CHAPTER 18
Prospecting via Social Media
When doing research for this book and talking with salespeople about problem areas, many questioned me on how to prospect using social media. Salespeople from both large and small companies were quick to describe the various attempts they had made on social media without much success. Many shared stories about buying programs from so-called “social media experts,” only to find they were not helpful at all. Sales managers also were quick to share their frustrations with marketing departments taking money from the sales budgets and spending it to push content and buy clicks as a way to generate leads from social media sites.
The “Experts” Aren’t Experts
With all the confusion, I feel it’s time to get deep into the mud and call out all the “experts” who claim that by using their methods, you too can be successful prospecting on the Internet. The number of courses out there claiming to know the inside secrets to prospecting with LinkedIn, Facebook, and other sites will make any head spin. I struggle with these “experts” and here’s why: they all claim that by using their methodologies you will find success. But what they’re selling is a dream. With enough false hype (and oh, by the way, cold emails), you too could be successful selling a dream. But wait, there’s more, as they would say. For us, we’re selling a real product or a real service that creates a tangible benefit or outcome for the customer.
Let’s cut to the chase. Social media can work as a prospecting tool. It will allow you to connect with many people you would never be able to reach via email or the telephone. Social media is changing the way we prospect in the same way the telephone changed the way salespeople prospected when it arrived on the scene. The Internet and social media sites are also changing advertising—much in the same way television did when it came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. When you begin to accept the Internet as just another transition in how you connect with customers, you can finally begin to use it effectively.
It wouldn’t be fair for me to say that what I’m going to share will work perfectly for you. If I were to make that claim, I would be no different than the “experts” I just ranted about. But don’t think with this disclaimer that what I’m sharing isn’t relevant. It is! The strategy I’m about to share will bring you results; the only question is what level of results. The amount of business I’ve received over the years from social media prospecting is significant, and there is no way I would have secured the business without social media. My success alone should discount anyone thinking social media does not deliver additional business.
Before even thinking about using social media to prospect, you first should make sure you’re practicing the techniques I laid out in the previous chapter. It all comes down to a simple fact: the bigger a footprint you have on social media sites, the more opportunities you’ll have to prospect. Not only will you have more prospecting options, but you also will provide prospects with more social proof of your credibility. Everyone you prospect via social media is going to check your profile before dialoguing with you. High-profit prospecting is about creating a high level of confidence about you in your prospects, and a key part of the overall strategy can be your social media footprint.
Your Time Is Not Their Time
In the previous chapter, I said to limit your time to one hour per week on social media sites. If you do choose to use social media sites as a prospecting tool, you will need to devote more time to these sites. My guideline is to still spend one hour per week maintaining social media, and your other time on social media is part of your lower-value prospecting time. I say lower-value because it shouldn’t be during your best hours of the day when you should be on the phone. I recommend you set aside a block of time to prospect and develop leads via email and social media.
It’s important to never lose sight of the fact that people will not necessarily respond in a timely manner. It’s easy for us in sales to think that because we’re on social media sites such as LinkedIn, everyone is. The majority of people who are active on LinkedIn fall into one of three broad categories: salespeople, HR, or people in employment transition. Mid-level managers and others with whom you’re attempting to connect may check social media sites only once a week or once a month. If your target is the C-suite, most likely you’re not going to find them on social media at all. This doesn’t mean social media sites can’t get into the C-suite; it just means you might need to use a path by way of a mid-level manager to whom you are connected. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social media sites all have different target audiences. Regardless of their focus and your attitude toward them, don’t expect your prospect to have the same attitude toward these sites.
In my work with clients, I have them look at how they prospect with social media using three different approaches:
1.Dialogue directly to create a lead or prospect. This by far is the most efficient way to prospect, as you’re reaching out to build dialogue with the person you’ve identified as a potential prospect.
2.Prospect with people who can connect you with the prospects you are trying to reach. For many salespeople, this is the only way to use social media if the prospects you want to reach are not on social media. With this approach, you’re reaching out and dialoguing with people who can connect you with the prospects.
3.Respond to people inquiring about you. This is where a bigger footprint has the potential to create more opportunities. I’ve had major opportunities come to me simply from people sending me messages via LinkedIn and Twitter.
The first and second approaches use the same strategies, but with the second one it can take much longer to get to the prospect because you need to go through someone else.
Why more salespeople don’t use social media to prospect is amazing to me. I can only speculate, but I wonder if people are turned off to this approach because of the numerous bad prospecting messages they’ve received from others via social media. Just because others don’t do it right is not a reason for you to not do it. You just need to know the correct way.
Taking the First Step
Finding potential leads begins with monitoring who views your profile. I pay close attention to who is checking my profile, and if I see any potential leads, I immediately reach out. Some might say this borders on stalking, but I keep coming back to what I wrote earlier in this book: if you believe what you do can help others, then you owe it to them to connect. How I reach out will vary based on what the social media site allows me to do. My preferred way is to ask for a connection and message them within the site’s structure to engage them in a conversation. Remember, the person looking at your profile did so because they saw something of interest. It’s your job now to follow up.
