social selling

How Content Curation Makes You a Smarter Social Seller with Stephen Walsh

September 20, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this episode, my guest is Stephen Walsh, CEO of AndersPink. We focused our discussion on the art of content curation. You probably already know that part of your social selling strategy includes using content to connect and engage with new buyers. Contrary to what many “experts” tell you though, you don’t have to create your own content. If you are able to do that at some point great but when you are first starting out, it just isn’t that easy. Your job is to sell, right? Plus, not everyone has the time, inclination or talent to write blog posts. There are other ways to create content like recording audio tips, hosting webinars, etc. but that takes time too. That’s why I like this topic. You can learn to curate content like a boss in ways that help you to engage with buyers and positions you as a thought leader in your field.

Stephen and I discussed:

What content curation is and what it has to do with social selling.

Why sharing other people’s content is a good idea. Learn how it helps you.

Learn tips for finding great content fast without losing your day to the internet.

How you can be more targeted in how/when you share content with more than just the folks in your network.

How you should think about social selling and content curation as a team sport. You don’t necessarily have to do it all on your own.

Finally, we talked about the FANTASTIC new ebook that Stephen and his team put out on this topic. More than theory, this is a “boots on the ground” field guide you will reference again and again. I’ve already read it twice! You’ll find specific strategies that you can put into practical application right now to improve your results when curating and sharing content.

Enjoy the interview!

About Stephen:

Stephen Walsh is the CEO and CoFounder of AndersPink. Stephen is passionate about helping sales teams stay smart, share better content, grow their business and keep learning every day. He’s has worked in learning, sales, and marketing for over 20 years. He co-founded Kineo, an elearning company, ran sales and marketing and grew it to a $20m business before selling it. He’s a co-founder of BuzzSumo, a leading content discovery tool and of Anders Pink, a new tool to help social sellers with content curation. He’s written 2 books on learning and selling and is a regular blogger and speaker.

Connect info: twitter: @stephentwalsh LinkedIn m: stephen@anderspink.com w: website

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Death by Meetings

September 7, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Wasted time in unproductive sales meetings is an all too familiar story. Meetings, especially for B2B salespeople, are part of doing business. By many estimates, however, salespeople waste some 25%-50% of their time engaged in meetings that go nowhere.

When meetings are done right, sellers significantly improve their ability to advance the sale. Unfortunately, trouble begins almost from the moment the words, “Let’s have a meeting to discuss it”, are uttered.

Five Ways that Salespeople Waste Time in Meetings

#1: Meeting with the wrong people.

Early in my sales career, I was told to “get into the account wherever you can.”

Back then we didn’t have the technology we do today. Talking to a number of people in order to get to the right decision maker was a necessary evil.

Today, if you aren’t using the Internet, social networks, business intelligence or relationship management systems to quickly find the right buyers to engage, you might as well find yourself a new career.

#2: Squishy agendas or none at all.

My rule #1 is that a successful meeting begins with a clear purpose. If the question, “What is the purpose and agenda of this meeting?” cannot be answered – don’t hold a meeting.

Salespeople are notorious for flying by the seat of their pants. They often don’t think through the purpose of the meeting from the prospects point of view. Their agenda is to get in and sell.

#3: Poor meeting facilitation skills.

Successful meetings rely on a careful balance of asking the right questions, listening and keeping conversations on track. Instead, a high percentage of salespeople roll right into their pitch – talking far more than listening – and then later wonder why a sale didn’t materialize.

#4: No clear plan of action to advance the opportunity.

Planning what you want to happen during the meeting – and after the meeting ends – is crucial to successful selling.

Time and again, I’ve seen sellers walk out of a meeting without securing the commitment for a specific next action, like locking in the next phone call. Everyone has their calendar in hand, on their phone. Don’t leave a meeting without a scheduled commitment to move forward. If you leave without a defined next action, you might spend weeks trying to rebuild any momentum you had.

#5: Failure to do their homework.

This is probably my all-time pet peeve. Back in the day, I went to the library to do my homework. The data available was largely out of date, but it was all we had to go on.

These days there are many ways to gather information about a prospect and their company before a meeting takes place. The best sales meetings are the ones in which the salesperson makes it all about the buyer. They do that by clearly demonstrating that they’ve learned about the buyer’s business, have some idea of what’s important to them and then discuss potential solutions to help solve their business problem.

Meeting success relies on…

Meetings need clear objectives, the right people in the room and a clear plan for what comes next. Otherwise, like a hamster on a wheel, sellers will find themselves running from meeting to meeting with no sales deals to show for it.

Transform Sales Through Social Selling with Kurt Shaver

September 5, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

Kurt is the Chief Sales Officer at Vengreso, and he has been an early evangelist of the use of LinkedIn and social selling strategies in the sales process. We started off talking about how Kurt defines social selling, which depending on who you talk too has different meanings.

