CHAPTER 8

TIME IS MONEY

Building Social Selling into Your Schedule

If you could improve a single part of your overall sales process, what one factor would potentially have the biggest impact on reaching your sales quota each month? More than likely, you would want to change the part of your process that influences either the quantity or the quality of your sales leads. Perhaps you need a larger number of leads coming into your pipeline, or you want more qualified prospects, or maybe you could benefit from prospects that are further along in the buying process and ready to purchase—sooner rather than later. Sadly, I don't have a magic wand to grant your wishes, but I can assure you that adopting a solid social selling strategy can have a positive impact on each of these areas. There's just one catch—it takes time. But rooting around in social media doesn't have to be a drain on your time, if you plan accordingly.

IDENTIFYING CURRENT TIME CONFLICTS

Before adjusting your schedule to make room for social selling, it's important to understand where most of your time is currently being spent with regards to the sales process, and why it's being spent that way. A benchmark report from CSO Insights examined how a typical salesperson's time is spent.¹ A whopping 19 percent of the day is eaten up with (non-customer) meetings and administrative functions, including CRM tasks that help with organization and data cleansing (to tell you more about a particular customer). Another 16 percent of the day is spent on service calls and training. And then about 24 percent is spent searching for leads. This leaves only 41 percent of the day for selling either face to face or over the phone.

Even though finding leads is a legitimate function, many sales managers, and their sales teams, would rather see a bigger portion of that time focused on selling. In the CSO Insights report, sales professionals admitted to being frustrated with the process of finding and researching leads and viewed it as a time waster. In other research, from InsideSales.com, the salespeople surveyed said that having problems contacting leads or identifying the proper decision makers were among their top barriers to selling.² Also flagged as problematic was the fact that even after researching leads, they didn't have the right information before making a call to a prospect. This is disconcerting because typically, the better quality of information you have for a lead before your first contact, the more successful you will be in pulling it into the buying cycle and ultimately winning the deal. This is one reason that LinkedIn has been such a critical tool for savvy salespeople. In Chapter 11, I explain exactly how you can use LinkedIn to improve the quality of your conversations with prospects.

So, to summarize, more than half of your day is likely spent on activities other than your primary goal—selling—and even then you may not possess the right information to have a good, quality conversation with a prospect. If this describes your typical day, you may find it hard to believe that it's worthwhile to add yet another set of tasks, or another lead pool in which to fish. But there are many reasons why social networks are lucrative for prospecting. With the proper use of social media, you can increase your efficiency and improve the quality of information available to you before picking up the phone for that first call to your prospect or before going into the initial sales meeting.

SPENDING YOUR TIME IN FISHING HOLES, NOT RABBIT HOLES

Time wasters are much like falling down rabbit holes. You become distracted and disoriented, and can easily lose your way. Some people, maybe even you, have previously thought of social media this way. I've met plenty of skeptics who think using social media for business is simply an excuse for otherwise well-meaning employees to waste time sifting through their friends’ status updates on Facebook, or viewing and sharing the latest viral video craze on YouTube. For sales and marketing professionals serious about social selling, this simply is not the case.

By spending as little as six hours per week in social media, 68 percent of marketers reported gaining benefits in the area of lead generation; additionally, 40 percent of those surveyed also realized an improvement in sales. These are a sample of the findings from the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.³ The annual report surveyed nearly 4,000 marketing professionals to see how they used social media to grow business. It's worth mentioning that the survey participants were split almost evenly in their target markets of B2B (51 percent) and B2C (49 percent), indicating that it's likely you can benefit from social media, whether you are selling to businesses or to consumers.

To reap these benefits, you may be wondering how much time you really need to devote to social media. Is six hours really the magical number if you want to find new leads? The feedback from this survey (which is one of the best reports I have seen on the topic of increasing business through the use of social media) indicates there are two time-related factors that make a difference. Whether you are looking for new leads or trying to improve overall sales, these objectives benefit from the combination of total weekly hours devoted to social selling and the number of years you have been using social media.

In general, those marketers who have spent anywhere from six to eleven hours weekly in social networks gained a significant increase in leads and improved sales, and were able to build new business partnerships. This is in addition to increasing awareness, or exposure, to their business. Marketers who had been using social media for one to three years saw the greatest benefits, significantly more than those who had been using it for six months or less. Small businesses, companies with twenty employees or fewer, often realized the most benefit across several of the categories, or objectives, specified.

