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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Optimal Sales Mindset Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on March 19, 2021. It featured Expert in channel “as a service” business models, IOT, and mobility services and solutions Janet Schijns.]
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JANET’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “When you’re selling, 72% of the people will Google you before they have a conversation with you, both Twitter and LinkedIn pay money to come up to the top of Google. So if you post 3-5 times a week on LinkedIn, all you have to do is share an article and then just use the same post on Twitter just shortened, you will show up on the first page in Google and Twitter. If you have a really common name like John Smith, you’re going to want to use a middle initial or use some kind of a John Killer-Seller Smith or whatever you want to use for that moniker, but you will come up first. You can’t buy that, it would cost you too much money, LinkedIn and Twitter bought that for you. As a seller, understand that that’s the behavior that buyers are having now and use it to your advantage. Get found and you will get sales.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
JANET SCHIJNS: I’m going to share some tips and tricks from our leading social selling expert program which currently has 37X ROI. Buckle in as we get ready to talk about what’s really happening.
I mentioned as I started, we’re in this time that I like to call the digital normal and it’s a shift in our world as the result of what’s been a perfect storm. The world as we knew it changed overnight when COVID came onto the picture and we started shutting things down, changing work preferences and now you hear people are never going to back to working fully in the office. Actually, it’s been stirring for years, the pandemic just forced those of us who hadn’t caught up to catch up. The preference for digital as millennials became the major part of the workforce and then next gen, gen Z, started joining the workforce was already there, the pandemic merely hit the speed button on it to pick up.
For those of you who think that, “It’s almost over, we’re all going to get back to normal”, Corona didn’t just change our lives, it sped up the inevitable. The genie is not going back in the bottle, it’s going to be digital, digital’s here to stay and if you’re going to be a top seller, you’ve got to get comfortable with it.
A couple proof points in my mind about why selling in the digital normal is so critical. First of all, almost 90% of customers prefer now to start their buying journey online with content and recommendations from their network – their network which is primarily social media. 74% of B2B prospects struggle to find the right content to support their buying journey so they reach out to someone in their network on social media. 91% of buyers prefer to engage with an expert – not a salesperson – recommended by their connections, versus a coin-operated salesperson. Where are those connections? 7 out of 10 times, LinkedIn. We’re going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
Finally, 67% of those same B2B tech buyers prefer digital engagement versus an in-person meeting or a phone call, so they’d rather talk to you on Zoom or through text on a DM platform than they ever would to take your meeting. By the way, most of their headquarters aren’t going to let you in anyway. As a result of all of that, what we see in our statistics here at JS Group is that salespeople that have a strong personal digital brand and the right connections out-perform their peers by 76%, and that’s what I want to talk to you about today.
Social selling skills are completely necessary for sales survival and as we saw, sales acceleration, but the good news is just like any other sales technique, it can be learned. Hint here, it’s a little less about selling so for those of you who have always felt bad about having to make cold calls, let’s use that as the best example I can think about as the hardest part of a seller’s job, it’s more about sharing, it’s more about engaging, it’s more about content than it is about cold calling. It’s a great way if you’re a good relationship person but also a good content person to excel right now.
What I want to do is spend the rest of our time together to enter you into what we like to call the digital ninja, the person who’s an expert at social selling. They’re like a ninja, they’re out there on those platforms, they’re getting business done, they’re generating demand, they’re getting sales revenue because they’re great at social selling.
Before we get started, just a quick primer. I have a lot of people that say, “Social selling, so you mean social marketing or social media?” I don’t. Social selling is about one-to-one, one-to-few, you’re trying to build just like you would in any other sales setting an authentic, genuine, real relationship that takes a connection to a prospect into sales and revenue. Social marketing, putting things on your company’s page or posting about your company, that’s one-to-many and your goal there is to just extend your brand awareness to a broad array of connections and influencers including the people you went to college with, people you worked with at your last job and maybe a prospect. Social marketing and social selling are very different, and social selling is critical to your sales success. Social marketing, not so much, that’s more for the marketing people.
A couple caveats as we get started. Social selling isn’t any different from face-to-face selling in that leads have to progress through the funnel, a lot of people use social media and say, “It doesn’t work for me to get deals.” It’s because you’re not selling on it, you’re using it to post a bunch of unconnected stuff or to like a bunch of people’s posts but you’re not actually using it to sell. What social selling does is it’s how you move people through the funnel that changes, you move from in-person meetings, used to be the nirvana, to a virtual touchpoint. You move from sending literature to sharing posts, articles and videos. By the way, sending literature by email is old-school, sharing posts, articles and videos, that’s social selling.