During the interview, you’ll learn why salespeople need to be incorporating social selling approaches into their current sales process, and what happens if they don’t. Surprising there are still a lot of naysayers and fence sitters who haven’t begun integrating social networks into their selling strategy.

Kurt shared his perspective on how an organization successfully implements a social selling strategy. He also shared tips for the individual sales contributor.

Content is widely promoted as a key part of any social selling effort. But it is fiercely debated about whether salespeople should create their own content. Kurt shared with me where he stood in the debate.

Lately, the “this or that strategy is dead” crowd has been rising up to suggest that social selling dead and that it doesn’t work. I asked Kurt what he thought about this… do these people have a point or is it simply click bait to get people reading their posts?

Kurt recently teamed up with other businesses to form a new company – Vengreso – to provide an array of services related to digital sales transformation. He told me what was behind his decision and what is Vengreso bringing to the world of social selling?

Finally, Vengreso has a new social selling boot camp starting on Sept 19. Kurt told me what people can expect to learn when they participate in the program.

Peeps, I want you to know that I’m an affiliate partner of Vengreso because I often have individual sales contributors or small business owners looking for social selling help. Since I mostly work with larger teams, I wanted to be sure I had a great place to refer folks too that I’m unable to support. So, go to my blog or company website and you will find program details there. Use my link to get yourself registered for the program.

Thanks and enjoy the interview!

Kurt Shaver is a co-founder and Chief Sales Officer of Vengreso. Kurt is an expert at getting sales teams to adopt new sales tools and techniques. Through a successful career in technology sales, Kurt learned what it takes to reach B2B decision makers. In 2011, Kurt recognized that LinkedIn would be the next great sales technology and that it would require expert training. He pivoted his business and now has over 10,000 hours of experience training corporate sales teams like CenturyLink, Ericsson, and TelePacific Communications. Kurt is the creator of the Social Selling Boot Camp and he frequently speaks at corporate sales meetings and conferences like Dreamforce, Sales 2.0, and LinkedIn’s Sales Connect.

Connect on LinkedIn and Twitter

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How Social Branding Intersects with Social Selling with Jasmine Sandler

August 23, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

In this episode, I talked with Jasmine Sandler about The Importance of Social Branding and its intersection with Social Selling in Delivering Results. I asked Jasmine to start by giving me the deets on how she got to where she is in her career today.

We also discussed:

Jasmine’s perspective on the intersection between Social Branding and Social Selling, and what she means by that.

You’ll hear tips on how to build a successful social brand presence.

You learn why Social Branding is for everyone, and your social brand is useful for anyone from Entrepreneur to Executive.

Discover how the Social Branding of the Individual Executive supports a company’s brand strength.

Jasmine provides tips for executives branding themselves online.

Finally, Jasmine talks us through a client case study, so you can understand the process she uses to help people build their brand.

Enjoy the interview!

About Jasmine:

Jasmine Sandler is a Google awarded Author, Senior-level Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Online Branding for global organizations and C-level executives. She is the Founder and CEO of Agent-cy Online Marketing, a NYC-based Social Media and Search Agency serving global brands including: CitiBank, Private Jet Card Comparisons, Fly Home Jets, Tuescher Chocolates, Diamonds International, Almod Diamonds and The Shade Store. She writes on SEO and Social Media Strategies for Fast Company, LinkedIn, Entrepreneur.com, SearchEngineJournal.com and ClickZ.com. She has a dual MBA in Marketing and CIS and is a former IBM Marketing executive. Her passions are Speaking, Singing and Hockey.

Connect on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Right Message, Right Support, Right Sales Content with Jim Burns

August 14, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

I talked to Jim Burns of Avitage in this podcast about how to support B2B value selling sales teams with the right knowledge, communication support, and situation-ready content.

High-performing content is your First Product and Currency with which you earn attention, interest, engagement — this is the way you create value for buyers. Unfortunately, many executives aren’t aware of strategic imperative of high-performing content and the impact on their business. Since most content tends not to be sales or situation ready, it generally performs poorly, often negatively, which does not reflect well on the salesperson or the company brand.

Jim and I discussed:

How to assess the current state of your current sales content assets.

What Jim believes to be the underlying causes of why content doesn’t perform well.

The primary cases for using sales content:

Knowledge, Shared Learning, Preparation support
Communication Support
Situation-ready

How an organization should go about producing content that is high-quality, high performing and sales-ready.

What Jim recommends in terms of deploying content, or making situation-ready content easier for salespeople to access and use?

And much more.

Enjoy the interview!

About Jim:

Jim Burns is a sales professional with a unique expertise in sales conversation and content. For over 20 years his company Avitage developed sales content and software that improved the way sales professionals differentiated themselves and created value for customers through the way they sold.

B2B selling organizations of all sizes have benefited from breakthrough approaches Avitage provided to capture and incorporate selling knowledge into daily activities. They’ve learned how to create effective communication support and situation-ready content that fuels value selling models.

Avitage no longer produces content. They help organizations capitalize on methodologies and practices that create high-performing content, at scale, without compromise.

Connect with Jim on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Does Your Social Selling Approach Need a Tune Up?

July 14, 2017 By Barbara Giamanco Leave a Comment

When I began evangelizing social selling as early as 2006, the majority of sales executives just didn’t see how using tools like LinkedIn would make a real difference in terms of reaching buyers and generating leads. But as buyer behavior and expectations began to change, now not a day passes that you don’t hear about why you need to be social selling. If you are still fence sitting, either your target customer isn’t using social networking platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter actively, or you haven’t fully grasped how to incorporate social selling strategies into your sales process in a way that drives sales results.

Many salespeople come to me frustrated that their online efforts don’t seem to be panning out, and that can certainly be happening for several reasons, which I’ve highlighted below.

Unrealistic expectations. One glaring reason why sellers struggle is because they mistakenly believe that using social channels helps to short-cut the sales process. That’s not true at all. Like every other aspect of selling, work is involved. It takes time to develop a relationship and earn someone’s trust. That’s true online and off. And if you have no plan, are not following a specific social engagement routine and measuring the results, it will be hard to justify the effort you are putting in. When done right, the rewards make the investment in time worth it!

Sales messaging. Being on the receiving end of sales pitches myself, I can tell you that most sales messaging is just plain awful. Email and phone messages are rarely constructed from the buyer’s point of view. In other words, buyers have business problems they trying to solve, so your feature focused product pitch falls on deaf ears.

As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. You have one shot at that first moment of engagement. Make it count. Do your homework. It isn’t the number of emails you send or phone calls you make that lead to that net sales return you want; it is the quality of the message and approach that matters.

Quality versus Quantity. Feeling the pressure to hit revenue goals, sales managers insist that sellers do more when leads are light in the sales opportunity pipeline. Make more cold calls. Send more emails. Connect with more people. Just – do – more. More of the wrong activity, however, isn’t going to lead to the right result. If all you focus on is the activity – more feature dumps, more demo’s, more calls, more emails… nothing will change if the activity provides zero value for the buyer. Buyers are looking for business people who can help them solve business problems. If you can’t do that, it will never matter how much hustle you put into it. When you understand the buyer’s pain points, their decision-making process, and can articulate the type of quantifiable value you bring to them, that’s when they will give you a shot.

Go Where Your Buyers Are. This suggestion falls into the category of stating the obvious. Go where your buyer is likely to be. Choosing the proper social media platform is paramount. Otherwise, you’ll waste time spinning your wheels and become frustrated. Your goal is to build an integrity-based relationship that over time may lead to a sale. But first things first. You must fish where the fish are, and as I said earlier, it is possible that your target buyer isn’t as active online. That means you’ll need to explore other ways to try and capture their attention. My strategy includes a mashup of things like speaking at events or on webinars, in-person networking, podcast interviews, facilitating buyer peer-peer networking lunches, writing articles, making the outbound phone calls and more.

Content Not Relevant. Content is a big part of social selling. The worst thing you can do is to push content out there randomly that isn’t consistent with what your target buyer will find valuable. That means you need to understand what they care about or the challenges they likely face. Therefore, creating your plan is important. It will help you determine whom you sell too and what is important to them. Things like trends in their industry, competitive pressures, their company’s strategic priorities, the financial health of the organization and more. It isn’t difficult to find that information and armed with that knowledge you can share the right kind of content to demonstrate that you get what your target buyer cares about.

Lack of Follow Up. Here are two statistics that may surprise you: 1) Per industry estimates, between 40 to 50 percent of all inbound sales leads are never followed up. Wait. What? Close to half of inbound leads are left to die on the vine? 2) The average salesperson only follows up two times on every lead. How can you expect to be successful in sales if you don’t put more effort than that into your follow up? Calling or emailing a prospect “just to check in” or asking for “an update” on prior interactions is not effective follow up. Your mission as a salesperson is to provide value at every stage of the buying cycle.

Summing it Up. Salespeople need to continually evolve and adapt their approach to serve the voice of the customer. The most successful and forward-thinking sales representatives will use social media as part of their sales process to connect with buyers, develop relationships, demonstrate their credibility and increase their odds of getting buyers to take notice.

However, social selling isn’t a cure-all for your sales challenges. It is a set of tactics that combined with other sales strategies can help to improve the quality of your lead generation efforts and the size and quality of your opportunity pipeline. These tactics aren’t the only thing you’ll do to be successful in reaching your quota goals though, but engaging online is simply part of today’s selling playbook!

Like this post? Please share with your networks. And if you missed my Selling in the Age of the Customer webinar, you can watch it on demand HERE.

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