Using Social Media to Trigger Buyer Activity

Even if you haven't spoken to your leads yet, you'll want them to keep seeing your name and your company's name everywhere they go. First, make sure to surround them on social media accounts. Get out there, and engage with them on LinkedIn and Twitter. Don't use Facebook, Instagram, or more personal sites, because that will make you look too much like a stalker.

Like, share, retweet, and favorite your leads' content from time to time, allowing a few days between each post. You can even add this to your outbound e-mail campaign cadence and daily routine. This is a great task for a virtual assistant (VA). If you use a sales automation tool with a live feed, you can have a VA do one or multiple social actions every time an action associated with that account appears on the live feed.

For example, if I see on the live feed that someone has opened my e-mail, that person should get a retweet and a like on his or her last LinkedIn comment right away. Maybe this will prompt the person to take a deeper look at the e-mail or write back. You can also use the action you see in the live feed as a reason to call the person immediately, but that goes without saying. This is more scalable, and allows you to nurture leads at scale.

You can use a tool such as Socedo, mentioned earlier in this book, to try doing this automatically.

Another thing you should be doing is sending e-mail recipients any information, news, or content that is relevant to them. You can do this on a per-prospect basis, but it can be very time consuming. Only do this for your largest accounts. You should be able to find articles that are relevant to entire list segments that you can send out.

Find triggers or action events to use as an excuse to contact leads. These triggers are the same ones mentioned earlier in this book. If the company raises money, expands, has good public relations (PR), and so on, then a congratulatory e-mail from you is in order. Make sure to take advantage of these trigger events, as they may not come around often.

A trigger event that most salespeople don't utilize is holidays. You can use any major holiday or even a Hallmark holiday as an excuse to send a warm follow-up e-mail.

Use social and lead research to see what people care most about. Maybe they are environmentalists and care deeply about Earth Day. Use that. Maybe they like to party and have a trip planned to Cabo San Lucas for Cinco de Mayo. Use that. You can also use holidays such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, or Labor Day to wish someone well and follow up.

Also, if you know a person's birthday, you can wish him or her a happy birthday, and you'll be ahead of the game.

Make Sure to Follow Up

When you start to get responses, make sure to continue to follow up. Following up is extremely important and something that many people forget to do.

For tools to help with following up, try using Boomerang, MixMax, or Rebump. These tools will allow you to preset e-mails to pop back into your in-box when you're ready to reply or follow up. You can also sync an e-mail to send at a later date. Some of the outbound sales automation tools provide you with e-mail plug-ins that do similar things. MixMax allows for some basic tracking and templating, too, but it isn't as robust as Cadence or ToutApp.

I can't name names, but a successful founder friend would use Boomerang to trigger e-mails to send to investors at 3:00 AM so that it would seem as if he was working very late.

If I tell someone by e-mail that I will ping him or her in a month, it's much easier for me to get that e-mail redelivered 30 days later than to create a calendar note for myself.

Reactivating Leads

With regard to nurturing existing leads, there's one tool that I like for reactivating leads that have slipped through the cracks or aren't getting the attention they deserve for one reason or another: Datahug.