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Before you sell your thousandth customer, your hundredth customer, or even your tenth customer, you have to sell that crucial first customer. For a new startup with no case studies or testimonials at its disposal, this can be a daunting task.
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Whether you’re looking for a job, attempting to establish your thought leadership, or widening your circle of connections to include influencers or potential clients, your LinkedIn profile is a key component of your personal brand.
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As organizations flatten out, employees don’t have to corner senior management in an elevator to get their thoughts heard. They could just schedule a meeting, or even walk up to a leader’s office or desk. So is there even a need to have an elevator pitch at the ready?
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When your writing countless emails every day, its hard to run through each with a fine-toothed comb and insure you haven’t made any grammatical errors before hitting “send.”
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Just like anything shiny and new, social selling suffers from a fair amount of hype. And with hype comes misunderstanding.
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For all the powerful processing work the human mind can do, it’s still prone to making bizarre assumptions or jumping to an illogical conclusion every now and then. Problem is, we don’t even recognize these patterns as strange.
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If you presented the average person with the prompt “Salespeople are …” and asked them to fill in the blank, what do you think they would say?
Daniel Pink conducted this very experiment as part of his research for the book To Sell is Human. When asked to identify the first word that came to mind to describe “sales” or “selling,” the most prevalent answers included “pushy,” “sleazy,” “ugh,” “yuck,” “dishonest,” and “manipulative.”
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To sell something, you have to convince a buyer that they not only want your offering, they need it. To be clear, I’m not talking about fooling them into buying a piece of junk. Oftentimes, prospects stand to benefit considerably from purchasing a new product or service. But that doesn’t mean they’re any more eager to fork over their money — and this is where the fine art of persuasion comes in.
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Marketers are well aware of the power of content to attract and nurture leads. But at some point, leads get passed on to Sales, and salespeople are generally not as “hip” to the content movement as their colleagues in marketing.
That is, until now.
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All customers are not created equal. Sure, you might like some more than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re your best clients. Sales comes down to revenue and ROI — so how can sales leaders objectively determine which customers are most valuable?
Through a customer lifetime value (CLV) analysis. But calculating CLV isn’t a cake walk — inaccurate data, confusing metrics, and inadequate technology can all block the path.
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The pen is mightier than the sword. (Which is good, because you probably don’t want to threaten prospects into buying at sword-point.)
As the primary “weapons” to convert prospects into customers, words are incredibly important to salespeople. How sales reps deliver their messages and converse with contacts can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of a conversation.
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Social selling is part activity, part reputation. If you’re writing insightful comments on your prospects’ blogs, responding to their tweets, and liking their shared content, you’ve got the activity bit down pat. But if your LinkedIn profile doesn’t include your three jobs and features a cropped picture of you from prom, you can’t really call yourself a social seller.
If you’d like to start a social selling initiative in earnest, then begin by revamping your LinkedIn profile. Just as you’re researching potential buyers on LinkedIn to learn more about them, they’re looking at your profile to judge whether they want to do business with you. Don’t ruin great messaging and positive interactions with an outdated, sparse, or inappropriate profile.
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There are a lot of classics in the world of employee rewards. Money. Time off. Restaurant gift certificates. Trips. All oldies, but goodies.
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Google “business email mistakes” and you’ll find endless articles and resources. But they all say the same thing:
