The Social Media Sales Revolution: The New Rules for Finding Customers, Building Relationships, and Closing More Sales Through Online Networking

The Social Media Sales Revolution

The New Rules for Finding Customers, Building Relationships, and Closing More Sales Through Online Networking

LANDY CHASE

KEVIN KNEBL

Copyright © 2011 by Landy Chase and Kevin Knebl. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-177455-0

MHID: 0-07-177455-6

The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: ISBN: 978-0-07-176850-4, MHID: 0-07-176850-5.

All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations appear in this book, they have been printed with initial caps.

McGraw-Hill eBooks are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums and sales promotions, or for use in corporate training programs. To contact a representative please e-mail us at [email protected].

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, accounting, securities trading, or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

TERMS OF USE

This is a copyrighted work and The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. (McGraw-Hill) and its licensors reserve all rights in and to the work. Use of this work is subject to these terms. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976 and the right to store and retrieve one copy of the work, you may not decompile, disassemble, reverse engineer, reproduce, modify, create derivative works based upon, transmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish or sublicense the work or any part of it without McGraw-Hill’s prior consent. You may use the work for your own noncommercial and personal use; any other use of the work is strictly prohibited. Your right to use the work may be terminated if you fail to comply with these terms.

THE WORK IS PROVIDED AS IS. McGRAW-HILL AND ITS LICENSORS MAKE NO GUARANTEES OR WARRANTIES AS TO THE ACCURACY, ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF OR RESULTS TO BE OBTAINED FROM USING THE WORK, INCLUDING ANY INFORMATION THAT CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH THE WORK VIA HYPERLINK OR OTHERWISE, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. McGraw-Hill and its licensors do not warrant or guarantee that the functions contained in the work will meet your requirements or that its operation will be uninterrupted or error free. Neither McGraw-Hill nor its licensors shall be liable to you or anyone else for any inaccuracy, error or omission, regardless of cause, in the work or for any damages resulting therefrom. McGraw-Hill has no responsibility for the content of any information accessed through the work. Under no circumstances shall McGraw-Hill and/or its licensors be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, consequential or similar damages that result from the use of or inability to use the work, even if any of them has been advised of the possibility of such damages. This limitation of liability shall apply to any claim or cause whatsoever whether such claim or cause arises in contract, tort or otherwise.

To my three wonderful children, who in their respective ways remind me daily of the success that their mother and I had in being parents. Nothing that I accomplish in my life will ever give me greater satisfaction; each of them is a treasure that this world is fortunate to have received.

—Landy Chase

To my beautiful wife, Karin, and our three amazing children, Anja, Tristan, and Calais, whose patience and encouragement I greatly appreciate while I travel and pursue my passion. I couldn’t have a more supportive family, and I love them with all my heart.

—Kevin Knebl

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER1

GAME CHANGERS

The Six Rules of the Social Media Sales Revolution

CHAPTER2

LOCK IN SALES WITH LINKEDIN

The Gold Standard of Business Social Networking Sites

CHAPTER3

HOW TO GET RESULTS WITH TWITTER

Tapping into Global Conversations

CHAPTER4

THE ROLE OF FACEBOOK IN

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

This Time, It’s Personal

CHAPTER5

BLOGGING IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK

It’s Also Worth the Effort

CHAPTER6

ATTRACTING ATTENTION TO YOUR

ONLINE PRESENCE

How to Be a Magnet

CHAPTER7

HOW TO COMMUNICATE WITH PROSPECTS

ONLINE AND OFFLINE

Netiquette for Salespeople

CHAPTER8

EFFECTIVE TIME MANAGEMENT

Integrating Social Media Habits into Your Day

CHAPTER9

ADJUSTING YOUR SCHEDULE

A Blueprint for Your Daily Routine

CHAPTER10

THE FUTURE OF SELLING

Join the Revolution

CONCLUSION

INDEX

PREFACE

It is seven thirty in the morning—in this case, a Friday morning—and Thomas, a business-to-business (B2B) sales professional for a technology company, is making final preparations for his weekly marketing effort. Like most high-achieving salespeople, Thomas is a creature of habit. Thus, Thomas always does his marketing work on Friday mornings. And, since Thomas is a salesperson, his marketing work this morning is, as it has always been, a telephone-prospecting session.

Thomas is the quintessential selling machine. He has a work ethic that is without peer. Colleagues admiringly refer to him as Thomas the Sales Engine, a play on the fictional anthropomorphic steam locomotive in the Railway Series books. He is a planner, and he is disciplined. He comes into the office at the same time each day. He does the same activities at the same time each and every week. His goal today, as it has been every Friday morning for hundreds of past Friday mornings, is to set four appointments.

Thomas is also well educated. He has attended numerous training seminars on effective prospecting techniques during his career. (In fact, in years past, he has attended traditional prospecting workshops given by both of the authors of this book.) He has also read extensively on the subject. Like most top sales pros, he is always looking for an edge—and, historically, he has always found what he is looking for.

