· 2014. 2. 23. · buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion. direct mail and print advertising used to...

W W W . P R O S P E C T P L A T F O R M . C O M

Written By ProspectPlatform - www.prospectplatform.com - Generate More Leads & Revenue Using Next Generation Social Selling.

Sign up for our Free Software Beta Program by visiting our website – January 2014 – Copyright - All Rights Reserved.

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How Social Selling Can

Positively Impact Your Business

www.prospectplatform.com




Table of Contents

Social Selling Overview ...................................................................................... 4

What the Analysts Say about Social Selling ........................................................ 4

Business Value of Social Selling ......................................................................... 5

LinkedIn .............................................................................................................. 6

Twitter ................................................................................................................. 6

Facebook ............................................................................................................ 7

YouTube ............................................................................................................. 7

Google Plus ........................................................................................................ 8

Instagram ............................................................................................................ 8

Pinterest ............................................................................................................. 9

Meetup ................................................................................................................ 9

WordPress (or Other Blogging Platform) ............................................................. 9

Email Marketing Platforms ................................................................................ 10

Potential Client .................................................................................................. 11

Business Advocate ........................................................................................... 11

Investor ............................................................................................................. 11

New Hire ........................................................................................................... 11

Your Boss ......................................................................................................... 11

Lack of Prospects ............................................................................................. 12

Lack of Qualified Leads .................................................................................... 12

Outdated and Disconnected Tools and Techniques ........................................... 12

Disconnected Internal Teams ............................................................................ 13

Inability to Hire Great People ............................................................................ 13

Inability to Tap into Your Personal Business Network ........................................ 13

Inability to Tap into a Larger Community of Followers ....................................... 13

Content ............................................................................................................. 14

Community ....................................................................................................... 15

Collaboration..................................................................................................... 15

Knowledge Sharing ........................................................................................... 15

Social Sharing ................................................................................................... 15

Social Features ................................................................................................. 15

Business Intelligence ........................................................................................ 16



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Introduction: What is Social Selling? here has been a paradigm shift in the way selling is done today compared to just a few short years ago. Some of us might remember back in 1993 when America Online (AOL) sent discs in the mail to get people on the internet. They ended up sending 660 million discs and spending over $300 million to get to a peak of about 30 million users in 2002. In 2005, the nation’s newspapers had peak ad revenues of $49.435 billion. By 2012, total newspaper ad revenues plummeted to $22.314, a drop

of 55%. In July of 2013, the New York Times announced it was selling the Boston Globe for $70 million, after buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion. Direct mail and print advertising used to be the most effective way to reach potential customers. Today, these businesses are on life support.

Two small companies were founded between the peak of AOL in 2002 and the peak of newspaper ad revenue in 2005. Those companies, LinkedIn and Facebook, spawned a new way of networking and selling. The former was founded in May 2003 and is the king of business social networking, with 259 million members in October 2013. The latter was founded in February 2004 and is the de facto standard in social networking, with 1.19 billion members in October 2013. A third game-changing company was founded in March 2006 and as of January 2014 gives over 645 million users the ability to send out 140 characters. The Big 3 in social networking and selling are LinkedIn (May 2003), Facebook (February 2004) and Twitter (March 2006).

These social networking and selling mediums are not going anywhere and new sites pop up all the time. As of February 2014, the 15 top social networking sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, WordPress, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr., Instagram, Flickr, MySpace, Tagged, Meetup, Ask.fm and MeetMe.

Social Selling Overview

Social selling is a technique whereby products and services are sold via social networks. Social selling is more than just using tools like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Social selling is about salespeople, marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs using written and visual content to build a strong, personal brand and business community. These sites give you the potential to find business advocates that can spread the message of your content, products and services to others across the social web.

What the Analysts Say about Social Selling

The use of social media for sales is finally making a dent on the internet, according to Gartner Analyst Patrick Stackenas. He mentioned that some vendors use Big Data to rapidly sort through large quantities of social data internally, and externally, to help you find optimal buyers. B2B tech buyers “find nearly 70% of the content they need on their own, with only 15% sent by marketing and only 15% sent by sales,” according to Forrester Research. These prospects go to search engines and social networks first. In order to compete in today's market, sales professionals and business owners need to implement social selling as part of their daily strategy. A business needs to become trusted, highly visible and a subject matter expert in a given field. In May and June 2012, the Aberdeen Group surveyed 182 end users regarding their use of social media to improve sales

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effectiveness. They found that three core characteristics in sales professionals increased sales effectiveness by 25-35%. These are:

Social Collaboration: The ability to network internally within an organization and externally within a business community to learn information that shortens the sales cycle and increases the chances of winning the deal.

