some. Leaving a good post with no comment is like leaving a good restaurant with no tip. I learned that provocative posts are more valuable because they spark a discussion than lecturing people about your knowledge.

Early 2007 I discovered Twitter. See my first 16 tweets – silly tweets – like almost everybody. One of my friend’s reaction: “Axel, are you completely out of your mind? Are you in a midlife crisis?  Twitter? Oh man…” – After all, yes it was a bit strange, but I had this feeling again – “it’s going to be big”. What I learned about twitter was very important for my social media life: If you are not interested in people walking their dog and eating pizza: You are listening to the wrong conversation – because YOU decide who you follow. Getting massive amounts of followers is like collecting photos or stamps or old cars… (the farmer / hunter model). But the most important learning was this: You learn more about a person within 50 tweets (takes about 50 seconds to read) than you would ever learn in two or even three Face 2 Face meetings. You can argue that but only if you tried it for yourself and failed.

It’s 2008. In the past 5 years I learned so much about sociology – the one area I was least interested of all when I was in school and one of the most fascinating today. Robert Putnam’s “Bollowing alone” was interesting too, because he missed the most important part of our sociological change: Mass socialization. For a while I kept the title for my own book: “Bowling with Millions”. It became apparent to me that business people around the world are using social media every day without even noticing. Social media changes the way we do business. Unlike the inception of computers or the Internet – social media is the first significant change in the way we do business introduced by the consumer not by the manufacturer. In the past 100 years technology companies introduced massive improvements to producers and traders and helped them to be more economic more effective or more efficient in the way they the organize their business.  The social revolutions is turning this behavior upside down – now it’s the consumer who introduces a better way of dealing with customers to the manufacturer and traders. Business friends in VP and CEO level asked me to help understand social media and the impact to their business. After many hours of endless discussions I understood that there is a need to build a new education model to teach social media. Not to lecture how to be more social or tweet or brush up your Linkedin profile – but how to develop a sound strategy for a better customer experience model. How to analyze and assess the companies own position in the space, how to plan and execute a cross functional social media engagement. How to organize social media responsibilities across an entire campus instead of pushing it down to a marketing person and the rest of the company does business as usual. That was the birth of the Social Media Academy. Now every month a new tool comes to the market. So the learning continues.

In 2009 we discovered an interesting aspect of maturation. The social media strategy model we developed three years ago is still valid today. The four quadrant assessment model remained to be the same. The dual presence model where we came up with a way to balance branded communities with public spaces is still best practices and so is the organization model where we moved two years ago from a “social media team” to a cross functional engagement model. The other interesting development I noticed is that leaders remain to be leaders. Cisco lead the charge into the social media age with massive engagement while their competitors were arguing about the economy and actually fired their social media people. Pepsi and Coke continue to rival each other – now in the social web and also their competitors are silent spectators of the space. BMW was very active engaging executives in the social web to get feedback on their cars while Ford tried to sue a fan club over logo usage. Comcast engaged to compensate their troubled support force through Twitter and had a great success while their competitors don’t even exist in the social web. WholeFoods while rather expensive and potentially endangered during the recession was thriving through customer engagement on all platforms in contrast to their cheaper shops like Albertsons who ceased operations in many areas. Social Media was also a game changer in 2008 / 2009 for a few companies. Companies like Zappos went from 0 to 60 in no time and bypassed every competitor. Facebook even so a player in it’s own world bypassed the dominant leader Myspace – not so much through leadership but sheer luck that MySpace was purchased and ever conceivable mistake was made after the purchase. It was also a game changer in the airline industry where JetBlue and a few others clearly made it to become the acknowledged leaders in the space.

2010 – Social Media goes mainstream. Everybody and his dog is at least exploring ways to leverage the new media. Hundreds of thousands already benefit from the space by offering webinars, addon tools, tips to gain a quadro gazillion follower, a bit consulting here and there and books how to use social media for marketing. Tens of thousands of companies will fail as they follow the $25 advice “how to increase sales” with Twitter and Facebook. Democratization of Knowledge will become the biggest obstacle because “1 Million Twitter Experts can’t all be wrong” – Right? So lets grow followership to 50,000 and blast our messages into the new channels till they clog. And this will accelerate as 55 Million registered businesses worldwide will want to leverage Social Media by the end of this decade to develop a better customer experience, grow customer base and compete for more “brand appreciation” (not brand recognition). The next two years will bring a shakeout on the consulting and expert front. The self proclaimed social media marketing gurus will make way to more business savvy consultants who can deliver a 360 degree social business model for the new agile enterprises.

If you are like me, you’ve thought about writing a book. And, if you are also like I was, you may still be walking around with that book in your head. A spark of an idea that was coupled with a dose of universal intervention and a terrific writing partner in Joan Curtis, and I’m thrilled to say that my first book – The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media – is available for pre-order now on Amazon.

This isn’t just another social media book…already plenty of those.