The takeaway from all this data is that spending time in social media does have a tangible payoff that makes it a viable place to fish for leads and build business relationships. But you have to be willing to invest a solid number of hours each week, and commit to being patient—because the results improve over time (in this case, meaning a minimum of six months!).

CONQUERING THE SOCIAL SELLING CONFLICT

As you can see, social media presents an interesting challenge for sales professionals. On one hand, it holds the potential for providing more—and more direct—access to better quality prospects. These prospects have often already invested a good deal of their own time researching product options, which means they are typically closer to making a final buying decision. What's not to love about a lead source that delivers higher-quality results? On the other hand, how do you find the amount of time and effort needed, that block of six hours or more per week, to get that big payoff from using social networks as a lead source? Time management, after all, can be an Achilles heel for many salespeople.

In addition to trying to figure out how to make time for social selling within your own schedule, you may also need to convince a sales manager that it's truly worthwhile. It's possible that you will be met with resistance—after all, time is money. The first time I suggested the idea of letting our team of inside salespeople fish for leads online, specifically through social media, there was some hesitation. I was prepared for the sales manager to balk because he didn't view social networks as legitimate sources for finding leads. But his low-level resistance was based on two very different factors: time and compensation. He was worried about how much it might pull his team away from their normal sales call activities, and how this new lead source would fit into the sales compensation model for his team.

Like most small, inside sales teams, the group already had a lot of responsibility, from answering phone calls and responding to online chat requests (triggered from the company website) to qualifying new leads and following up with existing leads and passing them to an account executive. If you are an independent salesperson, you can probably relate to the pain of juggling so many balls in the air at once while relentlessly chasing leads to close the sale. You can certainly understand the sales manager's concern for how the team would possibly find extra time in the day to devote to foraging the social networks for leads. Of course, it's my personal belief that if ever there was a person on this earth who could figure out how to cheat time and squeeze more than twenty-four hours out of a day, it is bound to be a salesperson—a really good salesperson. With that in mind, we compromised and managed to find some spare time to test the idea of social selling.

The sales manager started by agreeing to let one of his newer team members serve as the guinea pig, so to speak. Because she was not yet fully in the sales call rotation, she had some extra time available; and since she was still on a draw rather than normal commission, he didn't have to worry about adjusting commission structures. As well as resolving the two primary concerns he first had about social selling, the sales manager thought that by using the newest team member, she would be the most hungry for a sale and possibly more aggressive in finding prospects from an untested lead source.

To ensure she wasn't completely flying solo, she was paired with a marketing specialist, from the internal marketing team. The two women shared the responsibility of monitoring several social networks and online communities for any mentions, feedback, or conversations that allowed a salesperson to engage. The marketing specialist even helped provide the salesperson with content in order to feed all of her new social interactions. (By the way, this is a great example of how easy it can be for sales and marketing to work together in an effort to further social selling goals, as discussed in Chapter 3.) And as a result of these initial efforts, we made definite headway in proving the merits of social selling, at least enough to win approval for the continued investment of time and resources.

While our internal social selling process has matured since that first attempt, there were many good ideas that developed out of it—and several important lessons learned, especially concerning time management. These lessons in social selling efficiency created the basis for the social media time management strategies I'm about to share with you. Not only can they help you make the most of your time spent in social media, but they may help you convince sales managers and marketing executives that you can make time for social selling.

SETTING CLEAR OBJECTIVES

Before spending your first hour perusing a social network, it's critical that you know what you are looking for and what you want to achieve. As part of a sales and marketing team, you are usually focused on hitting specific targets, and closely monitored metrics are used to determine how well you are meeting those goals. The amount of pipeline created, number of leads generated, total value of deals closed, and number of certain products sold are among the many common goals you either set for yourself or are expected to accomplish as part of a larger organization.

Social selling is no different—you need to identify not only a broad purpose, but the specific goals that support that purpose so you can avoid wasting precious time randomly surfing from one social network to the next, unsure of what you're actually hoping to find.

One overarching objective, for example, may be to increase sales pipeline generated through social media. Specific social selling goals to support that purpose might include:

• Engage in a set number of social media conversations per month that contain late-stage buying indicators (for example, asking questions that compare specific vendor solutions).
• Use LinkedIn to identify a certain number of decision makers in one or more of your target verticals and invite them to a Webinar, product demo, or other online sales presentation.
• Identify how much content you want to distribute on a weekly basis, for instance, and then identify to which specific social media channels each piece of content should be posted. You may want to match the types of content to the audience found on each social media channel, in line with your content strategy, as discussed in detail in Chapter 6.