External Listening: The ability to identify trigger events that happen across multiple areas, such as industry news, company news, blogs, social networks and industry analysts.

External Participation: The ability to put aside the natural tendency to sell first and instead provide subject matter expertise and business value before selling a product or service.

Business Value of Social Selling

Studies show that 93% of today's prospects search the internet for your company, your solutions and most importantly, your people, prior to meeting with you. Today’s prospects are highly educated. At the bare minimum this means you need to have an up-to-date LinkedIn profile and the content you generate needs to be valuable to your business community. The bottom line is that 73% of sales professionals who used social selling techniques as part of their sales process outperformed their selling peers and exceeded their quota 23% more frequently. When you implement daily or weekly social selling techniques this leads to increased prospects, opportunities, proposals, closed business and revenue.



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Social Selling Platforms he top 15 social networking sites discussed in the introduction act as social selling platforms for those who use them strategically. More than 90% of the people on these sites use them to connect with like-minded people, share content about their lives, be part of a greater community and feel connected to others. Almost every person on Earth wants to feel connected to others within a community. Many of these people are looking for content and ideas that will enhance their daily lives

or motivate them to take action. This feeling of connectedness and community plus a product or service that benefits the buyer is a winning combination. This is nothing new.

Before social networking sites dominated the marketing scene, people recommended products and services at social events such as cocktail parties, business events and community outings. Social networking sites make it easier to ask your community for a recommendation or for help finding something specific. This is why it is important to brand yourself daily by putting out value-added content about your products and services. If you do this effectively, your network will grow, people will have an easier time finding you and you will make more money.

In this chapter, we outline the top 15 social networking sites and the specific business value of each.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional business network with more than 260 million members, and is growing rapidly every year.

The business value of LinkedIn is to:

Establish your professional brand and control one of the top search results for your name.

Build and maintain a broader network of trustworthy professionals.

Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates.

Learn about other companies.

Leverage powerful tools to find and reach the people you need.

Tap into the knowledge of your network.

Discover new opportunities.

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and read “tweets,” which are text messages limited to 140 characters. Twitter currently has more than 645 million users.

The business value of Twitter is to:

Increase brand awareness.

Keep up with the latest trends in your industry.

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Promote your blog content, videos, presentations, etc.

Boost your website SEO.

Drive website traffic.

Get instant feedback about your products and/or services.

Increase the reach and impact of your PR initiatives.

Gather real-time competitive intelligence.

Monitor your brand reputation.

Support your recruiting efforts by connecting directly with potential employees.

Gain direct access to high profile individuals.

Facebook

Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world with more than 1.2 billion users. Users have the ability to create personal pages, business pages and group pages, as well as follow those pages.

The business value of Facebook is to:

Increased exposure to potential customers.

Gather more leads.

Lower marketing expenses.

Reach a targeted audience.

Use Facebook insights.

Build brand loyalty.

Increase web traffic.

Boost SEO.

Allow users to view your page on their mobile device.

Research your competition.

YouTube

The Google-owned video site is the second largest search engine in the world with more than 2 billion videos watched daily.

The business value of using YouTube is to:

Conduct how to videos or webinars.

Promote events.

Communicate to your marketplace.



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Communicate to your clients.

Increase SEO.

Build your brand.

Create a buzz.

Educate your audience.

Google Plus

Google+ is Google’s social networking platform that allows you to create a community of followers. It is also connected to your Gmail account and gives you robust content management capabilities using Google Drive.

The business value of using Google+ is to:

Optimize Google search.

Increase web influence.

Page rank boost.

Connect to Gmail.

Connect to YouTube.

Connect to Chrome.

Content management.

Reach of Google.

Instagram

With more than 100 million users, Instagram is a photo-sharing social network. It has a larger percentage of young audience members, but at the same time is a very popular application for small businesses because these younger members are familiar with purchasing products and services over the web.

