If you’ve ever heard me speak, you know that I have some strong opinions on things related to social media and what I would call “right sales behavior”. It isn’t that my way is the only way, because of course, it is not. Having sold professionally for close to 30-years, I do have just a bit of experience in this area. There are just some things that salespeople continue to do that drive me a little nuts. Add social media into the mix and well…more stuff to rant about.

My mission (and that of our company) is to help sales leaders and their sales team members bring their “A” game to the evolving world of sales. Though aspects of the sales process remain important…things like identifying and assessing needs, crafting solutions that help your customers improve their business or gaining commitment haven’t changed, other things about the process today have changed.

What’s different?

What has changed is that your buyers buy differently! That means that YOU as sales professionals need your sales A-game to include the smart use of social media as part of your overall sales process. Does it?

On to my rant about the little things…

• Take 30-seconds and personalize your LinkedIn connection invitation. I ignore the “friend” requests…save those for Facebook folks. I also pretty much ignore the generic “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Really, why? Why are we good connections for each other? Why should I have to figure it out? LinkedIn’s policy is that you know the people you connect to, but honestly, I’m open to connect with people I don’t know just yet, but ONLY if you take a minute and let me know who we can help each other. If it isn’t reciprocal, I’m not interested.
• If you want to send me sales spam, could you at least do your homework? Yesterday, I received an email from a Salesforce.com rep asking for 15 minutes of my time to talk to me about the service. Guess what. I’m already a client and have been for several years. Hello?
• Show some respect. If I have explicitly stated on my LinkedIn profile that I don’t want sales pitches, then don’t send them! You only serve to annoy me, and I just tell my net to avoid you like the plague. I don’t care what LinkedIn says about the positive ratio of people willing to respond to your InMail. That only works if you are darn good at personalizing, which most are not, and the person on the other end really needs what you sell. Recruiters this works for but for salespeople, not so much. Respect what people put on their profiles about the type of mails they are open to. Be creative, find another way!
• Stop asking for favors and never offer to do one in return. You have no idea how many people want to “pick my brain” to get FREE information. I’m all for sharing, but too many people cross that line. I’ve learned to be very discerning and say no as needed. But hey, if you buy me an awesome lunch or dinner with a nice bottle of wine, sure I’m open to sharing my valuable expertise. All I ask if that people respect that I do this to earn my living…I can’t give you everything for free! I know people who reach out to me for help with introductions and they NEVER offer to do anything to help me. Don’t even get me started on the people who show up every couple of years looking for help securing a job. Really? You haven’t talked to me in 3 years and the first email since is to send me your resume and ask that I ask my network to help you? Uh…not going to happen.
• Be relevant. Might mean you need to do some homework. I am soooo tired of receiving spam emails that have zip to do with me or my business. It’s lazy and a time waster to shoot out hundreds of email to people that you don’t know and that you haven’t bothered to learn about. Oh, and don’t school me if I have not responded to the sales crap you sent me last month. I didn’t respond because what you offer has nothing to do with me.
• Follow the rules of email marketing. The CANN-SPAM act is very clear…don’t send spam email to people who’ve not opted in to a list. And, you MUST give them an easy way to “opt out”. When you send me email without that option, it really makes me mad. The act says you are “forgiven” if you spam someone once, as long as they can easily opt out. Follow the protocol. In another blog post, maybe I’ll rant about the people selling Opt-In Database services who spam me – I didn’t opt-in to their list – and then give me no way to get off their email. Do you get the concept of opt-in?
• Say, thank you. Is it really that hard to acknowledge people and thank them for mentioning you, sharing your content, tweeting about you, helped you get that introduction, speaking gig or whatever? No, it isn’t. Do it. It is the right thing to do!

Folks, sales is a people business and people buy from people that they know, like and trust. In today’s social world, your prospects also buy from people that their colleagues and friends know, like and trust. Isn’t it time you figured out how to put social selling to work for you in a way that’s focused on what you can give versus what you can get? Relationships matter.