Yes, we do talk about social media, of course, and a complaint I commonly hear from people is that they know social media is important, but they have no ideas what to actually with do it all. Sure, all the tools look cool, but how do I use this stuff again to actually get a sales result? As I’m fond of saying…clicking on the buttons is one thing, but knowing how to use social tools to drive specific, measurable results is something else altogether.

If you are still perplexed about using social media as a business tool, or you still think social media has no value as part of the sales process – this book is for you! Be one of the first in your company to get your hand on this vital tool.  Every sales professional will want to learn about the new world of sales and the social media.  This is the first book written that helps salespeople understand the impact of the social media on sales and gives them the tools to start a social media sales strategy.

In the end, technology doesn’t matter much if it doesn’t help you achieve your sales goals. I hope you enjoy the read!

p.s. Joan and I have created e-book that we are just about to release that includes the first chapter of the book. Interested? Until we get it posted to the website, drop me an email with “new handshake ebook” in the subject line at info@talentbuildersinc.com I’ll make sure that you receive a copy when it is ready.

LinkedIn has made the Company section more robust. It is now even easier to research companies and keep up with the people changes happening with those companies.

The Improvement

You can now “follow” companies. Okay, STOP right there! Before you close your mind to it, because images of nonsensical conversation on Twitter just popped into your head, please hear me when I say that “the concept” is similar, but definitely different. This is the kind of follow that you want to engage in, because…

Sales Benefit

You will hear about key developments such as who’s joined, left or been promoted at the companies you follow, business opportunities and job openings. This moves your ability to research target companies you want to work with to another level.

Once you elect to follow a company… when you log into the Company Home Page on LinkedIn, you will see a list of updates for the companies that you follow. You will also see a “company updates” section now showing up on your LinkedIn Home Page.

This is so much easier than tracking the individual movements of people within in a company. LinkedIn aggregates the list of changes for you. You can easily scan the list to keep up with what’s changed. Here’s a quick screen shot of the company I set up to follow today to check out how this works.

How To

Find Companies under the “More” menu. Click on Companies. Search companies you want to track. Once you’ve pulled up their company page…look to the upper right and click on “follow company”. Scan the updates once a day or once a week.

Definitely check it out! Share your success stories.

I wrote in my last post about ways to gain executive buy-in for the integration of social media into a sound sales strategy. Rather than replace the tried and true, social tools can augment great sales efforts today. Used effectively they can also help your sales folks reduce sales cycle time by building relationships early and quickly through social communities. Yes, you can still attend in-person networking functions and you should – provided you are attending the right ones. Easy enough to burn hours of time that get you nowhere for the right events, much less attending the wrong ones. Instead invest some of your sales time each day to participate in online spaces, like LikedIn to connect, source business opportunities and prepare for your sales calls. Welcome to the world of social selling.

As I’ve observed companies considering how social media applies to them, I’ve also seen a tendency to want to short-cut the process. This is a big change and you need to prepare yourself up front for success. Asking and answering these types of questions should be the first step.

1. Are your sales leaders prepared to adopt new sales communication approaches and tools?
2. Will your current processes support a smooth integration to using new technologies?
3. Have you established sales communication guidelines and social usage policies?
4. What kind of training will your sales people need to make the shift?
5. How will you hold people accountable to using new media as part of their sales day?
6. Is your IT organization prepared to assist you in integrating the right social tools with your sales goals?
7. Do you use customer data, survey’s and focus group feedback to update services, policies and processes on the fly?
8. How well is your team “listening” to online conversations happening on the various social sites?
9. How ready is your sales team to respond to negative commentary?
10. What does your competition’s social media presence look like?

Don’t be seduced by the promise of number of followers = sales. Twitter isn’t for everyone and neither is Facebook for that matter. Think carefully about your strategy. It will make the difference between floundering around and achieving sales results.

Like any other major change initiative, you must present a strong argument for the value and benefits to the organization. Social media is a new way of thinking and it is still being met with resistance. So, there is still evangelism and education to be done.

To secure management buy-in, I think it is very important to forget all the techno speak…present the business case for WHY developing/executing a social strategy is a critical business imperative. It’s important to focus on the number’s, the sales potential, how social selling shrinks the sales cycle and can be used to increase customer loyalty. Talk about how your sales people can use new media to differentiate the products and services they are selling. And, of course,  point out that you can use these tools to gain competitive advantage. In other words, don’t lead with the technology. Before you jump on Twitter, you need to know why you are there.

Start with a clear vision, purpose and plan…then align the technology to your strategic objectives. Focus on measuring your results and build on them. Keep in mind that engaging everyone on your sales team will take time and needs to begin with active involvement from senior leadership. If management is asking their sales reps to use LinkedIn – they need to be acting participating themselves. Leaders model the way for their people!

This is another fundamental shift in how we approach the sales process. Don’t be fooled by the “quick fix” promises of thousands of followers over night. Numbers matter little if the followers aren’t your target customers. Integrating the right social tools will require much more than a few LinkedIn classes. Well…only if you want your financial investment to make a real difference.