The business value of using Instagram is to:

Market your products or services in very unique ways.

Post behind-the-scenes photos.

Update people on your latest promotions.

Create more personal brand awareness with pictures.

Target a younger audience.



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Pinterest

Pinterest is a digital pin board of pictures that gives users the ability to categorize and collate anything they deem visually appealing. It is the second or third largest social network in the world.

The business value of using Pinterest is to:

Communicate with your target audience if your brand deals with interiors, DIY, cookery, fashion,

hobbies and crafts.

Be creative with pins and pictures to create a unique brand experience.

Post a picture with a price, increasing interest.

Take advantage of better click-through and sales conversion rates than on Twitter or Facebook.

Experience a user base that tends to have a high disposable income.

Work with shoppers who, when referred to a website via Pinterest, will spend 10% more than

those referred by other sources.

Meetup

Meetup allows users to join or create their own online community in any unique niche that they are involved in. There are more general business communities as well as specific communities that you can use to target specific types of people. Unlike typical social networking sites where you might never physically see the person you are interacting with, Meetup, as the name states, enables you to physically attend local events in your area. Meetup has 13.4 million members and is growing fast.

The business value of using Meetup is to:

Create your own community to showcase your brand and invite people to events for no cost or

for a fee.

Join communities that you are interested in networking with.

Find new hires.

Find potential partners.

Find new prospects.

Practice your pitch.

Find events to attend in your area for free.

WordPress (or Other Blogging Platform)

Most people don’t realize that WordPress is the largest application in blogging and general corporate websites. There are more than 75 million websites that use WordPress. It is the underlying platform for most blogs and websites people view every day. More than 409 million people view more than 14.4 billion pages each month. Each month, users generate 40 million new posts and 50 million comments.



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Other top blogging or content management systems (CMS) on the market include Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, Sbvtle, SquareSpace and Wix. If you do not blog about the business value of what you do and how you help your customers, you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with customers.

The business value of using WordPress or blog is to:

Easily write and publish valuable content.

Allows you to integrate your website and your blog.

Increase SEO.

Communicate with current clients and prospects.

Build your brand.

Educate your audience.

Generate leads.

Build a database of contacts.

Build landing pages or squeeze pages to give something of value and capture an email address.

Email Marketing Platforms

Email marketing is one of the more important things that you can do to build your business. Building a database of emails that wish to receive valuable information from you daily or weekly is critical to your company’s ability to grow and scale. There are so many to choose from in the marketplace, many with free monthly send limits, but the top five are Constant Contact, Mailchimp, iContact, Aweber and Express Pigeon. As of February 2014, Reachmail, allows you to send the most free emails per month.

The business value of using an email marketing platform is to:

Build a database of people that you can directly message daily.

Communicate news.

Communicate events.

Communicate promotions.

Communicate new products and services.

Communicate partner products.

Send valuable content and information.

Help you promote content through social media.

Generate new leads.



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What Is A Prospect? hether you are a marketing professional, business owner or entrepreneur, the most important component of your business is bringing qualified prospects in the door. With a good product or service, you are almost guaranteed results if you have a steady stream of prospects. If you want to grow your business, you need more prospects. There are five main types of prospects.

Potential Client

The prospect that most of us typically think about first is a client, either an individual or a business, who may purchase your product or service. An individual purchases your product themselves with their own assets, while a business purchases your product using the business’s assets. Once you have brought in a new client, most of the time they want to help your business grow and you also want to help them grow.

Business Advocate

A business advocate is a prospect who works with you to help your business grow. A business advocate can do this at no cost if they know, like and trust you and there is some mutual benefit, or for a fee. A business advocate is anyone in your network who helps your business grow by sending your content to their network, giving you information, mentoring, passing you leads, making a referral or introduction at no cost to you. Anyone that you pay for products or services; partners, vendors, suppliers, manufacturers, are also business advocates. All business advocates want to help your business grow and you also want to help their business grow.

Investor

An investor is a prospect who will give your business money in order to launch, expand or otherwise grow. Investment may come from individual investors, angels, angel groups, incubators, organizations and/or venture firms. An investor wants to help your business grow and you want to help them grow.

