CHAPTER 4

MORE THAN LEAD SCRAPING

The Benefits of Un-Selling in Social Media

Lurkers Beware! While you won't see this warning officially posted on Twitter or LinkedIn, or any other social media platform, it has become one of the underlying rules for online prospecting. If you want to use social networking as a sales tool, then you must actively participate in conversations and the exchange of ideas. It may seem an obvious declaration, but you would be surprised to learn how many experienced sales professionals (and marketers!) are content to sit back and silently hover, like vultures patiently eyeing their prey.

To be fair, not all Lurkers are vultures. In my definition, a Lurker (as it pertains to social selling) is someone who joins one or more social networks but isn't really active on those networks. Instead of participating in and creating online discussions, and adding value to social interactions, the Lurker remains passive. Although he is only observing online conversations, he also expects to benefit from those same conversations—by capturing information that can be used to create a lead. Lurkers are all too willing to sit back and let their peers, and even their competitors, do the work of starting and holding online conversations, sharing information, and building relationships. While this may appear to be a savvy strategy for time-crunched sales professionals, the problem is that social networks are just that—social. If you are gathering information about your target customers on social networks without first having had any positive interactions with them, then it has basically the same value as cold calling. The idea of social selling is to build relationships and create warm (sales-ready) leads based on your prior positive interactions.

Of course, if Lurkers are silently sitting at one end of the social extreme, then the Pushers are whooping and hollering at the other. The Pushers (as I've chosen to call them) are those social media sales enthusiasts who are genuinely eager to share—share their product pitches. Instead of initiating conversations and participating in mutually beneficial interactions, Pushers serve a one-way stream of marketing propaganda that steadily flows out to no one in particular.

Similar to Lurkers, Pushers think they have earned the right to gather information and create leads simply by showing up on Google +, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Sure, the Pusher has been active, but her effort has been self-serving. The information she distributes is focused only on her company, her brand, her products, and her messages. She hasn't considered how those messages influence her target customers. Even worse, the Pusher assumes that she has an audience. In actuality, she has no idea whether or not anyone is even paying attention to her never-ending product pitches.

The days of relentlessly pushing out your sales messages and quietly stalking your prospects from afar are over, at least if you want to be successful in social “un-selling.” That is to say, the reality is that social prospecting is less about selling and pushing out messages and more about having normal conversations, participating in communities, and building genuine relationships. If this all sounds familiar, it's because these are the same elements that you already use to contribute to the sales process, offline. Now it's a matter of transferring these skills to building online relationships.

BOOSTING YOUR ONLINE LIKEABILITY

“Prey.” “Propaganda.” “Stalking.” I realize these are strong words for a salesperson to hear associated with their profession. But before you start sharpening your darts, hear me out. First and foremost, I know you are not a vulture (at least I don't think so!). The objective, however, is to ensure that your fellow social media users don't think so, either. You want to focus on changing any bad habits that might seem vulture-like and instead build up what one social media expert refers to as “likeability.” Dave Kerpan, founder of Likeable Media, coined that term in relation to a brand's approach to social media. The more likeable you are, the more likely you are to have the results you want. I think it's a simple and accurate gauge for companies and individuals to use when choosing their online actions. In terms of un-selling, think of it as a better approach to help boost your likeability.

As both a reformed Lurker and renounced Pusher, I can attest to the importance of choosing your social prospecting behaviors carefully. After all, social media is brimming with quality leads for your business. It is a phenomenal resource. According to global research from Nielsen, 46 percent of people surveyed in late 2011 said they turn to social media when making purchasing decisions.¹ In other words, they are using social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google +, and even Pinterest with the intent to connect with and research your company or that of your competitors. If you're not familiar with all these social platforms, in later chapters I will introduce you to each of them and help you weigh their pros and cons. To start, let's take a look at what those prospective customers are really like. Here's a hint: They care about and talk about a lot more than what they ate for lunch today or which TV show is their favorite.