These are sample goals, but you get the idea. Your initial purpose can be general, but your social media goals should be specific and should be set weekly, monthly, or quarterly. When possible, be sure to use the tools introduced in Chapter 7 to help you find the right social conversations to engage in and to track which content and conversations produce results. This is helpful in making sure you are meeting your goals and not wasting time on the wrong activities.

DESIGNATING BLOCKS OF TIME

You have already seen how a typical day is spent for many salespeople. The research indicated that at least two hours out of an eight-hour day are dedicated to searching for new leads and digging up information about prospective customers. Yet salespeople admitted to not being satisfied with the results. What if you took at least one hour of that time, or the time already being spent on administrative tasks, and dedicated it to specific social selling actions that align with your social media goals? To help keep you on track, take it one step further and actually schedule time for it on your calendar.

There is a generally accepted practice that if you repeat an action enough times it will eventually become a habit, but getting started is the challenge. Placing social media activities on your calendar ensures you spend a designated amount of time on it as part of your daily routine. One hopes that it will become a habit, something you do automatically, but if it's on your calendar or part of your official to-do list, then it's guaranteed to receive your attention. Plus, allotting a certain amount of time on your calendar helps prevent you from falling down one of those rabbit holes and wasting a disproportionate amount of your time.

Be strategic about defining the blocks of time to be carved out of your daily schedule. Instead of putting “Get on social media from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m.” on your calendar, schedule small time slots that detail specific activities or specific social networks, providing details on what you plan to accomplish. You might, let's say, allot a thirty-minute block of time from 8:00 to 8:30 a.m., saying: “Post new Social Selling white paper to Twitter and LinkedIn and check the list of trending topics in Twitter and new group discussions in LinkedIn for opportunities to make comments.” The more specific you can be, the less likely you are to waste time.

PRESCHEDULING POSTS

One of the best ways to make the most of your time on social media is to plan ahead for the comments and information you want to share in the different networks. Make a list of topics each week and then identify helpful content that supports each topic. Then write the actual comments you want to post each day for each social media channel in one or two sittings. It's ideal to compose a minimum of two or three comments daily. To manage this process, I find it is easier to keep up with the information by placing it all in an Excel spreadsheet, with columns labeled by social network, message, links, and time of post. An example of what a “Social Postings” spreadsheet might look like can be found on the website for this book (artofsocialselling.com) under the tab Exclusive Content, at the top of the homepage.

After you have created your comments and links for the corresponding content, you are ready to load, or preschedule, the posts. Refer back to Chapter 7 for a list of tools that allow you to do this. I like to use HootSuite but there are many others that let you do this, too. There are a couple of things to keep in mind with prescheduling posts. While this is a great way to make the most of your time, when it comes to something as time consuming as posting comments, it does not alleviate the need to make real-time comments during the week. Real-time engagement offers a better level of interaction with your social media audience, and lets you have more natural conversations (just as if you were talking face to face). It also reduces the likelihood that you might miss responses to your comments. When using prescheduled posts, you may have them set to go out when you are not available to respond to feedback and this can be a frustrating experience to your fans and followers, especially if it happens frequently.

You may want to use a three-to-one ratio as a guideline to get started. For every three prescheduled posts you use, make sure to have one real-time post. As you get more experienced with social selling and more comfortable with managing your time commitment, you will want to reverse that ratio, making it three real-time comments for every one post you schedule. But, that doesn't mean you have to use completely unique content or feature links to a new piece of content. Remember, “real-time” posts include retweets, mentions, and responses (such as a “thank you” to a new follower).

Prescheduling your posts is not the same as automating them. This is an often debated topic among social media experts. Essentially, the idea of automated posts or responses in Twitter means you have no other engagement or real-time activity. Deciding in advance what to say and when it will post and then walking away from it is a big no-no. You will be taking the “social” out of social media! Prescheduled posts should never be a replacement for real-time interactions in your various social networks.

Because some tools make it easy to automatically post information or comments for you, they remove a level of control. For example, HootSuite offers an “AutoSchedule” feature that will decide (on your behalf) the best times to post your prescheduled tweets; you write the tweet, but you don't get to decide when it should be posted. So you can't make it your business to be available for real-time interaction with your followers.

