Too often we get trapped in the illusion that selling is an art form. This can be a dangerous notion if you let it become the fundamental premise of your sales philosophy.

This has become even more dangerous with the advent of social media and networking. These new and potentially fertile grounds for sales leads can literally become distracting siren songs that can keep you trapped and bouncing around from one attractive, but futile suspected opportunity to the next.

In this presentation, I’m going to try to focus your attention on process, efficiency, and developing sales routines that will lead you into more “natural closes.”

How to Win Over and Over Again – Social Selling from Bill Rice on Vimeo.

Get it on Slideshare: http://bit.ly/winsales

What do you think?

Are you doing anything like this in your sales process? Please share your social selling tips.

Social Media & Sales Fuel

Really social media isn’t so different from the skills you use daily to sell. The anxiety comes with learning to use those skills in a new environment. For many of us in sales, technology beyond our cell phones and email is a bit intimidating. However, if you straight arm social media you are giving up opportunity in your sale pipeline.

Social Media 101 for Sales

The name itself makes social media sound like a marketing thing, but rest assured its more like a telephone–definitely a sales thing. The difference? Marketing is good at blasting and broadcasting. Sales is good at connecting and having conversations.

Social media is about good conversations.

So, lets start with the mind-set that social media is for sales. And we are going to use it like any other sales tool. We’re going to learn it, exploit it, and generate as many good conversations as possible.

Here are the basic social media tools sales people should learn:

Linkedin - More than a resume, this social network is full of information on prospects and competitive intelligence. Plugging in and connecting your existing database of contacts will certainly reveal previously unknown connections and relationship, ready to be leveraged.

Facebook - Don’t underestimate this as simply a venue for neighborhood busy-bodies and teenagers. Facebook is increasingly becoming the primary destination of a large percentage of the Internet community. Although it is not a big player on the business front it will be–get acquainted now.

Twitter - Often described as micro-blogging or instant messaging on steroid, Twitter is a powerful tool for collecting competitive intelligence, sniffing out opportunities, and breaking through corporate firewalls (i.e., voice mail, email, and other gatekeepers).

Blogs - They’ve been around for years now, but they are still great ways to get closer to influencers in your market. Everyone reads them, your customers trust them, you’re smart to meet these important online publishers–they can help you land deals.

How Social Media Works

Think of social media as a blend between a contact database and a CRM system. If used correctly it will feed you a steady stream of news and updates that are important to your prospects.

Most social media tools immediately ask you to load in your contacts (i.e., from Outlook, GMail, or other email address book). This gives you a head start on find who in your sales database or prospect list is already actively participating in social media.

I guarantee you will be surprised.

Once you have your contacts loaded a few minutes a day reviewing Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter will give you more than enough inspiration and opportunity for calling on these folks. Taking it to an advanced level you can use the tool itself to engage and interact with these folks–commenting and promoting their own agendas and credibility in the social media channel.

Very possibly you will see opportunities to help these sales prospects advance their own objectives. Can you introduce them to people they want to meet? Can you help them with advice or expertise before you even discuss a sale? Can you help increase their standing or credibility in their industry or peer group?

Searching Social Media Content

Finding sales opportunities in the sea of disconnected social media tools and networks used to be complex. Not so anymore. A little time spent practicing with Google Advanced Search can bring you all the sales leads you can possibly work. However, you do need to practice and refine your social media search techniques.

Start by thinking like a customer, not a sales person. Stop using your language and use theirs to develop your searches. Think through the characteristics of your ideal sales lead.

Here are some ideas to fuel your quest for opportunity, search for:

• Competitor’s names, products, and sales people
• Common problems your product solves
• Frequently asked questions you get on sales calls
• The names of influencers in your industry or market

Creating these simple searches and then toggling between Google’s News, Blogs, Updates, and Discussions searches will bring you a 360 degree view of your sales opportunities and angles.

Give social media a try in your sales process.

What do you think are the good and bad aspects of using social media as a sales professional?