Your prospective social media leads are savvy, knowledgeable consumers. They are comfortable researching their options online, and they frequently seek input from their peers before making a final buying decision. Today, active social media users readily turn to online product reviews as part of the buying process. A whopping 70 percent of social media users say they trust those online consumer opinions, even more than they trust editorial content in newspapers or content on a company's website.²

And here's where it gets tricky. The same consumers who are actively using social media to aide their buying decisions tend to be skeptical of marketers and salespersons lurking and pushing from within their social networking circles. To be perceived as a Pusher can be a deal breaker when it comes to building social currency as a trusted online resource.

The good news is that once you develop a trustworthy relationship, and up your “likeability” rating, there is a big payoff. Social customers are known for being fiercely loyal to brands they support and will gladly sing your praises as long as you continue giving them reason to do it. If you think about it, since you don't use vulture-like sales behaviors offline, it should be easy to let your non-vulture personality shine online, too. No vultures here!

LEAD SCRAPING OR LEAD GENERATION?

Vultures, Lurkers, Pushers…are they all really lead scrapers in disguise? And, what's wrong with that, anyway? The social sellers I have described so far may utilize different tactics, but the goal for each is usually the same: prospecting. You want to use social selling to generate real, workable leads, and preferably by increasing the flow of inbound leads (that is, those leads that come to you rather than you having to find them). Wait. You may be asking yourself, if you have to go out on social networking sites to search for leads, then how can those be inbound leads? I'll get to that in just a minute. My main point is that lead generation is a goal shared by everyone who wants to sell through social platforms, but the success rate varies substantially. The difference is often in the process that you use to prospect: lead scraping versus lead development.

When searching for leads online, the idea is to find sufficient information about your target customer, such as a real name (not a social moniker), an email address, a phone number, or a company website. You want to identify enough usable data that allows you, as a salesperson, to capture that person as a lead so that you can reach out to them in other ways (offline). Lurkers and Pushers believe that you can simply pluck this type of information about prospective customers from social networking sites in order to help fill the always-starved lead pipeline. Generally speaking, this is referred to as “lead scraping.” It's a lead-generation tactic that's been around for a while and one you have undoubtedly used for yourself.

Lead scraping, by itself, isn't a bad thing; and it's sometimes necessary and helpful. In social media, you will use lead scraping as a way of gathering all types of information, but you shouldn't depend on it as a way to get your best results—that is, to increase inbound leads. Lead scraping uses social networks to create a lead record you can use today, but lead development uses those same social networks to build online relationships and generate a flow of incoming leads over time.

I'm just old enough to have firsthand experience of lead scraping the old-fashioned way, long before the Internet made it seem effortless. While working my way through college, one of my part-time jobs was working for a women-only fitness center selling annual memberships. I remember the first time I sat down with a big, thick local phone book, going page by page through the residential listings picking out potential names and numbers to call and offer a free week of Jazzercise classes. My sales manager taught me to narrow the process by first focusing on the section of names in the zip codes closest to our gym, then by looking for listings that had only a woman's name or that listed both husband and wife. This was a way to help ensure the likelihood of reaching our target market. Chances are, even if you haven't had the joy of scraping leads from a phone book, you have probably done something similar using a membership directory from your Chamber of Commerce or another organization. Once upon a time, using this technique to find leads was almost like a rite of passage every salesperson had to experience.

Fast-forward a few years to the booming online marketplace and that same process of lead scraping was applied to information found across the Internet. This time around, software was developed to replace the tedious manual process. Instead of searching through a phone book, lead-generation software was able to riffle through thousands of virtual pages of websites and online directories, guided by a set of search criteria you defined. Unfortunately, as you may already know, this system wasn't much more foolproof than the phone book approach. The automated process was clunky and the search criteria were either too broad or too specific to return a quality list of leads. In addition to concern over list accuracy, depending on the quality of the lead-generation software, the emails sent to addresses in the resulting list sometimes got flagged as spam and never even made it to your recipients. There have always been plenty of companies around who handle the tedious backend details of lead generation and then sell you the semi-qualified leads, but the price of these leads can range anywhere from $20 to $150 (or more) per lead. Often, you are sharing the leads with at least two or three competitors as well. For many businesses, paying someone else for leads just isn't financially feasible. And that brings us back to today's process of lead scraping on social media networks.