New Hire

A new hire is a prospect who will do work for your business either as a 1099, contractor, consultant or permanent hire. Once you bring in a new hire they want to help your business grow and you want to help them grow.

Your Boss

Your boss is a prospect whom you will work for either in a permanent position or as a consultant, contractor or freelancer. Once you have a boss they want to help you grow and you want to help them grow.

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Business Challenges here are some core business challenges for sales and marketing professionals and business owners that hold them back from being successful, maximizing revenue and growing their businesses.

Lack of Prospects

Most business professionals are extremely challenged to identify exactly who they should be targeting and build a database of prospects.

Lack of Qualified Leads

The biggest challenge for most business professionals is a lack of qualified leads and inadequate levels of sales activity. This has a lot to do with having a lack of specific prospects to target, but a greater reason is that they don’t understand how to proactively message prospects based on business value in order to generate large amounts of qualified leads.

Outdated and Disconnected Tools and Techniques

Many professionals struggle with using outdated, disconnected tools and techniques from the 20th century. Others struggle to use many disconnected tools not built for generating leads. The biggest outdated tool is your company website; 97% of all websites are static brochures that nobody reads. Typical websites add zero value to your prospects. Prospects have no idea what you do or where your value lies.

The phone is another outdated tool from the 20th century. The phone should still be utilized, but never as the primary vehicle for prospects. If you’re still cold calling as your primary vehicle for generating leads, your business is a dinosaur.

Email is a 43-year-old technology. Email can yield good results when used properly, but most professionals don’t understand how to create business value-focused emails that get results.

Let’s shift to the 21st century tools. You might have a blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or other social networking accounts. Within all of these you have to manage comments, groups, personal connections and messages, plus try to gain intelligence about prospect triggers that you have to take action on.

Next, there is the dreaded CRM that you use, or don’t use (but don’t tell your boss). You also might be paying a company for SEO because you are trying to do PPC or PPV on all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. The 21st century tools are great if you have the entire day to manage all of the disconnected tools yourself or have the budget to hire an internal or external marketing army that is sometimes misaligned with sales and how they are generating leads.

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Disconnected Internal Teams

The organization you work for and all the people within are typically disconnected. Your employees and their networks are rich in leads, but there is no way to effectively mine their networks or collectively message social networks in order to generate new prospects and leads.

Inability to Hire Great People

This is a challenge for most organizations, but the best hires typically come from internal referrals. Your employees and their social networks are rich in potential hires, but there is no way to access these networks in a managed way that produces results.

Inability to Tap into Your Personal Business Network

This is an extremely large challenge that most business professionals aren't even aware of. You probably have between 250 and 500 people that know, like and trust you, who want to help you succeed in business and life. This is not your email list, Twitter followers or Facebook likes. There is no efficient way to tap into the collective knowledge and network of your personal business advocate community. These would be the people that you could call, email or text message and they would take action for you right away.

Inability to Tap into a Larger Community of Followers

Most social marketers and business professionals realize that they need to grow their list of followers on their social networks, but many don’t understand a strategy for tapping into this community of followers or why they need to focus on identifying and promoting their business advocates. Many professionals have thousands or tens of thousands of followers, but don’t understand why they aren’t getting the results they want to achieve.



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Social Selling Solutions hese business challenges seem impossible to solve, but there has to be a better way. If you are a small business you may not have the time or energy to manage all of these things. You also most likely don’t have the budget to hire an army of people to do everything for you. If you are a medium or large business, you might have the budget to do all of these things, but typically results are poor because marketing teams, sales teams, product teams, support teams, HR teams and IT teams are not

aligned to exceed customer expectations.

Remember, the single biggest challenge to solve is a lack of qualified leads from prospects and inadequate levels of sales activity. Solve this business challenge and you are almost guaranteed to succeed as long as you have a good product or service. What if it was possible to solve all the other challenges and also align the solution with bringing more qualified prospects in the door? Here is an overview of the social selling solution areas that will accomplish this.

Content

Content is the most important and foundational component of social selling. If your content does not focus on how you can provide business value to your customer, your business will never be as successful as it could be. Content is any type of information that you or someone else writes or says to your prospect. It also includes information that your prospect reads about you or your organization or data that you review about your prospect or their organization. Think about where all of this content resides and how it is delivered below. Many of these areas can be consolidated and aligned back to bringing prospects in the door.

