Shane Gibson's Podcast – Social Selling – B2B Sales and Influence

Today’s podcast is an interview with Sanjay Mehta, Joint CEO of Mirum India. The digital space in India represents over 300 million connected citizens and 100 million active social media accounts. In 2012 when I was in India speaking at the World Brand Congress I met Sanjay Mehta who at the time was CEO and Co-founder of Social Wavelength. Since then they have grown to over 170 staff and were recently acquired by Mirum (becoming Mirum India).

As a social media trail blazer and digital marketing thought leader Sanjay Mehta offered a wealth of insights into social media and major trends that will impact us in 2016 and beyond. Some of the key topics covered in this podcast were:

* The digital marketing landscape in India

* Best practices and creative social media campaigns

* How digital transformation can revive traditional industries

* How social media monitoring can be used for deep insightful business intelligence

You can follow Sanjay Metha on Twitter at @sm63 or visit Mirum India here to learn more

Do you ever wonder if you’re missing some of the insights around success in today’s very digital and social business climate? This week’s guest Jim Keenan claims if you’re over 30 there are many things you have likely not been taught about the new rules of success and prosperity.

Jim is one of my favourite social selling thought leaders and long time friends in the business – although we have yet to meet in person! I had an opportunity to read Jim’s new book “Not Taught – What It Takes to be Successful in the 21st Century that Nobody’s Teaching You” and asked him to be on the show. Here are five of my favourite quotes from the interview:

“Your social presence has to be 6 months to year ahead of where you are today.”

“You don’t have to take 6 months to find a new job or wait for a publisher to give you permission to publish your own book anymore (if you get good at creating content).”

“We have moved from experience to an expertise based economy.”

“Social media gives you the ability to demonstrate expertise.”

“Employers don’t want your time, they don’t care how hard you work, they care what you have done.”

To listen to the entire podcast you can click the play button on this post (above) or find it on iTunes here.

 

 

 

Today’s blog post and podcast is about the 9 C’s of Social Sales Success. Their are many attributes, attitudes and strategies required to effectively harness the power of online social networks for sales and relationship building. I have taken them and broken them down under 9 core areas that start with the letter C.

Following are the 9 C’s of Social Sales Success:

1) Curiosity

Those that are successful in social sales are always looking for new ways to succeed and improve. They see obstacles and problems as pathways to opportunity and are inquisitive and investigative in nature.

2) Curation

Great sales people and entrepreneurs understand that Mind Share = Wallet share. They become a resource through curation and sharing of relevant content for their target market.

Through the act of evaluating and sifting through content they also improve their industry insights daily.

3) Creation

Is the next step where we move from resource to social selling thought leader in our industry vertical. As a social sales person your goal it to develop magnetic content that is value specific to your audience. Creation or value can also be creating events or pulling people together offline or online.

4) Collaboration

Great social salespeople strive to move beyond cooperation to collaboration with their team members within all departments of their organization. They also use relevant online collaboration tools like slack, hangouts, Slideshare, and mobile CRM apps to leverage their efforts and the expertise of their network. Great social sales people foster partnerships that amplify their work and help them reach new markets.

5) Community

As a salesperson your community is your long-term financial security. What your community says about you sells. Your community can also be your partners in innovation and product creation. Tools like HeroX can help you innovatively partner with your community.

6) Combination

It’s not LinkedIn versus Twitter, cold calling versus email or online networking versus in-person. If you’re successful in sales you are most likely combining it all to maximizes your success.

7) Calendar Driven

Motivation and inspiration are temporary, calendars keep you consistent in your activity and results. Prioritize your social sales activities based upon ROI. Plan out your social/content media calendar a month in advance so that you have your social sales content and communications strategy broken down to daily disciplines.

8) Commitment

Gary Vaynerchuk’s big success came after video blogging 5 days a week until he hit  video 148 and then he kept going! 81% of the time you convert a competitors client it happens after 5 to 12 value-added contacts, follow-up and then follow-up some more. And remember… It’s not over until 11:59:59 on the last day of the month.

9) CRM

Use Customer Relations Management tools like Nimble CRM or SalesForce. Your CRM organizes and aggregates all of your communications channels. CRM gives you feedback, it’s a dashboard that maps all of your sales data helping you make better decisions. If used successfully your CRM tells you exactly where you are on your road to success.  It also enables you to collaborate with your team and manage an infinitely larger number if relationships than previously possible.

If you can apply all 9 C’s of Social Sales Success you will be well on your way to building a magnetic personal presence that na...

Today’s podcast (download here) is focused on why Influencer Engagement programs are vital and how to run one effectively in the B2B sales and marketing space.

