There are some FANTASTIC nuggets of insight from yesterday’s Social Selling Summit that Sales for Life and HireVue put on. These sessions are all recorded and you’d be CRAZY not to listen and watch them to build your sales toolbox. Go here to register now to watch ON DEMAND. It will be a good use of your time.
As a taste of what you have missed if you didn’t watch yesterday, check out some notes I pulled out from one session. Max Altschuler led a session called Using Social Data and Triggers to Find and Contact Your Ideal Customer Profile. Max reports on what works on the front line – real sales hacks that work, not just theory from a corner office. We love that.
Max was interviewed by Jamie Shanks of Sales for Life and they talked about social hacks.
Max: “You can almost prequalify people today by what you can find on the web about them”
You know your existing clients ideal profile – so find similar titles of people at other companies you’d like to do business with, and you can easily use your ideal company profile to do that.
You can build a really highly targeted list with free resources online.
Look for comments on Twitter about recent funding or other changes.
If you are a Sales Ops leader you need to be breaking down wins and losses from your past sales opportunities – to know your buyer persona.
The more common denominators you can find between existing customers and future customers allow you to create a more robust front end of your process.
If you target tech companies, there are resources like Crunchbase.
If you target restaurants, there’s Yelp.
There are tools that can help you sort through data.
Social Data:
How do you gather information and leverage it?
Social Hack: A lot of people on LinkedIn don’t notice their security settings – if you add your competitors’ sales people, see who they are connecting to. You can literally see what your competition is doing if they have left their settings open.
Watch prospects on Twitter to gauge someone’s triggers, passions, and tone – how they like to interact with others.
Triggers:
Look for funding announcements, job changes and promotions are some of the best things to notice. It is great to congratulate people – it builds rapport - and new executives make purchases in the first 90 days so seeing who has a new job where is extremely valuable.
Digital fingerprints show patterns about prospective buyers.
How to Reach out once You have Data about a Prospective Company
Segment your list based on lowest common denominators – will be easier to personalize. So if all are VPs of sales, from the same area – you can be more personal while still in a group. This is personalize outreach at scale. This is also known as batching.
(This is very tricky because you need this to be accurate - if you goof up on assumptions it can cost you)
Instead of one-off emails, if you can batch 10 or 20 at one time, it can help you scale.
Create a list around a sphere of influence – and that way you are batching around a customer story.
SDR Hack – Simply view LinkedIn profiles of people who are targets – people see who have viewed your profiles. You can use a virtual assistant found on places like ODesk.
Lori Richardson is recognized on Forbes as one of the "Top 30 Social Sales Influencers" worldwide and is a Top 25 Innovative Sales Blogger. Lori speaks, writes, trains, and consults with inside sales teams in mid-sized companies. Subscribe to the award-winning blog for sales strategies, tactics, and tips.
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