If you do have access to view the prospect’s full profile, it is extremely important you take note of everything. You’re looking for topics you might have in common with them, such as personal or professional connections and interest groups. In the preceding chapter, I shared the importance of being part of groups to which your prospects most likely belong. You often can find these by looking at their profiles.
It is best to keep what I refer to as direct prospecting via social media “social” in nature at the early stage. I will rarely send a note to someone via social media with a direct request to uncover an immediate business need. The most common approach I use in the initial message is to ask a question or make a comment about something the two of us have in common. It’s now up to the receiver to make the next move, and with social media we have to be patient that the next move may not occur for several weeks. The way the person responds will determine the next step. Typically, I will keep my response focused solely on responding to what they sent to me in their response.
After a second response, I will then move forward and begin to shift the discussion to a topic that allows me to uncover a need I can fulfill. As soon as the conversation moves in this direction, I also look to move it “offline” from the social media site. To me this is an easy way to begin qualifying the contact and seeing if they could be a prospect. Someone who is willing to move the discussion to email or the telephone certainly expresses some interest. Someone who does not want to move away from the social media site may still be a viable lead, but it may take more time to be certain.
If you’re in B2C, you can easily become overwhelmed with people who want to dialogue forever on a social media site for no other reason than they enjoy it. The problem is that their enjoyment is taking up your time. If they’re not willing to move “offline,” I’ve found you can take this as a strong signal that what you have is not a prospect, but merely a time-waster.
Recently, I was working with a sales force that sold software systems in the enterprise space. Their prospects typically were either in IT or finance. The plan we discussed centered first on using traditional prospecting methods, such as telephone and email, to reach them. If the prospect failed to respond to traditional methods, then the plan would be to reach them via social media.
In sharing this strategy with the sales team, several of them immediately asked if it would be appropriate to reach prospects via social media if they had rejected their overtures via traditional methods. My response was by all means yes—the initial contact is social in nature, so it is certainly appropriate. Needless to say, I was appalled the salespeople asked the question in the first place. If I believe I can help others, don’t I owe it to them to connect? There is absolutely no reason why salespeople should not use social media to prospect.
For this sales team, because they operate in the B2B arena, the optimal social media platform to use is LinkedIn. If you’re in B2C, it will most likely be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest. The main problem with using social media to prospect is the lack of a direct connection with the person you’re trying to reach. For the sake of saving time, this is the primary reason I suggest upgrading your level of service with LinkedIn to allow you to reach more people. When using this approach, the first message I send is through LinkedIn. There, I will follow similar guidelines to how I use email. If you know some personal information about the person, build your message around that information.
This might sound trivial, but be sure you record in your CRM system any prospecting activity you do via social media. On more than a few occasions, I’ve seen salespeople lose all credibility when they finally do dialogue with a prospect, but fail to remember what they said or did weeks or months earlier when reaching out to that prospect on social media. This is just one more reason why I highly recommend using a CRM system that allows you to integrate your social media activity. The time you save will pay for itself many times over.
Search, Seek, Connect
Groups and group postings are another way to uncover potential leads. Depending on the social media site you’re using and its parameters, sending messages to group members can pay off. Unlike targeting specific people, create more general postings to fit a broader profile of prospects when you reach out to a group.
I strongly suggest contacting group members on a weekend or in the evening when the time could not be spent on a more productive sales activity. Uncovering prospects via social media groups can be time consuming, and I advise salespeople to do it only if they can control themselves from spending too much time on social media sites. This approach has as much potential to B2C salespeople as it does to B2B salespeople. If someone who received the group message responds, I recommend using the same approach as with direct prospects: reply back with another comment or question that builds on the first. The second response you receive from them can then be your guide to knowing if they’re worth pursuing.
A high-return activity when identifying potential leads is doing keyword searches of job titles or company names. Never underestimate the search engine capabilities of a social media site to help uncover new opportunities. Your ability to connect with any leads you identify will be driven by the parameters set by the social media site, but typically there is some method you can use to contact them. As with the other social media strategies, the approach I use and recommend to sales teams is to make the initial message a question or a comment about something they will find of value. Because it’s social media, a response could come in five minutes or five weeks. Do not take the speed of the response as an indication of their interest. Response time is more often driven by how often they look at the social media site and/or the settings they have created to receive messages.
The Fallacy of the Numbers
My goal is to have you as a connection on social media. Let’s be honest, there’s not a person out there who has not been mesmerized at one time or another with the idea of building their list of connections. Just remember, you can’t eat connections. Having connections is meaningless from a sales aspect until they turn into profitable business.