Thomas’s education and skill level are reflected in everything that he says on the telephone. By traditional standards, Thomas is as good at this type of work as anyone in the selling profession. He has all of the key attributes that make an outstanding cold caller successful. He is motivated. He is focused. He is articulate without being canned or slick. His approach with gatekeepers is polite and polished. His pitch to decision makers is also highly refined and spot-on in its effectiveness.

He is so good, in fact, that if he can just get a qualified decision maker on the telephone for 15 or 20 seconds, he can persuade many of them to grant him an appointment before the call is concluded.

Unfortunately for Thomas, therein lies the problem.

You see, over the past few years, Thomas has seen an alarming drop in the number of appointments that he is able to set each week. In fact, as recently as three years ago, Thomas didn’t need to make 50 calls every Friday morning. He made just 25, because he almost always reached his four-appointment goal with this level of effort. Then, about three years ago, over the space of just a few months, he saw a sudden and significant drop in appointment results.

What concerned Thomas the most at the time was the fact that this drop was not the result of a change in his tried-and-true telephone techniques. Yet, without anything changing on his end, his success rate had taken a significant turn for the worse.

Unfortunately, Thomas reacted to this problem the way most salespeople would, and still do. Instead of examining the reasons behind the productivity drop, he simply did more of what he had always done successfully. He didn’t work smarter; he worked harder—much harder. In this case, he doubled his calling effort without changing his fundamental skill set. He began making 50 calls every Friday morning, not 25. To his credit, he did make one significant technological adjustment: he acquired a contact-management software program and began managing his prospects on his laptop.

Three years ago, these adjustments paid the requisite dividends. Three years ago, he got back to his four-appointment goal each week, maintained his sales productivity and income level, and reinforced in his mind the idea that hard work will overcome any selling obstacle. Three years ago, Thomas’s strategy worked.

Now Thomas has a bigger problem. The productivity issue has reared its ugly head again. This time around, however, it is not going to be defeated with old-fashioned hard work.

Thomas’s strength, his trump card, has always been his ability to acquire new accounts through a consistent outbound marketing effort. But now, even Thomas’s 50-call-a-week regimen isn’t meeting his needs. In fact, he is having enormous difficulty in getting more than one prospect appointment a week, despite all his work. To complicate matters, Thomas cannot, as he did previously, increase the number of calls he makes, as there is no time for that in his schedule.

For Thomas, like many other salespeople, the economic downturn has hit him where it hurts—right in his wallet. Through no fault of his own, he has lost nearly 20 percent of his customers, and most of the remaining 80 percent are buying less than they did in the good old days. As we noted, Thomas is no longer able to replace the lost business through appointments generated from his weekly prospecting effort, and as a result, he is really feeling the heat.

Thomas has had several uncomfortable meetings with his sales manager in recent months. All of them have focused on one topic: his continued drop in sales performance. Each time, his manager, predictably, encourages him to work harder. The manager is a good leader, but he cannot provide what Thomas desperately needs, which is a solution to the revenue problem. Thomas is at the end of his rope. He is stressed, and he is frustrated. He knows that he has to do something, but for the first time in his career, he does not know what that something can be.

Thomas is out of ideas, but he is not stupid, he is not passive, and he is not a quitter. He does something that he has not done in a very long time: he examines his marketing methods, his assumptions about what works in sales, and what is different about the marketplace. He opens up his mind. He takes a step back from the day-to-day struggle that his career has been of late, and he looks at what has changed in his world. He examines the steps in his weekly prospecting effort, and once he does that, it does not take him long to identify the root cause of the problem.

Thomas realizes that buyers are no longer reachable on their telephones, because the telephone is no longer their primary communication tool. Instead, they are doing most of their communicating on the Internet. He realizes that his marketing efforts are going to have to adapt to this fundamental and irreversible change. He also realizes that social media offer him a huge opportunity to communicate with his customers and prospects in ways that he has never done before. It is at this point that Thomas makes the decision to purchase this book.

Your authors are here to help you—and we are exceptionally qualified to do so. You should know that we both enjoyed successful careers as salespeople. Independent of each other, we both developed and grew successful businesses that focused for years on training sales teams to generate new revenue, before we became involved in social media. Today, we are both prominent in this new field, and this work is the product of our own experience, of proven and replicable methods that both of us employ on a daily basis. We have collaborated to deliver to you the ultimate sales professional’s user guide—the one road map that you need to generate offline revenue from online marketing. Yes, everything we share here is field-tested—and it works! So turn the page. Join us now, and join The Social Media Sales Revolution.