I’d like to suggest that it is time to play a bigger game! Bring it!

As long as I’ve got the subject of time on the brain, I thought I’d write a post about the biggest objection that I hear from salespeople with respect to using social media as part of their sales routine.

“I don’t have time”.

That always gets me a little riled, because it says to me three things. One, they haven’t accepted that social media is as critical to their sales business, as email and smart phones have become. Two, these reps still believe that running around to lots of networking events is what gets them the greatest return on their effort even though, at most of those events, their buyer isn’t even in the room. Three, they don’t understand how to use technology to their advantage.

Adapt or fall further behind.

Whether you like it or not, buyer behavior has changed. Your sales approach needs to change too. Buyers do a significant amount of research online before ever engaging with a salesperson. Can they find you? And, if they do find you, is the information that you’ve shared on your LinkedIn profile (as an example) compelling enough for them to want to talk to you at all?

I know, I know. You never thought we’d do business over email either. Well, you were wrong. You are wrong about social media too! Every day business is being transacted over social sites. Unless you want your competitors to step up and kick your bootie, it’s time to move.

Ok, so let’s talk about those networking events.

When is the last time you carefully evaluated if the events that you are attending is netting you any sort of sales return? In general, you can choose to attend events for two reasons. One, you want the education, because you think the speaker is going to be awesome. Two, you are going to make connections with people who can buy your products and services. Let’s hope that most of you are using your networking time focused on #2. But here’s the problem. Buyers aren’t spending time at networking events like they used to. A friend of mine – he’s the decision maker for the technology providers who get in at his company -  tells me that not only does he not spend much time at networking events anymore, he also doesn’t carry business cards to the ones he does attend. Buyers aren’t showing up, because they are tired of being pitched by sellers. Why are you spending so much time there?

What to do?

Free up some time by cutting out events you know aren’t getting you connected to sales opportunities. Spread that time throughout the week and use it to share content, post updates, research your target list of prospects, etc. using LinkedIn, Focus, InsideView, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, whatever. You can create some serious opportunities working social just 30-minutes a day. I know, because I do it. The key is to have a plan and know exactly what you want to accomplish.

Finally, use technology to your advantage. Unless you enjoy posting on LinkedIn, then jumping over to Twitter or your Facebook page, use Hootsuite as your social media dashboard and content organizer. Hootsuite’s free version lets you connect to five social media sites and/or RSS feeds. Got a blog you like to follow? Curate the content by setting up the blog RSS feed in your Hootsuite account. Every time a new post is published, a message shoots out from your account to your various social media sites. From your Hootsuite dashboard, you can send messages to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and you can monitor the conversations from there as well. And, you have the ability to schedule messages in advance.

So, stop making excuses.

You do have time to integrate social media into your sales activities and like any change to the way that you do things, you have to decide if you will spend time on the activities that actually lead to sales – or not.

Recently, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference. As a first-timer at the conference, I wasn’t completely sure what to expect, but I have to say that it was one of the best run, most  informative conferences that I’ve attended in some time.

The overall theme of the conference was sales and marketing alignment, in addition to social selling. What I find curious is all the time spent talking about the need for sales and marketing alignment (it has been a topic of conversation for years), but somehow the problem has yet to be resolved in most organizations. Now that social media has entered the scene, I believe that alignment between these two departments is even more critical.

Social marketing campaigns must be tied to current sales processes and CRM systems but I don’t see that happening in most instances. Case in point. I met a Marketing Manager recently from a sizable organization who became defensive when I asked if her company had a social media strategy. “Yes, of course, she huffily replied. I handle all of that.” I said, “Cool. How are you tying your marketing campaigns and social lead generation activities to your sales teams CRM system and sales process?” She didn’t even know what a CRM system was much less understand how social sales leads should be tied it. Folks, social media marketing success is more than putting up a Facebook fan page and it certainly requires more than hiring the young 20 or 30-something who knows how to tweet, but I digress.