MOVING BEYOND LEAD SCRAPING

In a way, lead scraping has come full circle. The goal is relatively unchanged, and like those first efforts of culling through a phone book, page by page, social media lead scraping is somewhat of a manual process. At the very least, it is a hybrid version. That's because with social media lead scraping, you can spend hours at a time reading through tweets, Facebook feeds, blog post comments, updates in LinkedIn groups, and questions and answers posed in various online communities. There are tools to help, but it is still not an automated process. That said, the nuggets of information you discover through social media are often much greater than any lead-scraping program of the past!

Unlike the days of phone books and software programs, when searching through social networks you actually get contextual clues by way of the social media conversations that tell you a particular person may be your target customer. This assumption is not only based on demographics and psychographics (such as zip code and marital status), but on real conversation threads.

Not only can you identify someone as a target customer, but sometimes, through these social media conversations, you get additional clues about their buying preferences, such as specific product needs, purchasing time frame, budget constraints, technical barriers, and much more. It's as if that phonebook that I once used for cold calling could have instead revealed the intimate story behind every name I searched in the White Pages. Instead of only showing me that Mrs. Barbara Little lived two blocks away from my fitness center, it might have also told me that she had a baby six months ago and she's struggling to take off her pregnancy weight. To boot, it might let me know that her best friend is getting married in the fall. And, she's agreed to be a bridesmaid, so she is desperately looking for weight-loss tips. When looking for leads on social media and following and engaging in conversations, that is exactly the type of details you could potentially uncover. The trick is finding all of this information about Barbara Little in time to provide her with the solutions she indicates needing.

In the reality of today's sales landscape, by the time a prospect becomes a lead for you, that customer has already narrowed her decision. In the case of Barbara Little, she is already pricing options for a six-week diet program from both Weight Watchers and Slim-Fast. By the time your fitness center gets to her, she may have decided a traditional gym may not meet her needs, unless the price is right.

During the process of social selling, instead of assuming that the prospect is entering at the top of the sales funnel and open to receiving very broad, general information, realize that the lead (or prospect) may instead already have your company or product on her short list. She's made the decision to buy, and it's just a matter of where or from whom she will make her purchase. The information she wants is very product- or service-specific, and possibly focused on price alone. It's the type of information that is typically shared at a stage much later in the sales process. Thus, the opportunity to influence this lead's buying decision is greatly limited at this point. Even the best salesperson may struggle to keep the lead warm. So how do you change this scenario and flip it to your advantage?

First, you start by moving away from the idea that simply scraping information out of social networks is the only answer. Why?

• Generic lead scraping is no better than cold calling: You may have some basic facts about the prospect, but you have had no previous engagement. There is no existing relationship or other interactions to build upon when trying to contact the lead outside of the social channels.
• When lead scraping, you miss the opportunity to add value: Typically, if you are only scraping information, then you have not actually entered into the social conversation. The lead doesn't know you. You haven't had the opportunity to establish trust, value, or credibility for you or the brand you represent.
• Lead scraping often occurs late in the buying cycle: More than likely, you are plucking information at a point when the lead is already toward the end of the decision process. That means you have less opportunity (if any at all) to influence or change the final purchasing decision.

Considering that lead scraping and other traditional (direct) sales methods may not net you the best results, it's time to turn to lead development and un-selling to help you prosper.

THE TRUTH ABOUT UN-SELLING

When I talk about the concept of “un-selling,” I think of it in terms of putting value on building relationships first and foremost as opposed to forcing a sales transaction. As with any relationship, it takes time to build. But, as you are establishing and growing these connections, you are developing not only relationships, but potential leads. In his book The Thank You Economy, Gary Vaynerchuk explains how he started “selling” wine through social media. Instead of jumping in and talking about what types of wine his store offered, or how good the prices were, or that he could offer free shipping, he looked for conversations about wine. He participated in those conversations by offering help—suggestions, opinions, and answers to basic wine questions. In the process, he developed a social following and a reputation as a trusted wine expert. What followed were not only leads, but customers. As he says in his book: “Social media relationships and personal relationships work exactly the same way—you get out of them what you put into them. You can't buy them, force them, or make them into something they're not ready to be.”³