Company websites, internet, intranet, extranet

Phone

Email

Direct mail

Print advertising

Printed brochures or glossies

Traditional networking

Events

Blogs

Social networking accounts – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Business groups or communities

Personal connections

Comments and messages

Business intelligence systems

CRM

SEO

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Community

Every individual has between 250 and 500 people in their business advocate community that know, like and trust them. These are people that you can call, email or text and they will take action on things you want them to do right away. They can be family members, friends, colleagues or even company employees. You and others in your community might have thousands or tens of thousands of followers on the major social networks. Followers are not business advocates, but at the same time, they are part of your community and you have the ability to influence them. They will take action at a percentage based on how much business value you are giving them on a daily basis. Business value can be measured by the amount of good content you are sending out on a daily basis to your community that is not just about you and your product or service. Think about the power of these statements for finding new prospects. Imagine if you had the ability to know who your business advocates were and who wants to help your business succeed, and you understood the percentage of your followers that would take action on your campaigns.

Collaboration

Within your business advocate community you should have the ability to collaborate or work with each other accomplish tasks and share common goals. When you have the ability to directly collaborate and communicate with your community and you know who your business advocates are, you can dramatically increase your productivity. Tasks get completed and goals are achieved 15-25% faster. The effect of this is dramatic because daily tasks and goals never stop happening. The compounding effects of better collaboration can transform how you do business.

Knowledge Sharing

You have questions every day and your community gives you expert answers or refers you to the right person who can help you. Knowledge-sharing is a two way street. You have to be willing to help others before you ask for help. You have to give to get. You have to make deposits daily. If you do this properly, when you ask community members to get your message outside the community to their social networks, a larger percentage of them will want to help you.

Social Sharing

Social sharing gives you the ability to directly message and send the content from a web page to individuals or your community via email or any of the social networking sites from the web page you are on. When you are browsing around websites on your mobile device, desktop or tablet in the future, pay attention to whether the social sharing buttons (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.) are there on the page and highly visible. In 97% of all websites, there are no social sharing buttons, but even when there are, they’re not highly visible. Social sharing buttons are extremely powerful because they give you a simple way to share good content with your community.

Social Features

Social networking sites have common social features that we all have become familiar with. These include activity streams, direct messaging, @mentioning, sending content, creating events, reviewing profiles, following, searching, liking, commenting and sharing. These social features will become the standard way we communicate in the future over the all web and mobile applications so it is extremely important to educate yourself on them.



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Business Intelligence

Business intelligence gives you the ability to understand data on what users do on your site and how users share the content on your site. You have the ability to view canned and custom reports, as well as analytics, that allow you to take action and make decisions on how to improve your business, generate more leads and communicate better with your community. Data comes not only from your site and the users on your site, but it can also come from external sources across the web. Data coming from users on your site is easy to understand, but external data sources involve open and closed Application Programming Interfaces (API) and data that can be purchased from places such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The ultimate goal is use internal data and external data to make better business decisions, generate more prospects and grow your business.

Conclusion ccording to Jim Keenan from “A Sales Guy Consulting” and Barbara Giamanco from “Social Centered Selling,” social selling positively impacts revenue. Jim and Barbara co-wrote a new study called “Social Media and Sales Quota.”

Here are some findings from the survey of 511 sales professionals:

72.6% of sales professionals who use social media in their sales process outperformed their selling peers and exceeded quota 23% more often.

Of those not using social media, 21.7% said that they did not see the value and 45% did not understand it.

75% of respondents stated they never received any training in the effective use of social media.

LinkedIn is the number one site for sales activities.

The bottom line is that social selling will get you results, so just go out and do it!

ProspectPlatform’s vision to enable all sales professionals, marketing professionals, business owners and entrepreneurs to generate more leads, meetings, opportunities and revenue for their business. We are passionate about prospecting and are building a next-generation social selling platform that will help generate more prospects and revenue for your business. Please visit our website at www.prospectplatform.com to be included in our Free Software Beta Program or share this eBook with a friend or colleague. If you have a question please email us. Thank you for your support!

ProspectPlatform Team – [email protected]

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· 2014. 2. 23. · buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion. direct mail and print advertising used to...

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