Following is  brief abridged version of what I cover in the podcast:

In a recent study (by Augure) of over 600 B2B marketing professionals 93% of them stated that they considered influencer engagement as an effective strategy to build brand awareness. 75% cited influencer engagement as an effective in lead generation. In my opinion Influencer Engagement (which is really building a community of leaders) is a highly overlooked or misunderstood discipline that can pay dividends for months or even years after you start using this strategy effectively.

Over the past few years I have had the opportunity work on influencer engagement programs (in partnership with great people like Mitch Ballentine) and events for major brands such as Paladin Security, Make-a-Wish Foundation, Toyota, various Comicons. I have also successfully used these processes for product launches and major events such as Social Media Week Vancouver, the Dragons Den Social Summit, the Sales Tribe social chat and all three of my books.

Although Influencer engagement is a hot topic many organizations are struggling to see real results from it.

Where most strategies fall short is they fail to identify the right influencers, and even when they do identify them they fail to develop a real relationship. Furthermore, even for those that develop a real relationship with the influencer; very few create a situation where the influencer is compelled to authentically talk about their brand, their organization or their products and services. The goal is not to get them to tweet about your brand, the goal is to turn these influencers into brand advocates and partners for your organization.

Following is a visual representation of what motivates today’s influencers:

A Simple but effective event / project based B2B Influencer Engagement program may look and sound like this:

(Program will include some or all of these events and projects)

* Build a Top 50 List of Influencers to be published and promoted through social media, online news sites and directly by influencers.

* Collaboratively work with 10-20 of the influencers on several online Twitter chats. Check out this report to see the online impact of just one #SalesTribe twitter chat had this past June 2015.

* Launch and host a webinar series with influencers as participants.

* Develop, produce and promote a white paper or how-to guide sourcing content from 10-20 influencers.

* Develop a series of interviews with high profile clients (who are influencers) that are using your solutions and/or who your target market can relate to.

These 5 engagement strategies are simple and cost effective to implement. To enlist the help of these on-line thought leaders, start by promoting them, helping them and collaborating with them. You’ll notice nowhere have I mentioned getting them to do a product review or demo yet. This is all about building a board community of thought leaders and influencers first. After that it’s easy to move them into engaging directly to work more proactively with your brand.

Today’s sales funnel and sales process has changed. Sales for many of us is now more about getting buy-in versus pitching our wares. This 15 minute sales and social selling podcast introduces the new sales funnel “The 5 Stages of Consent” and also dives into how content creation is not enough to get noticed – you need to have a thought leadership strategy to truly fill the new sales funnel.

The success strategies covered in this sales podcast include:

* How to move your prospects from “hello” to permission to sell

* How to establish yourself as a thought leader

* The role content curation and creation play in sales success

* Why content is king and connection is queen

Click the images below to enlarge the Social Selling Infographics:

The 5 Stages of Consent (The Social Sales Funnel)

Thought Leadership in Social Selling Venn Diagram

Social CRM and social selling are two terms which I have seen go from obscurity to mainstream business topics in the past 24 months. Jon Ferrara CEO and Founder of Nimble, an early innovator in social CRM and social selling technology, took time out of his schedule to share with us the latest innovations in the space.

“Social selling is about inspiring and educating the customer as a trusted advisor.” – Jon Ferrara, CEO and Founder of Nimble

In this podcast Jon Ferrara talks about his new “Nimble Everywhere” plugin and tool for the Chrome browser. This plugin can literally embed rich, relevant data in any cloud based application – it even enhances tools like SalesForce.com or Microsoft 360 and Dynamics.

Some of the key talking points of the podcast were as follows:

* Your contacts are everywhere so your social CRM and prospecting tools should be everywhere as well.

* We need to turn connections into conversations and then those relationships into a measurable mutually beneficial business outcome for your company. This is something we all struggle with in sales and social networking for business and Nimble Everywhere makes this easier to do.

* 60% of your sales time is looking people up, logging what you did. From a social communications perspective your CRM should aggregate these conversations with each contact in an automated fashion.

* The inbox is more and more becoming the ignore box for many people. Social media and social networks give us a way to get around the inbox.

* It’s not about who owns the customer. It’s about the fact that the customer now owns the process.

* When I asked Jon about what his favorite social media tools were he said for him the two primary social selling channels are LinkedIn and Twitter for him and his organization.

If you want to dig deeper here’s a video presentation created by Nimble that shows you how Nimble Everywhere can enhance and streamline your sales process:

Edgy Conversations – How Ordinary People Can Achieve Outrageous Success is an awesome book that once I picked up I pretty well read the whole thing. I asked Dan Waldschmidt, author of the book to do a podcast interview. In this podcast we really got to dig onto his methodologies and principles of creating a great life and a successful business.