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of un-selling in social media. First, you must make a connection, and then you have to invest time and effort into building the relationship. As a result of this process, you are able to establish credibility and trust, which, in turn, generates leads. As you tackle the idea of un-selling, here are the key points to remember:

• Exhibit patience: Sorry to break the news, but the social selling process is not instantaneous. Un-selling is a process that occurs over time; it requires consistent interaction with your prospects via social media so you can establish credibility for yourself as a good resource.
• Utilize contextual (lead) scraping: Instead of looking for basic information about a prospect in order to fulfill the data requirements to call them a “lead,” look for other meaningful information to identify someone with whom you should connect. Contextual signals might include: industry, job status, general interests that could relate to your product or expertise.
• Track customer sentiment: Like contextual signals, customer sentiment is meaningful because it's an indication of how a customer feels about a particular brand, company, product, event, etc. It can be positive (reflects a good experience; indicates a brand supporter or enthusiast), negative (indicative of a poor experience), or neutral (interested but doesn't have a personal opinion or association, yet). By identifying social conversations that exhibit customer sentiment about your brand or competing brands, it provides a good opportunity to enter the conversation and start building a relationship.
• Brand yourself: Heeding the recommendations from Chapter 3, get active networking across the social platforms. Even though you may represent a company or product/service other than your own, it's still important for you (as the sales professional) to become the trusted expert. After all, people don't really interact with a company or brand, but with the people within the company!
• Engage with existing customers: As with traditional sales, in social selling you can benefit from the network of others. That's why, as you start building your own social circles online, you should reach out to people you know first—especially existing customers. Use social networks to thank them for their business, check in with them, and send them helpful information and tips related to your products and services.
• Identify industry influencers: In addition to reaching out to customers, look for respected social influencers within your industry, whether they are bloggers, analysts, designers, trendsetters…you get the point. These are great people to connect with to help expand both your prospect base and your knowledge base!
• Interact and give back: While you want others to listen to you, like you, follow you, and hang on every word you send out across the social networks, there's something even more important when it comes to building online relationships—giving back. A big part of un-selling is having positive interactions with your social connections without being a Pusher or a Lurker. But you don't have to wait for others to take action. You can be the one that gives someone a +1 (in Google +) or retweet something they said, share or Favorite an article they posted, or comment on their blog. Remember, successful communication is a two-way street.
• Be a thought leader to build social influence: Another component of un-selling is being able to discuss and share information that reaches beyond your core products or services. If you sell premium household paint, you can certainly brand yourself as an expert in paint, providing tips and answering questions about your product. To truly build social influence, you also want to become a thought leader. Write blog posts, articles, and other social media posts about bigger issues or trends that relate to your industry. Sticking with the paint example, you might discuss design trends based on paint colors or how economic conditions impact the decision to redecorate a home or buy a new home.

  Becoming a thought leader also exposes you to other social influencers (reporters, bloggers) who may want to interview you. That, in turn, exposes you to a wider audience, affirms your credibility, and helps expand your online social connections—all while un-selling!

• Embrace consultative sales: As an established sales professional, you may want to always compare the consultative approach to the short-term transactional sales process. You may even be convinced that your product only lends itself to the transactional process—it's about a price point; it involves a quick decision; you only need to drive traffic to your appropriate Web page and start the e-commerce process. However, there's really not a product or a service or a type of business that cannot benefit from un-selling over social networks if you embrace the consultative sales approach. Consider it a longer cycle, one in which you are developing conversations that educate and assist the prospect throughout the buying process. Sure, you may not have a complicated product, but the key to un-selling is building relationships—and that naturally takes time to do it right.

EXPANDING CIRCLES, INFLUENCE, AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Another benefit of un-selling is that it really does open the door to an increased amount of sharing by those who follow you, whether you have reached the level of thought leader or you simply become adept at being helpful and sending out quality information. This is particularly true when you think about sharing with existing customers. As you interact with them, you are also exposed to contacts in their networks and it provides more opportunities to demonstrate your credibility and build new relationships.

How much influence does an existing customer have over potential customers in the world of social selling? What's the worth of a +1, a Like, or a four-star review? In the next chapter, I show you how and why peer-to-peer influence matters to your brand.