Brad Banyas | The Social Selling Machine

Step 1: Directly engage with your connections.

• You may initiate your social selling and build relationships even without using top of the line technology.

• Take your time to do simple things for your connections.
  • Sign up on free social media tools and platforms that help categorize people based on their interests (such as LinkedIn).
  • These tools and platforms may show significant events of your connections (such as their birthdays and new job acquisitions).
  • Since this information is readily available for you, take the time to engage during these special events like greeting them and congratulating them.

• This step is fundamental to social selling. Allocate a certain amount of time to do engagements every day.

• Being disciplined to do engagement every day imposes a business value and it nurtures your prospects at the same time.

• There are several technologies that allow you to automate your interactions while keeping them personalized.
  • Aside from your personal engagement, you may set up an automatic email that gets sent to whoever has a special occasion.
  • Also, there is software that allows you to automate sending your greeting cards.
  • With this, you will be able to connect with your prospects more than once.

• As your network of connections grows, you may strain yourself by keeping up your engagements. By this time, it is wise and convenient to invest in such technology (such as Nimble and 366 Degrees).

Step 2: Perform social listening.

• There are several platforms/software that lets you subscribe to someone or on some company for alerts.
  • Choose something that’s free (such as Google Alerts).
  • You’ll receive alerts and notifications if the company or person you’ve subscribed to is mentioned on the news, or anywhere else similar.

• You may also utilize Nimble for your social listening.
  • It lets you follow and listen across several social accounts.
  • If something’s up on your prospect’s social account (LinkedIn, Twitter), Nimble will then notify you about the event.

• You will no longer need to perform intensive researches since social listening allows you to be updated about what’s going on with your prospects and partners.

• You may also subscribe to relevant and trending topics which then you could share across your connections.

Step 3: B1e savvy.

• Firstly, you must be clear on who your target audience is.

• This step is all about deeply understanding your connection with your prospects.

• Make sure that the content you share is tailored to your prospects.

• Do not share content that is solely about you and your business.

• 366 Degrees categorizes each profile according to their interest levels.
  • From this, you may filter the content you share across your entire connections.
  • You may choose to send content to a certain category of connections but not to the other categories.
  • This way, the only content you’ll be sharing with your connections is the most relevant one.
  • Within 366 Degrees, you may also create multiple sequences with which you can tag people.

• One of the objectives of this step is to connect your sales and marketing by making sure that a connection is receiving the correct content.

• Remember to give some personal touches when disseminating your content and stray away from your canned emails.

Step 4: Be flexible.

• Social selling doesn’t come as a linear process.

• Being flexible means that you get to introduce your prospects to the people who can help them.
  • By doing this, you are earning your prospect’s trust along the way.

• Keep in mind that some people might not do business with you today, but they are still prospects in the future.

• Be a giver and keep nurturing your relationships with your connections.

Step 5: Develop your action plan.

• Map out the points you want to engage.

• Think through the messaging pieces you want to communicate and automate before you invest in any technology.

• Once you do so, you may now look and invest in the software that can help you scale.

System Notes

• The technology to do social selling effectively is not worth thousands of dollars. This means that small and medium-sized business can put aside an amount to scale.