As we talk today, think not only about how you get new funnel from social selling but also how you put your current high-value prospects and your customers into your social selling process to make sure you increase your results. I just had a conversation yesterday with a seller who had a prospect go dead, we’ve all had this happen where they were hot, they were talking to us and all of a sudden nothing’s happening. Put him in his social selling process and a week later, the gentleman reached back out and said, “Sorry I dropped the ball, been busy but I saw your post about health checks and doing them with technology and it reminded me that we’ve got to get this thing going, so let’s get back at the table and figure it out.” Don’t forget, as I talk today, this isn’t just about the prospects that you gain here, it can also be used for your existing prospects.
Let’s think about why social selling is working right now. The use of social media daily has been growing for 11 straight quarters with the past quarter growing 2.5X due to COVID – maybe, maybe not because some people are starting to get back out there but social is still going up. In B2B sales, there’s one giant social medial location that is delivering a lot of leads and the reason for that is pretty transparent, it’s because it’s become the business location of choice. By the way, this isn’t just for the “younger people” although the statistics do skew social media slightly younger. Every generation is spending more time using digital media. What’s that site that really works? It’s LinkedIn.
Before I get talking about the key metrics that you should measure as a seller to see if you’re good at social selling – and then I’m going to walk you through how you improve each one of them – let me just turn to Fred and see, any thoughts?
Fred Diamond: Why do you think salespeople have been so slow to move to using social selling tools?
Janet Schijns: I think there’s two reasons and we actually did a study on this last year so I’m speaking from experience. The first one is they tried social media and it didn’t work because they didn’t have a formula, they didn’t know what they were going for. They did some stuff that their marketing team gave them or that they made up and it didn’t work and it’s one thing we know about sellers, if it doesn’t result in a sale, they’re not going to keep doing it. That’s the first reason. The second reason is, unfortunately, many salespeople whether it’s age or just stick-to-itiveness have trouble adapting their skills and go back to just working harder at what used to work for them in the past. Those were the two things that we saw. Rod, great question, enjoy that nice spring weather I hear you’ve been having in DC. Let’s get going about how you get some success on LinkedIn and maybe talk you all into changing some of your habits.
There are five key metrics that you should measure when you’re talking about success on LinkedIn. The first is your social selling index floor, more on that in a second, the other four are important as well. The first is connections with ideal prospects are at, at least, 25%. In other words, when you reach out to someone who is an ideal prospect for you whatever your target market is, they should accept your connection request at least 25% of the time. By the way, 5,000+ connections on LinkedIn is the gold standard, it gets you into the all-star category which makes your content show up first when people plug in. It doesn’t do as well for you as your social selling index score which we’ll talk about in a second, but it really does help.
Third is relationship management. When you social sell, it’s all about recently, how recently has the prospect heard your voice? How frequently do you engage with them so when they’re posting or someone they follow is posting, how frequently are you in there engaging with them? Finally, the movement of the prospect. How is the relationship moving forward? How are you doing the things that are going to take this from a connection to a relationship, from a relationship to a sale? That of course leads into how do you get sales-qualified leads?
Finally, your pipeline from social selling activity, your number of SQLs and your average deal size. This is how I look at success in social selling. In the past, and Rod asked a great question, people looked at social selling as an, “I’m going to be on social media a couple times a day. I didn’t get any leads in two weeks, I’m done, this didn’t work for me” because they didn’t look at it the same way you would look at selling, they looked at it like a marketer would look at it. How many people looked at your post? I don’t care how many people looked at my post, I care how many people bought because of my post.
Let’s start with your LinkedIn SSI. Your LinkedIn SSI is a hundred-point scale which measures how effective you are at four things, establishing your brand, finding people, building relationships and engaging with content. A score of 70+ is considered an expert social seller. If you don’t score above 70 initially, that’s okay, take the tips we share today, help propel your score forward. If you have a score above 70, it may not all be good news. Two things, if you don’t have a lot of connections or if most of your connections are not qualified prospects, they’re your friends you went to college with, people you work with, people you’ve known for 20 years, it doesn’t really count. As you expand your contact to include high-value prospects, you may actually see your score fall before it comes back up. My score, 81, I cut this in yesterday, includes 18,000 people of which almost 2,000 are C-level executives so being in my top 1% is pretty tough competition.