Social Media Sales

So, you’ve finally heard enough about social media. You’re to the point you actually think you might be missing something. You might even be hearing whisperings around the sales floor that this might be some of the top producers’ secret weapon to grab a few extra wins every month.

I’m glad you took the initiative to be here. We’re going to do a little equalizing.

You’re going to learn some of the basics of social medias. However, much more importantly we’re going to show you how to get value from it immediately–long before you’re a guru.

Why Try Social Media?

Okay, not quite convinced this is going to be worth your time to figure out? Let take a little walk down memory lane and talk about sales history.

Back in the day it all started with carrying a bag and walking door to door, getting a foot in the door, showcasing the product, and selling belly-to-belly at the kitchen table. (Notice all of our cliches come from old school sales).

Then things changed a bit. We started to send sales letters, picked up the telephone for a little cold calling, and blasted a few emails to stay top of mind. That’s right took a few marketing tricks to help us cover our prospects and sales pipeline a little more thoroughly and efficiently.

Social media is the next trick for personal lead generation. Think of it as the new telephone and the email of the future. Believe it or not surveys show that youngsters under 20 never use email–it’s Facebook or text message if you want to pull their chain.

7 Reasons Sales Should Be Using Social Media

Enough coaxing, you either want to learn this or you don’t. Here are 7 specific ways social media is going to immediately improve your sales process:

1. People hang out on social media - The fact of the matter is that millions of people are now congregating on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and hundreds of other social networking sites to stay connected and share ideas. If you’re in sales, why would you hang out on the Internet alone? (It’s kinda like eating alone).

2. Social media is stitch the fabric of referral networks – In the real (physical) world it is really hard to refer business. When someone hears a friends ask, “Do you know a good…” You have to recall the name of the great person you used, search around for a crumpled business card or a scribbled down number, and then you need to get it back to the person who asked the question. Most often these referrals don’t happen–in social media these friend just search the profiles of their Facebook friends and connect to the expert.

3. Trust is already inherent in social networking - Normally when we find people on the Internet or and advertisement for a service we start skeptical. Will they treat me right? Do they care about my business? Will they screw me over? There’s none of that in social media. If you’re in my social network and my friends vouch for you–that’s good enough to get started.

4. You can spot opportunities without cold calling – Cold calling is hard work. You have to break through the firewall and then start peppering the prospect with questions to see if there is a fit. Incorporating social media into your sales process lets you do most of the pre-qualification of a lead long before any call is made or email sent. Just read their profile and content. Is there a reason to do business, or not?

5. If you’re connected referring you is much easier – Outside of social networks you rarely refer someone you’ve never used. It’s too much of a risk and you probably don’t even know about these people and their services, unless it pops up in a random conversation with friends. However in social media you can search for great people to refer by seeing who your friends are endorsing, referring, and raving about. So, there are many times with social media you may get a referrals and endorsement from people you’re never even met.

6. Social media makes finding the right angle a snap – Starting a conversation is the hardest part of sales. What will trip their trigger? What is their burning objective right now? How can I make them a hero in their own company? These are the questions we love to know the answer to–they makes getting an executive’s ear easier. Interestingly enough managers and executives talk about these things all the time in their social networks, using them like advisory networks. And it’s all there for you to read and plan the perfect angle of attack.

7. You are going to find ins you never thought you had - Here’s my favorite. One of the first step in signing up with a social media or networking website is to automatically load in your address book. You will be floored by how many of your friends, colleagues, and prospects are already in the social media channel–instant ins and referral networks.

As you can see social media is not necessarily about engaging and Twittering all day. It’s about observing, listening, and searching for folks that need your products and services.

Then you can use all the user-generated chatter to guide you in the right approach to doing some of your traditional sales stuff–like cold calling, emailing, or even belly-to-belly selling.

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When I browse through Linkedin I see tons of missed opportunity. Profile after profile looks like the tired old resume or curriculum vitae. This particularly saddens me when it’s a person that sells for a living.

Here’s the problem with most people’s Linkedin profile and usage: You set it up because you’re on the hunt for a job or because you might be in the future. Then, it sits and ages—dormant to you and your potential market. Even if one of these prospects does find it they get job titles and companies, but not a clue how you can help them right now.

My suggestion? Switch your thinking. Make your Linkedin profile a sales letter.

Here’s a quick couple of hints to get you started.

Get Attention

The headline in the Linkedin profile is one of the most under-utilized sales tools in Linkedin. Most people leave the default option, which is your current job title. Think about it. No one wants to buy a VP of Sales. They want to buy network performance monitoring, security software, a professional speaker, or a dog training guru.

These are elements of a headline. Let me illustrate.

Here’s my profile:

Here’s the average sales person’s profile (sorry to pick on someone):

Who’s going to get the click/call? Obvious, right!

Here’s another reason this is so important. It’s your mini-sales ad in a Linkedin search (think Google AdWords). Again, who gets the click/call here:

Pretty boring, and certainly no value proposition in any of these. You’re only ad space in Linkedin search is the headline. Make it count.

Generate Targeted Sales Traffic

Here’s another little under-utilized lead generation trick. Use your update or status box to generate targeted sales traffic. This is a simple way to land on your connections’ Linkedin home page (staying top of mind) and provides a call to action for new visitors to your profile.

This simple little update box, when combined with a website link, can be a powerful lead generation tool. Make your updates a brief call to action and add a link to a compelling landing page. This could be your website, a blog, a squeeze page, Slideshare.net LeadShare, your Facebook fan page, wherever you can capture leads or generate calls.

Here’s the box I’m talking about:

Here’s an update in action. Would you click?

Do you want more ideas on turning your Linkedin profile into a sales lead generation tool?

Sign-up for the newsletter and get my special report on Using Linkedin for Sales Lead Generation (in tomorrow’s newsletter)—only available to newsletter subscribers.

Are you using Twitter in your sales process?

My guess is that many of you are. It’s hard isn’t it? You want thousands of followers to give you the sales leverage of large numbers, but you want to deliver a very personal experience to prospects and clients.

My suggestion (secret)? Twitter Lists.

I use Twitter Lists in four very productive ways:

1. Segmenting various target audiences
2. Researching new markets and audiences
3. Tracking target accounts/prospects
4. Tracking current clients

First, it’s important to understand the basics of Twitter Lists to effectively use them with this sales technique. There are two basic options—public and private.

I use public Twitter Lists for purposes 1 and 2.  It allows me to segment and monitor these folks in distinct segments, gives them a little visibility boost (value), and there is no need to keep them hidden.

I use private Twitter lists for purposes 3 and 4. This allows me to segment and monitor these folks without publicly revealing the people I want to work with or clients.

Here are the basics, as simple as it is it’s powerfully sales enabling.

Every time you follow someone get them on a useful list (pick purpose 1-4). Then set these lists up in your favorite Twitter client HootSuite, Seesmic, TweetDeck. I use TweetDeck.

Immediately you will have better visibility of the markets you’re working and learning, your clients, and most importantly (if you’re in sales) your sales pipeline. You will see more opportunities and help more people everyday—nothing accelerates sales like situational awareness!

Questions: Do you do anything like this? What are your tricks to managing sales prospecting and engagement on Twitter?

Bettercloser.com - Sales Prospecting with Google

Daily people (prospective customers) are creating profiles, indicating their preferences, discussing their pain, and describing their vision. Really, what’s left in the sales process? Connecting with them and building a trusted relationship. Actually, social networking assists in that too. These tools show you pathways to connection and trust.

The trick is learning to efficiently mine this amazing database.

Most people use Google by typing in a couple of keywords into the Google.com search box. Typically, this returns thousands of results filled with companies or websites competing for these top spots. Of course, there isn’t a single prospect to be had in these results.

Frustrated, we end our pursuit. Let me show you the secret to finding prospects with Google.

Finding Prospects with Google

It’s all about looking for your ideal sales scenario. Here is the worksheet that I use to organize those thoughts. As you fill in this tool with keywords keep two things in mind:

1. We are searching conversations and discussions. Use simple words.
2. Use keywords appropriate to the power levels you are searching.

I’ll illustrate my point.

