Strictly Marketing Magazine May/June 2017 Dave Mattson Column Strictly Marketing Magazine dave mattson | Page 4

As we look forward into 2017, we see social selling
playing a bigger part of sales, not only in
prospecting but also in servicing clients and
building your professional network. Your goal with
social selling should always be to exchange value
with the other members of your network. If you’re
not finding ways to communicate that add value
to someone’s day, you’re not getting what you
should be getting out of the platform in question!
Whether it be in your existing relationships, while
passing along information to groups, or while
pursuing specific selling opportunities, you should
always be looking for new ways you can use social
selling to add appropriate value to your network.
If you haven’t yet started to make adding value
via social selling a part of your daily routine, we
recommend taking these six action steps
immediately.
1. Build a professional-looking, complete, and
client-attracting (not job-attracting) LinkedIn
profile. This should be your first priority. The
profile you create must spotlight the pain
arising from specific business challenges you
and your organization have a proven track
record of resolving. Pain, in this context, means
the gap between what your typical prospect
expects or desires … and what that prospect
actually experiences in the real world, before
you come along to fix the problem. Your profile
must focus on that pain – not on the features
and benefits of what you sell, and not on your
own personal qualifications or achievements.
2. Add clients, vendors and other professional
contacts to your online networks. It’s not so
much the quantity of contacts you should be
looking at as their relevance to your world.
Ideally, your professional contacts should be
composed mostly or entirely of people to whom
you can add significant value, and vice versa.
This goes for LinkedIn and for all other
platforms where you have a professional
presence.
3. Start sharing insights, articles, and other
information your prospects will find valuable.
Avoid randomly recirculating articles, news,
and information that fall under the heading
“general interest.” Keep your communication
focused on issues relevant to a specific
audience, and in particular on problems that
audience faces that you can solve.
4. Build a list of prospects to watch, listen and
engage with online. This is particularly easy to
do on Twitter. Just make sure the Twitter
account you use Is exclusively business-
oriented!
5. Look for trigger events, specific problems you
can solve, or pain indicators that will help you
qualify prospects for interest … and take the
conversations offline. There is a special art to
taking business-related on-line conversations
offline.
6. Join and participate in relevant discussion
groups. Joining a group not only expands your
visibility, it helps you to connect with others in
your industry who share your interests.
A few additional words are in order here about
LinkedIn groups, which are extremely important
for salespeople. Here’s why: As a group member,
you are able to message other group members,
something you would normally need to be a first-
degree connection to do. It’s important to use this
message allotment wisely! The free version of
LinkedIn allows you to send up to 15 initial
messages in groups per month.
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