Dan interviewed and researched over 1000 successful people from all walks of life and has managed to distill it down to four key attributes or behaviors that drive success. In our interview we cover this, plus we also dig into how he is able to consistently land multi billion-dollar companies as clients through online thought leadership.

In his book Dan covers four key behaviors and strategies for success:

Extreme Behavior

Disciplined Activity

Giving Mindset

Y(H)uman Strategy

Have a listen to the podcast to and learn Dan’s EDGY approach to success.

Quick Links:

* Follow Dan Waldschmidt on Twitter

* Visit Edgy Conversations

* Buy Edgy Converstations

Post an Edgy Comment below!

 

 

Todays social media podcast is focused on sharing and creating. Too often we hold back, hide our voice or just never start the process of being creative. We all have something to share. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, an artist or in charge of a social content strategy it all starts with getting in-the-flow of creating and sharing as a discipline and habit. In this podcast we cover following:

* Strategies on becoming creative

* The role sharing plays in successful social media marketing and communications

* How to overcome the fear or rejection so you can share what you create

* Tips on how to get out of a creative rut

* How creating, sharing and contributing build momentum in your business and your life

Shane Gibson (@ShaneGibson) is a social media speaker who has addressed over 100,000 people on stages on three continents over the past 15 years. He is also co-author of Guerrilla Social Media Marketing and Sociable! How Social Media is Turning Sales and Marketing Upside-down. When he’s not speaking or Tweeting he is in the social media trenches working with his clients on their sales and social media strategies.

Today’s Podcast is on the power of intent in sales, leadership and marketing. We are being constantly told that what we focus is on is vital, yet the intention behind that focus determines the quality of our results.

In his life-long study of Micro-Expressions  Paul Ekman, Ph.D has proven that whether we realize it our not we are constantly telegraphing our intent and emotional state to those around us.

In this podcast I will also talk about the 6 ways you can fine-tune and direct your intent for better results which are:

* Check-in on your emotional state, confidence and outlook

* Start with the receiver in mind

* Be clear on your goal and the benefits

* Set a goal to make your touches and interactions enchanting

* Be totally present when taking these actions

* Be gracious in all aspects of interacting – be unattached to the results

Do you have any great stories about intent? I would love to hear them!

 

Digital fatigue and social media addiction are on the rise

Have you ever pondered about the negative effects of social media? Today’s podcast is in on the toxic effects of social media use and what you can do to make sure that’s only having a positive impact on your life.

How do you know if you’re suffering from social media addiction or fatigue?

It starts with the odd comment from your spouse about your love affair with your Samsung, or possibly it’s the realization that you tuned out for an entire hour during a boardroom meeting. For others it’s worse – an overwhelming feeling of guilt or anxiety for not being social enough online. Fits of jealousy, defensiveness, elation (overreacting) or over-sharing are all other symptoms that our social media use has gone from empowering to toxic.

Updates ( 11/12/2013):

A study cited by the National Post shows that taking photos at an event (more often than not with a smartphone) actually decreases our ability to recall the event.

An Anxiety UK study found that over half of respondents who regularly use social networking sites saw their behaviour change negatively.

On the extreme side social media abuse and overuse can lead to amplifying and worsening Narcissistic Personality Disorder, lead to lack of intimacy and anxiety disorders. We don’t have to go that far to have social media lose it’s luster. Sometimes we are not even willing to admit that we have lost touch of the goal. Social media is “social” it’s about building real relationships and improving efficiency through collaboration and community.

How do you overcome social media addiction, fatigue or doom scrolling?

In this podcast we discuss many of the route causes and effects of social media abuse and we also discuss 15 Ways to Positively Use Social Media. Here are the solutions in bullet form: (Listen to the podcast for the whole story):

* Start culling your stream – racism, whiners, anti-everything people etc.

* Proactively decide where you want to be, what your values are and build that community

* Share awesome content (passionate)

* Make a calendar, daily activities, limit time

* Social situations – Decide in advance if you should disconnect from the smartphone

* Set a goal when going online

* One network at a time open to reduce distraction

* Use a tool like Hootsuite to manage the noise and filter

* Share who you are (it’s exhausting being someone else)

* Be aware of the emotional impact – extreme good and bad emotional responses – these are danger signs

* No email Fridays – go meet someone, use the phone and avoid the digital

* If it’s your job to do social media, it’s time to set boundaries and get the resources to have digital black out periods

* Map out your vital signs. What makes you healthy and productive? Less is more.

* Set life goals not social media goals.

* Use the internet to get off of the internet