Landy Chase

Kevin Knebl

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Landy Chase

This book was, for me, both a rewarding and a challenging project, written during a year of transition, change, and personal growth. Special thanks to

Betsy Padgett, Anna B. Padgett, Russell Powell, Johnny Hoover, Jenni Lanning, Jay Lucas, and Beth Lucas

My parents

David Meerman Scott, for his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR

My coauthor, Kevin Knebl, for his collaboration and for meeting all those deadlines

Patsy Stewart, for her advice and patience, and for going the extra mile

Ira Kaufman, for his creativity and brilliant mind

Regina Landry, for your continued hard work and loyalty

Kevin Knebl

I had a wonderful time writing this book. It was an honor and a privilege to be able to coauthor this volume. Special thanks to

My good friend Chris Kauza, for his encouragement and his brilliant marketing mind

David Fein, for his example of what can be accomplished when you seek first to serve

Joseph Berkowitz and Stephanie Frerich at McGraw-Hill, for their invaluable assistance

My coauthor, Landy Chase, for being such a great collaborator and for his patience with my right-brain ways

My parents, Karl and Anne Knebl, for their support and encouragement

My wife, Karin, for her never-ending belief in me

CHAPTER1

GAME CHANGERS

The Six Rules of the Social Media Sales Revolution

Before we get into the details of the Social Media Sales Revolution, let’s turn the clock back a little and take a look at how we got here.

Landy’s Story

In 1985, Landy started his first job as a business-to-business (B2B) salesperson. The company that hired him was a bootstrap startup with a small amount of capital. However, it was an opportunity in outside sales, which was beneficial for a young person with no sales experience. Landy was a good fit for the company, and vice versa. He jumped at the opportunity, partly because the company was willing to give him a chance, even without a proven track record, and partly because it was introducing a new idea that it seemed to him would change the business world forever.

Believe it or not, back in those days people at work actually received incoming messages from outside callers on slips of paper! It worked like this: the office secretary would take the call (that’s right—this was before the term executive assistant came into favor), write down the caller’s information on a small preprinted slip, and place the message from the caller in the recipient’s inbox slot on the secretary’s desk. There was an individual slot for each employee for this purpose. The recipient would then come to the secretary’s desk, check his or her slot, retrieve any messages taken by the secretary, read them, and return phone calls. It was just like going out to your mailbox at home and checking for mail, only it happened at the office.

This company’s new service was called recorded message retrieval, and it eliminated the need for written messages. When a client signed up for this service, he would forward her phone number to the company. A bank of telephone operators at computer terminals took the clients’ incoming calls. While the operator was handling the call, the conversation between the operator and the caller was recorded! When the client wanted to check her messages, she would call into her mailbox and listen, as a third party, to the recorded conversations that had taken place between the operator and the callers. This was 1985, though, so it seemed like amazing technology.

Landy hit the streets hard, presenting this exciting new service to business owners around Dallas, Texas. Nobody had ever seen anything like it—and Landy’s enthusiasm for the service was contagious. Within six months, he was, at the ripe old age of 23, the company’s number two salesperson in the United States. Then, one Friday afternoon, the company announced that it had run out of funding, and Landy, having been previously tipped off about the firm’s dire financial straits, accepted a better job with a publicly held company in the office-products business the following Monday morning.

You know the technology, of course; you use it every day. It is called voice mail.

There have been many other changes in business communication over the past 25 years, and these, in turn, have been driven mostly by new technology. For example, when Landy was selling recorded message retrieval in 1985, salespeople did not use personal computers. (He bought his first PC, a desktop IBM XT, in 1987. It came with a dot-matrix printer.) We did not have laser printers. We did not have cell phones or PDAs. We usually did not have fax machines. Over the years, as each of these products arrived, the technology came in the form of easily manageable gadgets that one could learn to use without difficulty. Then came the Internet.

The Ultimate Game Changer

The Internet is the greatest communication tool of all time. For B2B sales people, it is also the ultimate game changer. Past technological changes have all been improvements like voice mail, which were easily adaptable to the existing landscape, whereas the Internet is not. Over the past 15 years, it has completely taken over the way in which people get and exchange information. Over the past five, it has completely taken over the way in which people socialize with one another.

And now—right now, as this book is being written—social networking is taking over B2B communication. Like it or not, social networking sites are completely, and permanently, redefining the way salespeople find new customers.

The good news is that if you learn to harness the power of this new technology, it can grow your sales like nothing that has come before. The bad news? If you don’t adapt quickly to this fundamentally new way of building relationships, you will, in all likelihood, find yourself locked out of the selling profession. The moment has come to learn and adapt. Selling is undergoing a revolution, and the times they are a-changin’.

The Six Rules

The Internet has created six fundamental shifts in the B2B marketplace that are driving the future of the selling profession. They require all of us who wish to sell successfully in the new marketplace to accept these changes, recognize the inherent opportunities that they offer, and become educated in the new skills needed to acquire new customers.

In this chapter, our aim is to convince you to embrace the new fundamental rules for salespeople that together make up the Social Media Sales Revolution. You will find some of your most fundamental beliefs regarding how you should be doing your job challenged. You may even find yourself questioning what you should be doing for a living. If, at the end of this chapter, you are in agreement with these six points, then