If I am looking to find network engineers solving problems (pain) then I’m likely to find things like, “those damn developers love SOAP, but all I get is transactional errors all day.” If I want to find customers revealing pain I might find, “Match.com’s website is down again. This is not helping my dating.” Finally, if we are looking for C-Level folks I might find, “Virtualization is going to be the buzz topic at our presentation to the Morgan Stanley investor conference.”

Your keyword worksheet should reduce your ideal sales scenario down to conversational and level appropriate keywords.

Understanding Different Content Types

The next step is to consider content types and sites you might be targeting. Here is my simple strategy guide to dissecting content types Google indexes (thanks to Google’s new sidebar this is very easy to slice and dice):

News: This is where you can find the latest on market trends, companies, and people as they are covered in press releases and news outlets. I have found these types of searches best for giving me prospecting campaign themes, not necessarily prospects themselves.

Blogs: Searching through blog content is important on two accounts. One, they are typically authoritative or thought leading content. They draw in a community of prospects researching solutions (i.e., potential customers), which means you should be hanging around here too. And two, these blogs are likely to shape your prospects’ perceptions of the “right” solution or best practices. It’s best you are prepared for these perceptions.

Updates: This is a relatively new content type for Google to index, it is the real-time Web results (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and more to come). These results are rich with real-time pain–customers complaining and companies responding. You are likely to find targets of opportunity in this content.

Discussion: The secret hide-out of all experts. Niche discussion groups and forums are where all the experts hang-out and help friends and trusted colleagues. Google does a pretty nice job of indexing most of these treasure troves. Discussion searches are filled with new initiative and complex problems being hashed out. Plugging in your expertise can yield a steady flow of new prospects.

Understanding and segmenting the various content types Google indexes can dramatically improve the efficiency of your online prospecting campaigns.

Creating Prospecting Campaigns

The final step in prospecting online is taking all of this brainstorming and turning it into a productive search query. Each of these queries should be narrowed and focused into a targeted campaign of potential opportunities.

Here’s a quick example of finding market opportunities and themes for your campaigns:

Here’s an example of how to use Linkedin and Google together to target people:

Do you have any favorite online sales prospecting techniques?

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I’m still unpacking tons of ideas from SOBCon 2010, but one of my favorites revealed itself completely by accident in a conversation with Jon Swanson (@jnswanson), at the coffee pot no less. I’m sure it didn’t even register with Jon, but it reminded me how important simple idle chat is to creativity.

So, my chat was typical conference (2.0) introductory chatter.

“Hi, I’m Bill. I follow you on Twitter and read your blog. It’s wonderful to meet you.”

Then of course Jon does his part with the, “Oh yeah, I recognize your Twitter icon…What do you do?”

This is when the good stuff happened.

I told him how we have a couple of software products for sales people, but recently I have been doing a lot of strategy, speaking, and coaching on how sales people can use social media along side their sales process. Typical psycho-babble about yourself.

Then it popped out, “I think we are helping make sales people better social media community members.”

Moments later, after our conversation was over, I scribbled this concept in my notebook.

How powerful would it be if, in designing products and services, we considered not only giving value to the customer, but also improving the community in which these customers operate?

Can you think of examples? How could this concept help your sales process (hint: the Go Green theme is making a mint off this idea)?

Have you ever noticed that everything about social media is focused on marketing?

I’m in sales.

We need to do social media differently. We need to do it in a good and productive way.

Do you want to talk more about this?

Competitive intelligence seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Is it because of the increasingly open and social Web? The vast proliferation of social networks? Or, the the dawn of social media monitoring. Regardless of the source of the surge, it is important to your business and it is easier than ever.

Why do you need to tune-up your competitive intelligence capabilities?

1. Social media makes it easy - It has never been easier to plug into the market. Social media makes listening and engaging with customers, partners, and even competitors easier than ever. If you are not participating, or at least monitoring social media, you are creating a big missed opportunity in your marketing plan. Your customer expect you to be here. And there is tons of good strategic and tactical information flying around to give you the competitive advantage.