How do you get the score? Everybody always asks me this, I’d love to share a link with you on how to get your LinkedIn score but if I share the link it’ll go to mine and you won’t be able to use it. Just Google, “What is my LinkedIn SSI score?” whenever you have a chance. As long as you’re signed into your LinkedIn, it’ll take you very conveniently to the main page where you can click, “Learn my score.” Ultimately, if you have Sales Navigator, you can see it in your profile but again, you’re looking for a 70+ here, and keeping score matters because this SSI score goes up and down every day based on how participative you are.
Let’s talk about how you can get to those 70 points because again, when you get to those 70 points, LinkedIn prioritizes your content and engagement. When they prioritize your content and engagement and you have the right connections, those connections see what you’re doing, hear from you, you’re in front of that, it’s almost as if every day when they dial into their social media, they see you. This really helps you to start to get sales. I’ll keep an eye on the chat to see if anybody’s brave enough to say what their score is. If you don’t want to escape from this and look on Google, you can lose after. The average score right now amongst sellers is 54.
Again, your SSI score really demonstrates your social selling expertise. As I said, if you type in this over here as long as you’re in your LinkedIn, it’ll take you to yours, or Google, “What’s my LinkedIn SSI score?” It’s just like any other skill, when we measure ourselves, we can improve our results. The first thing is your SSI score, of 100 points, 25 points of it is your profile. Filling out your complete profile is worth 25 points so your profile matters in the look-online-first era, it helps you get found, it spurs engagement.
It’s really critical as you look at your profile, your profile consists of basically 11 things. If you fill out 10 of those, you will win but you cannot fill them out like a resume. LinkedIn started as a resume service, LinkedIn was a place people went to search for jobs, that has gone away. LinkedIn is now really a business-to-business connectivity platform so you truly need to look through your profile picture, look at your URL. Does your URL say John Smith 127945? By clicking on your profile, you can make your URL anything you want as long as someone else hasn’t taken it. I’m lucky, my name is Janet Schijns, nobody else had it but if your name is John Smith, you can make it Super Seller [whatever you sell], LinkedIn doesn’t care.
You also have to think about things like your banner and the content that you’re featuring. When you post something, when you’re done posting you can actually go to the top of your post and there’s three little dots. On those three little dots, you can say, “Feature this at the top of my profile.” If you don’t do that, LinkedIn very helpfully will constantly just put the last three things you engaged in at the top of your profile when someone searches for you. If you liked that it was your friend’s birthday, that’s what’s going to show up. It’s all about you going in and spending some time on that profile and getting it right, you want to make sure that you do that.
On our course, we go through a whole section on that, but I would tell you, start with your “About You.” Change it away from what your job title is, make it what you do for customers, complete everything in your profile and get those first 25 full points. Once you’ve done that and you’re showing really well, then it’s time to roll up your shirt sleeves and go get after prospects. Here’s a secret, top sellers spend 3X the time building a highly targeted prospect list – not doing prospecting calls, building a list – than others do in the same industry, so you want to continually add to your prospect list.
Whenever you have a meeting, an appointment or you see someone in the news, always connect on LinkedIn. Narrow your prospect list to ideal prospects and clients, I recommend using Sales Navigator but if you can’t do it that way, you can also use the search mechanism in LinkedIn to narrow down who’s in your prospect list. Remember, there’s no award for collecting low-value connections so be discerning on who you connect with. It’s great to connect with your old college friends, but don’t put them in your Sales Navigator lead list because they’re not a lead.
The next thing you want to do is really think about who those leads are, who are your prospects? Who are your customers? What do they seem to be reading, commenting on, when did they talk, who do they seem to follow? What I find is a lot of people think about what they want to say first on a LinkedIn rather than saying, “If I’ve got a hundred top prospects and they’re all listening to this influencer and they’re all talking about this news and these kinds of topics, I should talk about those things because they would then listen to me. I should talk to those influencers, because they would then listen to me.” They stick to their, “Nope, I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about” and that’s why the don’t succeed. You really want to think about why someone would listen to you and post content that would make them listen.