Another problem of using an automation tool is that you may have the option to have each new blog post automatically shared on your designated social networks. This would mean that the same exact post would appear on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and at the exact same time. And your blog software (or specific design template) may not have the feature allowing you the option to add or customize a message; instead, it automatically grabs only the blog title, or a portion of the title, and uses that with a shortened link. As you know from the example of the Coverall cleaning product for schools (discussed in Chapter 3), it's important to create tailored messages for your various audiences—this absolutely applies to the various social networks, as well!

In sum, while automation can be a time-saving tool, many social media experts (myself included) believe these types of automation are not a best practice. You want to fully control the information you post, including when it is posted, in which network it is posted, and what message accompanies the post. Prescheduling—not automation—allows you to easily manage this process.

LIMITING YOUR EXPOSURE

Just as you want to manage when and where your comments are posted, you may also want to limit how many places you “network,” or try to engage with others on social media. There are a handful of primary social platforms that most people associate with social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, and Pinterest. When it comes to social selling, there are potentially hundreds of other platforms where you can become active, from blogs to community forums. Once you begin identifying all the places you could ultimately engage in conversations, you'll see that your entire day could be dedicated to these networks and you still wouldn't get to all of them.

More than likely, you'll find that there are certain networks where your target audience is most likely to congregate. A simple way to manage your time is to pick a few of those that are most appropriate to start with—the ones with the highest concentration of active prospects. Concentrate on one or two, maybe three, and give up the idea of trying to be everywhere. It's not an effective approach to social selling, nor is it the best use of your time. In the earlier example about my company's first approach to social selling, the limited resources and minimal amount of dedicated time forced us to concentrate on only two networks, and it quickly became obvious that this was a smart approach (even if we had stumbled onto it by accident!). The first network we focused on was LinkedIn, particularly a couple of groups within the network that revolved around topics pertinent to our solutions; the second was an online community geared toward our target audience of IT professionals. Concentrating our time and effort in those two networks to start with helped us achieve our goals.

USING YOUR EXTENDED RESOURCES

One of the components of social selling that takes up the most time is developing content to feed the social machine. As shown in Chapter 5, a great deal of effort (and time!) goes into producing and coordinating content. One way to minimize this investment of time is to turn to others for help; tap into any and all resources you may have available.

If you are part of a company with an active marketing team, ask them to help you sort and organize content so that it's easy for you to quickly identify which pieces are most useful in which networks. You could even make a list of topics or ideas that would aid your social media strategy and suggest having those pieces of content developed by the marketing team. Similarly, look to customer support, product marketing, and any other departments in your company for content that already exists—from tips for using your product to installation or training videos. You may be surprised to learn what content has already been developed but is not being used.

On the flip side, if you are working solo, you may reach out to vendors or other associates and ask if they would be interested in providing content suitable to both of your audiences that can be shared. Inviting someone to contribute a guest post to your company blog is also a commonly used approach to accessing more quality content when you are stretched for time or ideas.

GOING MOBILE

Speaking of utilizing resources you already have available, as a salesperson one of your best tools is your smartphone or tablet. When you are out of the office or traveling, these devices can turn a (parked!) car or a coffee shop into a remote office where you can make calls, check your email, send sales proposals, and more. You can just as easily use your phone to manage your social media efforts.

Most social networks and social media tools have mobile apps, or applications that allow you to access your networks. You can also choose to allow the apps to ping your phone with real-time updates. (If you are not familiar with the term ping, it simply means to send a message or contact you via phone or email.) Implementing mobile apps is a simple, low- or no-cost option for helping you make the most of your time on social media. It lets you respond faster to questions, comments, or invitations to connect, and extends the amount of time you can give to social selling by picking up an extra ten or fifteen minutes between sales appointments, or while waiting to board an airplane, or waiting in line for lunch.

It's amazing how much extra time you can find for social media with some advanced planning—time that will allow you to identify helpful resources and put some of the tools you already have available to work for you!

Equally important to making time for social media is the need to find financial resources to support your efforts. While some parts of social media are free, many others require a minimal investment. Having a defined budget is a way to maximize your resources and make sure you are spending your dollars wisely. In the next chapter, I show you how to put together a budget that supports your social selling goals.