Jon Ferrara | The System to Grow Sales Through Social Content, Conversations & Influence

Step 1: Create your persona.

• The goal of this process is to pinpoint your professional and personal identity.

• If you’re not part of the conversation of your prospects, customers, or influencers, on a day-to-day basis, you won’t be placed on top of their mind.

• When people buy things, they often seek advice first from experts who could share their knowledge about a product first.

• You should position yourself as the expert and you can do that through the following:
  • Set up your identity
    • Set up your identity to all the usual places such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
  • Have a great avatar. Equip your accounts with a great photo of yourself.
    • Focus on your eyes. Use a great background.
  • Drip content.
    • Content creation isn’t the easiest thing.
    • If you have a hard time producing your own, consider sharing and attributing other people’s ideas into yours if those people are considered an expert in your field.
    • This might initiate interactions and conversations on your platform.
  • Share your content.
    • It doesn’t end with sharing your content.
    • You must engage with the people who reacted to your content to start a conversation.

Step 2: Identify the influencers of your prospects.

• Use BuzzSumo to search influencers and relevant content related to specific fields.

Step 3: Share your content.

• Use Buffer or HootSuite to help you queue up content.

• Be sure that you share all your content across your various social media accounts.

• Share different types of content.
  • Don’t just talk about business topics.
  • Use your personal identity to make connections.

• Experiment with the frequency of your content sharing.

• Do not engage with the purpose to sell. Engage with the purpose to serve them.
  • Service is the new sales.
  • Invest your time in building relationships. It will come back around and help your business grow.

• In the beginning, you can manage your interactions and content-sharing by yourself.
  • But as your business grows, you might be needing a system or a process for it.

• Nimble is a tool to manage thousands of contacts that you obtain as your business keeps growing.
  • This tool helps you stay focused and efficient on following up and following through with your contacts.

• Focus on sharing contents covering these 5 F’s:
  • Family
  • Friendship
  • Food
  • Finance
  • Fellowship

Step 4: Listen and engage.

• Connect in a relevant and authentic way.

• Find ways to add value to those you engage with.

Step 5: Follow up and follow through.

• Follow the 5 E’s of social selling:
  • Educate.
    • Create content that is educational.
  • Enchant.
    • Create content that is enchanting.
  • Engage.
    • Engage with the thought of empowering the other person.
  • Embrace.
    • Embrace the people with the intent to help them grow.
  • Empower

• Following these 5 E’s will result in getting more connections than you could think of.

• The more digital the world gets, the more human we need to be in order to build deeper relationships.
  • Pick up the phone.
  • Meet someone face-to-face.
  • Send people cards for special occasions.

• Following up and following through needs a systemized approach to be successful.

• Treat each relationship as a chair that is supported by the number of its legs.
  • Bring and build your relationships to multiple platforms.

• A lot of effort is required to get a relationship started but it also requires consistent nurturing to keep it steady and improving.
  • Periodically connect for you to stay on top of the minds of your contacts.

System Notes

• While this system suggests using other influencer’s content, Jon suggests that you create content you could call your own.

• One way to create your own content is to engage with influencers from your field and share that conversation as your content.