Once you know who your prospects are, you’re one step closer to being a social selling Rockstar because if you can identify what people want to talk about, you can design a daily approach to engage with your prospects on the right topics, at the right time and on the right platform. Remember, success is a habit, so you need to have a disciplined prospect list and engage with them with value to win. But wait, there’s more. If you can find and engage the right prospect and then make sure you focus on recency, every day to two days, post on LinkedIn something that engages your prospects. Frequency, make sure you’re frequently commenting on their posts, tagging them in your posts, engaging them in comments, sending them a DM not to sell but to offer value. “I posted this today, you might not have seen it, I thought you’d like this article.
Finally, really focus on which of those prospects you can get monetary value from because ultimately having conversations all day long on social media from someone who’s never going to buy from you, that’s like going on a sales appointment with somebody who doesn’t have budget, we don’t ever want to do that. You want to keep track of your RFM success, what I always recommend to people is every other week, go to your LinkedIn profile – your LinkedIn profile that you updated to make it not about your resume but about what you bring customers. Review the number of high-value one-on-one engagements you’ve had with a client or a prospect for the past two weeks. I use this little point system that I’m going to share here.
If you liked the client’s post or sharing the post without commenting, so they maybe did something and you shared their post, you’re called a lazy-liker and you get zero points for that. If you thought you were doing a good job because you were liking people’s posts, you’re not because that doesn’t do anything for anybody, and they may not even know you did it. You get one point for every direct message you send to a qualified prospect, sharing a post with a comment towards that qualified prospect or tagging a prospect or client. By the way, don’t spam tag and tag a hundred people in every post. I’m talking about really defined, you post something and then you go into the comments and you tag the prospect or client and say, “I’m interested in your thoughts.” It shouldn’t be about your product, it should be about something they’re listening to, go back to what I said previously.
Now, if your prospect or client direct messages you, comments on your post, shares your post or tags you in a post, you get two points. Top sellers, those folks that I said do 76% better score 60 points in a two-week period. Why does this matter? Because LinkedIn is keeping score and they’re using it to prioritize who we see. If you connect and engage on their platform and use it to your advantage, you get more towards those hundred points. By the way, somebody asked me last week, “Do you need a hundred points?” No, you need 70+. I like to hover around 80, it gets me at the top the minute you come in on your profile, you’ll see my posts but more than that, we don’t need to do.
Fred, thoughts on this before I move into my final talk track of today?
Fred Diamond: A couple quick things. A bunch of people have gone up and checked their SSI score during today’s webinar. I just want to recognize a couple people, Matt is a 48, Mohammed is a 78.71, Jane at a 72, Hal is at a 65, Denise is at 71. Jane who I just mentioned also wants to thank you for the great information. Sherrie says, “I’m a 49” so some room for improvement there and Roberto is at a 72.
I want to ask one quick question that came in from Hal, “Janet, so many of my connections are people within my industry. How do I pivot to getting connections from prospects in my targeted industry?” Thank you so much, Hal, for that question.
Janet Schijns: That’s a great question. First of all, make a list of who they are, what they have in common, watch what they’re looking at, watch what they’re reading and start posting and start commenting and start engaging where they are versus where you are. For example, if you’re calling on healthcare and they’re all spending time looking at new healthcare technology automation, they’re following John Nosta who’s the top healthcare influencer, follow John Nosta, comment on John Nosta’s post and then invite John Nosta to connect with you. If you comment on an influencer’s post in an industry a few times, they’ll know your name. When you go to connect with them, they’ll absolutely connect with you and 9 times out of 10, they don’t block their connections so you can see everybody who’s listening and watching.
One of the things we teach in our course is exactly how to ethically stalk somebody, but that’s the absolute best way. There’s an influencer for every industry and you can just Google who’s the top online influencer at healthcare and you’ll find those folks. That’s where I’d start, I hope that helps.
Let’s talk about the nirvana, the final stage. How do you convert MQLs into SQLs and ultimately pipeline? Because it’s great to have a prospect list, it’s great to have qualified leads, make those connections, you’re all talking but ultimately you want to get them to buy something. The first thing is do not pounce although the puppy’s cute, the paradox of social selling is that millions of prospects are online yet none want to be sold to. When you do get a connection with a qualified prospect, do not pounce.
