Welcome to Day 5 of the X-Factor: 10 Days of Epic Sales Knowledge!. Todays article comes from Jack Kosakowski of the Creation agency.
The sales world has undergone a digital transformation. While this has had a huge impact on how we connect with buyers, it has had an even bigger impact on how people make purchase decisions. And the transformation isn’t over…things are just changing faster every day. We’re now at a point where it isn’t enough to have a social/digital strategy, we have to be social/digital organizations. This requires different tools, tactics, metrics, and approaches.
Jack Kosakowski has emerged as an expert in the world of social media and digital sales. Today, he provides a set of checklists every salesperson and every sales leader should consider as they go through their final 2018 pre-flight checklists. Jack is the CEO of the US Division of the Creation Agency. If you haven’t been introduced to Jack, you must be new to the sales world. Jack is a regular speaker, writer, and contributor. Jack challenges status quo thinking and continues to find new ways to transform how companies sell. Today’s article provides you with a 6 step process to add structure to your social strategy and horsepower to your sales engine. This is one you’ll want to refer to throughout the year.
Here’s how you can follow Jack:
Website: www.creationagency.com
LinkedIn: /in/jackkosakowski1/
Twitter: @JackKosakowski
Facebook: jack.kosakowski
As 2017 is rapidly coming to an end, it’s time to start thinking about 2018 if you are in sales leadership. How are you going to get the competitive advantage for your sales team in 2018? How are you going to innovate the way you lead? Do you have a blueprint as to what that looks like?
Building a coaching plan and sales cadence is key, but have you thought about what your plan is for social and how that fits into your 2018 plan? What are you going to do to get more visible, more valuable, and more connected to your buyers in 2018 at scale? How are you going to build thought leadership in 2018? How are you going to assist your sales team to create more sales conversations, opportunities, and strengthen your relationship with prospects and current customers?
These are all questions sales leadership needs to be asking themselves. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size fits all social sales strategy. Every organization is going to be different for a variety of reasons. Here is a simple blueprint to help guide you through building your 2018 social sales blueprint.
Step 1 – Building a Social Sales Team
Time is never on any sales leader’s side. Therefore, it’s imperative to start thinking about who is going to be a part of this overall strategy. As you will see in step 3, content is going to be a big part of building out a needle moving social blueprint. Should you get marketing involved to help with content creation and strategy? Should you have SDRs involved to help guide the connection strategy? Who is going to oversee your social sales plan and make sure it’s implemented and tracked correctly? Is it going to help you integrate new technologies?
List of people who could be involved:
Step 2 – Building a Social Optimization Strategy
Understanding the social data is key when trying to understand where you should be spending your time getting visible, valuable, and connected at scale with your targeted buyers. After you have identified what channels you will be spending your time, it’s then imperative that you understand social optimization and how to use it as a competitive advantage to get found.
For example, if you sell into a niche industry, is your sales team showing up on the front page for your targeted industry keywords? If buyers are searching online for what you have to offer, do you show up before your competitors? An overall social optimization strategy will help you achieve this in 2018.
Simple Social Optimization Checklist:
Step 3 – Building a Thought Leadership Content Strategy
Are you currently recognized as a thought leader in your industry? This is a question that you really need to start asking yourself when building out a thought leadership content strategy. If you are already considered a leader in the space, why is that? Having a big logo behind you is great, but people aren’t on social to buy from your brand – they are there to buy from you.
Quality content is going to be the key when building world-class thought leadership in sales. This is where marketing should play a key role. Writing the content should be done by marketing, but the ideas that drive the content should come from the sales leaders. Why is that? It’s because sales leaders understand the pain their salespeople and customers go through daily. They are in the weeds and know what is holding back opportunities from turning to revenue.
Content strategy checklist:
Step 4 – Building a Social Tech Stack
Efficiency is key when building a social sales program that drives long-term adoption internally. Proactively, building a social sales tech stack will allow you to incorporate a process around getting outcomes on social at scale that save people time verse adding more to their plate. The old way of selling is reaching out one-to-one. The best sales organizations are starting to understand how to reach out one-to-many using value verse ask as the key to online connections leading to offline sales conversations.
What technologies are you currently using and how will new tools fit into that? For example, what CRM are you using? How will new social technologies track your activity properly so that you can report on outcomes? Reporting will be essential to having a real-time view of what targeted sales conversations are happening online and who is engaging with your content. The right social tech stack will help you get the insights you need to create, strengthen, and influence one-to-one conversations online-to-offline.
Simple tech stack checklist:
Step 5– Building a Connection Strategy
To create sales conversations, you must get visible and valuable proactively with your buyers six months before they are ready to buy (in most cases). The real key to getting sales conversations at scale all comes down to deepening the connections that you make. A lot of salespeople and sales leaders have connections on social, but they aren’t moving those connections offline with people that can buy the product, solution, or service that you sell.
This is where having a solid connection strategy at the leadership level will help your sales team across the board. Are you connecting with prospects before a first call on social when an appointment is set by the SDRs? Are you connecting with hot prospects during the sales cycle that your account executives are trying to get across the finish line?
Simple social connection checklist:
Step 6 – Designing an Outcome Strategy
The goal of any sales organization looking to build and implement a social sales blueprint should all lead to one thing and one thing only – REVENUE! Understanding the process of how social turned to revenue is the real competitive advantage building a scalable social sales program.
The social tech stack you build will be imperative for accurately tracking online social activities to offline outcomes. You must think about online outcomes the same as you think about offline outcomes (cold calling/email).
How many new sales conversations were created from social? What content drove the most engagement online that led to offline targeted sales conversations? What engagement led to targeted connections? How did social influence shorten the sales cycle? What social platforms are driving the most engagement and offline conversations?
Simple outcome strategy checklist:
Building a social sales strategy is no longer an option if you want to stay relevant in 2018. The real question is how much money and time are you going to spend to build out a solid social sales blueprint to get the competitive advantage?
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If you want to find out more about changing behavior in your sales teams with Xvoyant Coaching Technology,
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You can get caught up with past day’s articles by clicking on their titles below:
Day 1: Millennials In Sales: What You Need To Know For 2018
Day 2: Annoying Persistence vs. Professional Persistence
Day 3: The Most Important Attribute in Coaching Top Performing Salespeople
Day 4: Tansformation in the Digital Era
Day 6: One Haunting Sales Statistic Every Sales Leader Should Know
Day 7: Hiring Kick Ass Salespeople
Day 7 Bonus: It is Time for More Women in Sales
Day 8: The Five Keys to Great Sales Coaching
Day 8 Bonus: 5 Lessons A 2-Year Old Can Teach You About Sales Coaching
Day 9: Why Impact Eats Value for Breakfast
Day 9 Bonus: Top 3 Coaching Mistakes Made by Good Sales Managers