2. The Web is social, markets are conversations - There is little doubt about the Web becoming more social. Everyone is connecting. These connections create communities and market niches online. This means your markets are literally conversations online. Are you tapped into the online market?

3. Why wouldn’t you want to listen to customers? - If you asked any marketer if she would like to be a fly on the wall, watching customers experience her product first hand, you would get an enthusiastic, “Yes!” Yet, daily we miss this opportunity by turning a deaf ear to social media.

4. Why wouldn’t you want to listen to your competitors customers? - Even better, how about watching potential customers experiencing the competitors’ product or service. That is the opportunity of competitive intelligence using social media monitoring.

5. Your competitors are listening to your customers - Guess what? If your competitors are really good and really want to beat you–they are already listening to your customers. That means they have a competitive advantage, right now!

6. Your competitors are listening to you - Whether you want to admit it or not, you are leaking strategic and tactical insight into your next business move. It’s hard to prevent that. Maybe you don’t even want to. But, you can assume your competitor is listening…so should you.

7. Your customers are looking for opportunities to steal your customers - Yes, this is an increasingly hostile business environment. It seems as though buying customers are finite. That means competitors are on the hunt. They are looking to identify and then steal your customers. Social media is an efficient way to do both. Shouldn’t you be doing this better than your competitor?

8. Your competitors customers may be frustrated - There are few things better than a customer frustrated with the competitor. They are not only ripe for the plucking, but if you help them they are likely to be loyal and passionate fans. Competitive intelligence and monitoring social networks will help you pinpoint these opportunities.

9. Your competitors customers may be willing to try something else - Like the frustrated customer, curiosity is nearly as good. If someone is shopping around for alternatives you need to make sure you are in the mix. A good competitive intelligence strategy will help you identify not only one off occurrences, but patterns to find large groups of them.

10. Your competitors may not be using social media monitoring at all - Perhaps the most interesting and compelling reason to start using competitive intelligence and social media monitoring now is that your competitor might not be. What a powerful competitive advantage if you can get the jump on them.

A new B2B survey just popped into my email this week. The punch line was: sales pipelines are healthier, but 60% reported their sales cycles were getting longer.

Being kind of a "solutions" guy, my first reaction was to think about ways to shorten a sales cycle. Fortunately, I didn’t just sit down and start writing the typical 10 Ways to Shorten Your Sales Cycle article. I think that would have yielded some bad advice.

Instead I stepped back and thought about the real goal of sales–revenue. Think about it. Does your sales manager really care about how long sales cycles are if you’re consistently hitting revenue targets? No.

So, let’s talk about things that help you hit revenue more often.

Shorter Sales Cycles Don’t Get You More Sales

Sales cycles have little or nothing to do with sales revenues. Many traditional measurements sales managers track have little to do with revenue. Things like sales cycles, fall-out rates, call volumes, and all the other little measurements are used to diagnose problems. They help managers identify people that need their help.

For you, as a sales person, these measurements are of little value. They may even be counterproductive–causing you stress, sapping your confidence, and certainly focusing you on the wrong sales activities.

Good Conversation Get You More Sales

Think about this: When was the last time a sale dropped into your lap? I mean truly fell out of the sky–you never called them, emailed them, met them, engaged them with social media, or were referred by a client or friend.

In the real world, pennies from heaven rarely fall.

That means at some point you had to have had a good conversation, with someone. This is why I argue that increasing your sales has everything to do with increasing your good conversations.

Using Social Media to Increase Targeted Conversations

Notice I keep using the phrase: good conversation. I think there is an important distinction to be emphasized here.

I can sit in the coffee shop all day and have conversations. However, I doubt that’s going to help my sales (unless I run a coffee shop).

This is where social media can be a real force multiplier for your sales. I can get pretty precise in targeting my conversations at prospects.

Here are some places and ways I like to generate good conversation with social media:

• Search Twitter for keywords and trigger phrases
• Join relevant Linkedin Groups
• Participate in Linkedin Answers
• Comment on relevant (industry) blogs

Each of these venues gives you quick and relevant ways to start good conversations.

How and where do you start good sales conversations?