We’ve all had this situation where we’re on LinkedIn, we accept a connection request and then we get that very long DM from the person, almost instantaneously so you know they programmed it, that talks all about how they want to sell us something. It’s either insurance for your car, your auto warranty or leads. You don’t want to pounce, because you connected you have permission to connect, you don’t have permission to sell, that’s pushy. Do not pounce on the person. Now that you’re connected, you can start to engage them in your content, you can start to send them direct messages if you have maybe an interesting article you saw or something relating to their industry that you saw.
Just like at an event where you met somebody and they said, “Sure, let’s spend 10 minutes together” you wouldn’t say, “Let me tell you about everything I found.” You would talk maybe about where they live, what they like, what’s happening in their industry, what’s happening in their business. You need to do the same thing on social selling.
The next thing you need to do is get better at being heard by listening. Listen to your market and your prospects, set up Google Alerts so that you see what’s happening in your industry, use the keywords that are important to what you’re selling or important to the industry you’re selling to, set up Google Alerts for the companies that you’re trying to prospect too and you’ll get a very efficient, effective note every day in your mail showing you exactly what people are talking about. Then engage with thoughtful and insightful commentary and don’t be afraid to just share an article, third-party expert content. Always invite something that lets you listen so when you post, don’t just post, ask a question at the end. I think Fred does a great job at that because people get engaged.
Next, know your client’s challenges. What are their pain points? More importantly, how can you help? If everybody’s worried about saving money on budget, optimizing remote workers, whatever it might be that you’re selling, what are they really worried about and how can you help? The best way to figure this out is by using things like LinkedIn Navigator to follow your clients so that every day you get what they’re posting and what their industry is posting. Reddit has some great pages that you can follow and apparently, you can also trade stocks there – I’m not recommending them, just saying Reddit’s making a big thing. Google Alerts, as I mentioned, listen to their podcasts, don’t be afraid to look on Facebook and Twitter as well for some hints.
One of the things I love to do is follow the clients I’m trying to go after’s companies on Twitter because Twitter is where people complain. I happen to be in the technology industry, most of the complaints are about a customer experience. If I see enough complaints about a specific customer experience, I can go in as a technologist – when I used to sell technology versus what I do now, consulting – and say, “I saw you had 170 complaints about people getting hung up on by your customer care center, it’s pretty obvious you need some new technology there.” I can find out a lot from just eavesdropping on Twitter or Facebook on what the complaints are that their customers have, it’s a great way to turn it around on what you can help.
You also want to make sure you’re consistent, you can’t pop in and pop out in social media, you have to be reliable, you have to be engaged, you have to be present. I like to think of my social media feed like an email or a voicemail, you would never leave that unresponded to and yet people get tagged in messages, people get direct messages, people get alerts and they don’t look at them for days on end. The other person who you’d worked so hard to try to get engaged maybe put a comment on your post but then you don’t comment back on that post for days, you’ve lost your ability, it would be like not returning that email or that voicemail. I set a schedule for myself, I check in the morning, I check around lunch time, I check again in the evening.
By the way, if you’re thinking, “That sounds like too much work, I don’t think I can post all that content” you can outsource having your content post, we actually do that. We actually play people online, that’s one of our services at our company, we write their content, they approve it, we go on, we engage, they have a prospect list, we try to go get those connections. Don’t be afraid to outsource it, you probably have a useful person in your life who doesn’t make enough money, potentially they might even be on your family pay roll, and you can pay them to do your social media instead of paying them for sitting on the couch. If you don’t have one of those young adults, you can certainly find one in your local area.
Remember that trust is everything. On social media as in life, like I said at the beginning, it’s just like real selling, only online. The more present you are in conversations the more credible you’ll be as a valued source. Saying something in a comment like, “Great share” or, “Cool”, “Awesome”, that is not adding value. I think value is saying something, “I really liked this, what do you think about that?” and trying to get the person to engage back with you. That develops over time in person and on social platforms.
I want to net it out. The less you sell, the more you deliver value on the social platform, the more meaningful your relationships will be and as a result, your funnel is going to grow. Spend the time now to do some key things. One, create your ideal prospect profile, know who you’re going after to sell. Then, think about your profile. If your ‘about you’ says account executive, ABC Company, no one’s searching for an account executive unless they’re hiring on LinkedIn. They’re searching for someone to help them with a business problem you solve, put that in your about you. You have space to say you’re an account executive in the stuff that’s coming next in your experience.