Personally, I don’t think the sales and marketing alignment problem is that tough to solve. Am I just naive? Why doesn’t the CEO put both sales and marketing on the same revenue goals and bonus them on the same objectives; i.e. hitting quota. Don’t bonus marketing on cheap leads, bonus them on the right leads! On the flip side, tie a piece of every reps sales commission to following up on the “right leads” provided by marketing. To be fair, we all know that salespeople often ignore the leads handed off to them by their marketing team and that’s generally because the leads are not adequately qualified. Salespeople want to talk to qualified, motivated buyers. Give them the right leads and they will follow up! By the way, signing up for a free whitepaper – often called “raising your hand” – doesn’t mean that the lead is qualified or that the potential buyer even cares about what you sell. Maybe they just thought that the whitepaper sounded interesting.

Here are a few of my other thoughts as a result of attending the conference:

•  The right conferences are still an incredible way to expand your network. Yes, I love the power of social media, but let’s face it, people do not buy from companies, people buy from people. I went to learn, speak, to meet people and to make connections, but I didn’t go to “sell”. Take note sales folks…the best sales come from the investment in building relationships that lead to opportunity over time.

• Your online conversations can move offline. I had such fun meeting people like Joanne Black and Anneke Seley that I’ve been talking to or following online for quite some time. Joanne and I have connected again since the conference and have decided that we are twin sisters of different mothers. We both agree that there are lots of opportunities for us to support each other with referral business. And sometimes, you have to travel 2200 miles to meet a local colleague from your own community. That was the case with Judy Yi of Silverpop who works about 10 miles away from my office and wouldn’t you know…we are also members of the Atlanta Women in Social Facebook group. Small world! Online conversation is great, but taking it offline can be even better!

• Don’t forget the social in social selling. There were a handful of conference vendors who just couldn’t resist tweets full of selling. The me, me, me got a bit old. If you’ve been sharing valuable information with conference attendees and then mix in a pitch here and there..ok, but tweets simply focused on you and what you sell are a big turn off.

• Keep presentations focused on delivering value to your audience. This is a nice way of saying…don’t sell from the podium. One vendor in particular spent their entire presentation time selling, selling and more…well…selling. Not only nauseating, but they were the subject of numerous conversations throughout the conference and the comments were not positive. Honestly, is that really how you want your company to be remembered? Just sayin.

• Bold moves sometimes backfire. During one of the presentations, I applauded the move to do a “live demo” of the sales approach being sold. At the same time, I felt like I was witnessing a car wreck in slow motion. The approach was slightly better than cold calling and the techniques used to get things like email nomenclature from the receptionist were a bit lame. Not to mention the rep went back to her several times asking the same questions she had just answered. Listening skills were lacking. As for the voicemail message being left for the targeted prospect…what a waste. It was focused only on what the vendor wanted – an appointment. Nothing in it for the exec at all!  If I was the exec on the receiving end of that message I would have hit the delete button in 2 seconds flat. Lesson… do  your homework before picking up the phone, so that when you need to leave your voicemail message, you’ll be able to leave one that is compelling enough for your prospect to want to call you back.

I’ll close by saying that aside from a few presentation missteps; I was inspired and energized by the sheer number of smart people with great ideas and approaches to their business. I engaged in many great conversations and appreciated the willingness of so many pros to share best practices.  It can be easy to coast along comfortably in our day-to-day lives without remembering the importance of investing in our professional development. I say thank you to all the people that I talked with who so generously shared their perspectives.

Hats off to the entire Sales 2.0 conference team for creating and delivering a conference experience that raised the bar and puts other conference organizers on notice! Seriously, Selling Power, you rock!

p.s. I’m attending the Sales Strategies in a Social and Mobile World. Why don’t you join me for a meet-up?

It has begun. The relentless beating of the negativity drum that our media insists on pounding. Predictable I suppose, but none the less disappointing.