As I discussed in the previous chapter, I encourage you to connect with those people who want to connect with you and fit your criteria for acceptance. When people connect with me, I’m going to look at their profiles; if they have merit, I will reach out to them immediately. Be cautious, however, with the time you spend. There’s a reason it’s called “social media.” There are a lot of people who like to be just that—social. Conversations are great, but they can take up time, which is your most precious resource.
The objective of the connection is to begin developing confidence, which may allow you to later get connected with someone else. Your connections will create other connections from similar circles, which can create still more connections, not to mention more confidence. Your connections have the ability to see what you post, which in turn increases their awareness and—yes, I will say it again—their confidence in you. On more than one occasion, I’ve had people reach out to me based on a recommendation from another person with whom I was connected on social media. This approach is extremely important if you’re targeting senior-level people or the C-suite. These people tend not to be on social media sites, but it is not unusual for people one level below them to be on the sites. When you connect with people at this level, you have opportunities to build their confidence in you, which may compel them to think connecting you with senior-level people is a good idea.
The further up you go in any organization, the more critical it is for you to have a trail of supporters who feel confident in you and know you have strategic value to their company. When people trust your competence, they will be far more willing to make a connection on your behalf.
You Mean to Tell Me I Won’t Have Instant Customers?
We’d all like to think we could turn a social media presence into a continuous source of new leads and instant customers, simply from people commenting on what we share. The odds of that happening are simply not anywhere close to being in your favor, despite what the “Internet experts” might want you to believe.
The best approach for finding success is to carry out the strategy I outlined in the previous chapter for posting updates. Your objective with your posts is to increase your level of stature and build the confidence people have in you. Closely monitor those who view and share your posts. The people who share, as well as the people with whom they share updates, may be leads worthy of your follow up. There will also be people who post comments, and they also may be leads worthy of a follow up. Your follow-up comments to these people should merely build on the original posts.
Developing ongoing conversations with people certainly can be beneficial, but it also can take up too much of your valuable time. My rule is to exchange comments with people on a limited basis if and when I find the comments insightful. The challenge is not becoming so engrossed in online conversations that they quickly take your time away from other activities. It can go both ways, though, because you do become known by what you post and the circles you run in, and that alone can create leads and ultimately business. I’ll share two examples. The first is a person I traded comments with off and on for over a year. Without me asking, this person connected me with someone else, and that person eventually became one of my customers. The second example is a person who reached out to me and said they were doing so only because they had been following me on social media for years and liked the comments I shared. Was this incremental business I wasn’t expecting? It sure was; however, I will freely argue I’m not sure it was worth the investment of time. I say this because I don’t know for sure how much time went into getting those pieces of business—and that is why I say social media can occupy far more of your time than you even realize.
Social Media Sites Are Merely Search Engines
Social media is here to stay, and while we don’t know what it’s going to look like tomorrow, we must figure out how to best leverage it today. Recently, I was having a discussion with a salesperson who is clearly at the top of her industry. Few people can do what she does, and she has the track record to show for it. Her market is B2B, and she sells a service with a typical sales cycle between two and five months. I’ve had many discussions with her about the value of social media, in particular LinkedIn. She believes social media sites try to do everything possible to make it difficult for salespeople to use them. In her mind, a perfect social media site would be one that gives her complete accurate information and a way to message contacts via the site, as well as directly.
She doesn’t use social media sites to message prospects using the approaches I’ve presented in this chapter, but she still uses the sites daily as a search and verification tool. The reason she doesn’t use social media sites for messaging is because she believes people don’t respond quickly enough. However, if you ask her if she looks at a prospect’s profile on LinkedIn before calling them, she’ll say, “Of course I do!” Ask her if she sends out a request to connect with a prospect on LinkedIn after she’s talked with them on the phone, and she’ll say, “Of course I do!” Ask her if she sends a connection request to other people in the same company where she is prospecting, and she’ll say, “Of course I do!” And ask her if she uses LinkedIn to gain contact information or titles she can use when she makes a phone call, and she’ll say, “Of course I do!”
This high-performing salesperson uses LinkedIn not as a tool to send and receive messages, but as a tool to aid her in her other prospecting efforts. You may be like her and choose not to use most of the strategies I’ve shared in this chapter. That’s fine, but I will say failing to use social media in at least some capacity to prospect will put you at a serious disadvantage.
Going back to the early days of the telephone, I’m sure there were companies that failed to embrace it, believing there was no way anyone would want to do business with someone they couldn’t see. I’m sure there were companies in the early days of television that saw it as nothing but a fad, void of any genuine opportunity to effectively advertise. I’m wondering how things worked out for these companies. I suspect they did just fine for a while, but over the long term, the telephone and television were changes you couldn’t ignore. We can say the same today with social media and the impact it has on prospecting. You can ignore it and be fine for a while, but don’t come back to me in a few years and complain about your lack of customers.