Fill the profile out completely, volunteer information, education information, don’t forget in everything you post on there to consider what your ideal prospect will be looking for. It’s not a resume, it’s a way for people to search on LinkedIn for people that can help them. You want to show up in those results. By the way, you also want to make sure that your SSI is good, that it’s 70 or plus. It’s a hundred-point score, 25 points for your profile, 25 points for posting regularly, 25 points for engaging with insights and 25 points for connecting with people.
You should all be able to get a 70+ easily but if it’s not a 70+ with your ideal prospects but just people you know in the industry and people you worked with, your college roommate and your family members, then you’re like somebody winking in the dark. You know what you’re doing but nobody you want to sell to does, so you’ve got to really take a fine look at that score and say, “If I don’t have my prospects in there, that score is not relevant yet. Once I get my prospects in there, if I’m still above a 70 I’m doing the right steps.
You also want to look at your recency, frequency and monetary value, every week moves a prospect from a connection to a sales qualified lead and into the pipeline. Finally, because you’re here today and because we’re all talking, I’m a top 10 influencer in technology, Women of Technology, I just won some other thing yesterday, I have a large following and I do come up at the top of most people’s LinkedIn pages once they’re connected with me because I keep score. If you want to tag me in a post by 3:17, unless it’s not a nice thing because I won’t respond your post, I’ll boost your post. If you want to write something about your industry, you want to post something that’ll engage prospects and you want to make sure it gets seen, tag me. I will make sure that I boost your post because you listened in today and took my advice.
Wrapping up here because I know we’ve got some questions, if anybody needs to get in touch just some information here about JS Group. We do offer a full training session, both videos with workbooks as well as live sessions on social selling. I hope you enjoyed the little snippets and tips and tricks I gave you today taking a full one-month immersive online program and putting it into a little over a half an hour with some tips and tricks and I wish you all the best. I know, Fred, we probably have some questions so I wanted to leave time for that and any questions you may have.
Fred Diamond: How can I use LinkedIn to add value to my prospect base?
Janet Schijns: One of the things I would tell people, I use a pretty simple formula. Do something that gets the person to want to connect with you, send the connection request, get the connection accepted. Now I send a thank you and what I do is I have a little video, I record a little video, “I know we’re connecting here virtually, it’s always tough to get to know people but I wanted you to see my face” and that my current one makes a little joke, my hair is my natural color and very long because I haven’t been able to go to the salon. I send that out, I don’t pounce on people for a sale, I send something out that looks and feels like, “I know her a little better now” and I do that only when I’m really prospecting to the person. If I’m just making friends with somebody in the industry or something, then I don’t need to do that.
Then over the next week I’ll set up an alert, Fred, you went through this part. Whenever that person comments, posts something, I get an alert right in my Sales Navigator and I will comment, I will share, I will make an opinion, ask a question back, comment on someone else’s comment on their post. The person starts to feel a little grateful that look, I didn’t just post out into the great abyss – which happens to a lot of people. Or if somebody meaningful in then industry posts, let’s go back to my John Nosta example, I will go to John Nosta’s post and I will say, “Fred, this reminded me of you, have you met John?” All of a sudden I’m introducing you to somebody who’s pretty important and you start to feel great.
Once I’ve done a few things that make someone feel good about me, then I’ll send them another direct mail that says, “I really would love to chat sometime, what does your schedule look like? How do we spend a couple minutes just learning about each other?” Again, there I probably have a 50%, 60% success rate. I will close that by telling you that in the last two years I have gotten zero prospects anywhere outside of LinkedIn, I have grown my business, doubled it every year for the last three years and 100% through social selling tactics for my business, and my business is a multi-million dollar business.
Fred Diamond: Give us one final action step, something people can do right now to improve their selling ability and their sales skills, you’ve given us so many great ideas, give us one action step they need to do right now.
Janet Schijns: The reality is that when you’re selling, 72% of the people will Google you before they have a conversation with you, both Twitter and LinkedIn pay money to come up to the top of Google. So if you post 3-5 times a week on LinkedIn, all you have to do is share an article and then just use the same post on Twitter just shortened, you will show up on the first page in Google and Twitter. If you have a really common name like John Smith, you’re going to want to use a middle initial or use some kind of a John Killer-Seller Smith or whatever you want to use for that moniker, but you will come up first. You can’t buy that, it would cost you too much money, LinkedIn and Twitter bought that for you. As a seller, understand that that’s the behavior that buyers are having now and use it to your advantage. Get found and you will get sales.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo