Social Selling: Understanding the Basics

Welcome to maximize your social, practical and actionable advice on how your business can truly maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social author of the recently published book of the same name and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, folks, Neal Schaffer here, welcome to another episode of maximize your social. today. I'm still in Orange County, California actually did do a presentation just today for a skincare company. They had their annual meeting of consultants, beauty consultants out here in beautiful Dana Point, California, right there on the beach, always a pleasure to be able to speak at nice hotel. So if you're a company looking to do an event, pick a nice hotel near the seaside. And it'll make everybody happy. Not only the speakers, but obviously the participants. But anyway, I digress. And there's a few nuggets I wanted to share with you from that presentation. But today, I want to talk about something which I've been asked to talk a lot about, which have been creating a lot of content for in which I think there's a huge demand for on maximize social business. We have Craig Jameson, who actually blogs will originally he was blogging about b2b sales. And now he takes a broader approach by blogging about what is something called social selling, or social sales. The interesting thing is that my background is b2b sales. And when I wrote and published maximize social media for LinkedIn, and social media marketing back in 2011, that published in July of 2011, social sales, social selling really wasn't a term. But salespeople were already learning how to use social media to help complement their sales efforts. And that's really what it is. And today, for those of you that are new to the topic, but are in sales, or you're a small business owner, and obviously I talk a lot about from a marketing perspective, how you can utilize social media. But the same tools can be equally relevant if you're trying to sell especially when you try to sell in other businesses, but even when you're trying to sell to other people. And I want to give you just a very, very, very easy example of what happened to me today, that illustrates the basics of what social selling is about. And I hope to cover it in future podcasts as well. And obviously, if you want me to cover any other topic, I'm always free to your feedback or open to your feedback. So what happened was, I have a company called windmills marketing, if you know me, my original website was called windmill networking. And recently, I changed that to maximize your social, I branched the blog out into maximize social business. And then I branch the my personal brand into maximize your social, which is obviously the name of my new book, as well as this podcast. So when Mel's marketing was the company name was is my LLC out here established in California. But now that windmill is no longer part of my brand, I wanted to what we call a DBA, or doing business as I applied for a DBA for maximize your social to represent my brands that when companies send me checks, they don't have to ask me what my company name is, or is that windmill or windmills. It's maximize your social, right makes total sense. So here's the thing. When I was presenting today, I got a phone call. Now I learned long ago that when I speak, I turned my phone off. And I noticed it was a local 949 number. That's the number here in Orange County where I live. And I immediately without calling this person back, I noticed I had a new voice message. So I listened to the voice message. And the voice message was from a gentleman who works at the local branch of the Wells Fargo Bank. Now, I actually bank with a different bank. And I don't think that matters what bank I bank with. But let's just put it this way. I was a walk cobia customer. And when Wells Fargo bought out by cobia Well, I stuck with them. But I really liked my local law cobia branch. But then there were things on the internet that I couldn't do with Wells Fargo, like be able to see, you know, copies of checks that I had deposited to remember, you know, who I deposit them to, and what have you I really wasn't happy and my accountant turned me on to another bank. And that's the long story of that. But this is a gentleman who is trying to sell business banking services representing a local branch of Wells Fargo, he left me a message how did he contact me, he saw that I had a DBA listing anybody who knows what DBA listings are means that you have to in publicly available or you know public places like newspapers, you literally have to print an ad to advertise the fact that you are going to be doing business as a different name. So this person was monitoring that knowing that that anybody that's doing business, as a name is doing business. And probably there's something in their business that made them change to another name, which may be a good thing that they're creating a new product, a new brand, maybe they're getting a lot of sales. And so this gentleman was very smart. He was reading the data reading the information that was right relevant, that he knew that every single person that's posting a do business as advertisement is one of his potential business banking clients. He reached out, he saw that there was a contact phone number, he called me left a message that is an aggressive, awesome salesperson. Now, will they close the business or not? Because I have my own experience with Wells Fargo is another question. But the fact that this person used the data to contact me. In other words, this data appears in a lot of different forms. This was old school data, the application that needs to be published in the newspaper. But equally, there's data everywhere on the internet. And you better believe there's a hell of a lot of data. In social media, we call it big social data, social Big Data, whatever you want to call it. But there's lots of hints of people that may be looking to buy a product or service that either you or your competitors can easily find in social media. And that's part of the social selling is, you know, as a salesperson why, you know, I wonder where am I going to develop my next lead marketing can only get you so far, sometimes you need to do a little bit of prospecting, right? And you need to build up your pipeline. Well, that's where social media can help complement by doing some keyword searches, some geo targeted keyword searches in your area in your industry, for competitors names for your products names, or service names or generic names that will be associated or affiliated with your company, I think you get the picture. I think that is one of the things that you can be doing that I would call part of social selling. And you can see in that instance, it is just very, very easy thing to do. And it's an easy and natural way to complement what you've always been doing like this gentleman from Wells Fargo Bank did now. When I am on the freeway on the drive home, I get an email now it's illegal to text and drive. So after I got home, I looked at the email. Guess what? Good afternoon, Neil. This is what the email said. Good afternoon, Neil. I just left you a via my name is and I'll you know I already said Wells Fargo Bank, I'm not gonna say anything else. I am a business banker at Wells Fargo Bank, I wanted to reach out to you in regards to recent filing for a fictitious business name statement with the county of Orange. I don't know if you have a current provider for your business banking needs yet, but I wanted to reach out and give you a point of contact at Wells Fargo. And if you're interested in what we can offer you as a small business customer, you can reach out to me and I'll go over the benefits with you. Hope you have a great day hope to hear from you soon. Classic. What did this person do? This person first of all tried to call me. And when you call well voice messages, I guess you can go on and on and on. But people usually keep it very simple and short and sweet. But what if I'm busy and I'm not responding to phone? Well, there's email. And with email, you can obviously go in a lot more depth, and it wasn't a sales email. Hey, I noticed I don't know if you have a bank. Let me know if you have any questions. Feel free to use me as a point of contact. very savvy. Well, guess what? What if I'm not reading my email? What if I'm spending the whole day on LinkedIn? What if I'm spending the whole day on Facebook, it might be easier to send me a message on Facebook, it might be easier to follow me on Twitter, start retweeting me on Twitter, creating a relationship sending me a direct message, saying hey, would you like to meet for coffee? I think you get the picture. We talked about the different ways of finding data to generate new business. The next thing is the different channels to communicate. So in addition of phone and email, now, you now have all these different social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and within each social networks, you have a lot of different ways of engaging and sending what we call social signals. And I'm not going to talk about social CRM, people like Oh, social selling, you need to look into social CRM. And we all know, it's new tools, old rules, right? Sure. It's a new business tool. And that business tool allows you to efficiently within a single dashboard, do keyword searches, or perhaps decide if you're already connected to someone which channel you want to use to send them a message. But it's important to understand the concepts, the concepts of sales have not changed. Social media is not going to help you get 100% of your business. Well, maybe me but that's my industry. It complements what you've been doing. But if you understand the power of that data, and being able to find that data and contact the person, and the different channels available to you and different ways of engaging with those people, I think you'll see why social selling is a compelling topic for anyone in sales. And I look forward to blogging and sharing more information about this as we go on into the future. That's it for today. I hope you enjoy this podcast, really enjoy and appreciate all those that have rated it on iTunes. I look forward to your comments, your ratings and any feedback that you may have. This is Neal Schaffer maximize your social app. My office in Irvine, California in beautiful orange county signing up for today. Everybody, make it a great day, wherever you are in the world. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Thanks for listening and have a great day.