Don’t Worry About The Competitors Outside Your Company; Start Focusing On The Competitors Within Your Company.

Many companies today spend a great deal of money, time and resources on competitive analysis. What are competitors saying? What are they doing? How does that affect my offering and my business? Has it occurred to anyone that the real missed opportunities and true competition just might be created everyday within the company?
In this fast moving world, many companies have turned to technology to keep up with the latest tools and practices. You may have already jumped on the bandwagon and invested heavily in the “flavor of the month” solution looking for that silver bullet that will propel your business development efforts into success. Who has taken on the task to insure that these latest and greatest social tools play well together? They just might be competing with each other.

Sure, LinkedIn might get you connected to people, but are they the right people? The people who are predisposed to buying from you? SEO can drive traffic to your website, but is it the right traffic? When the people who are predisposed to buy from you view your website, what do they see? Do they see what is of interest to them or a beautiful assortment of graphics and pictures that were selected from the artistic preferences of its designer? Introduce a new social selling tool that might work independently but you may find it trying to collocate with your other initiatives, resulting in conflict, and there you have it: Internal Competition. These tools and practices are designed and implemented in a vacuum. They have the possibility of competing with each other and can unknowingly sabotage your mission.

These are just some examples of how the race to keep up and use the “latest and greatest” tools can unknowingly lead to conflict and ineffectiveness leaving you with an internal competition where there is no winner. This type of competition is greater than what any competitor can bring to bear.

What can be done? Well, for starters, shift some of the attention from external to internal competition. In order to succeed, it is going to take a new focus to make sure that all the tools and processes have a purpose and are successfully integrated with each other.

Integrated Social Selling is just that; a process that identifies the specific value of social selling tools and practices. It designs an integrated roadmap to have all resources working in harmony to successfully achieve the mission. The process starts with identifying and finding the “ideal customer”, from nurturing them through the buying experience, exposing them to their buying preferences, monitoring and suggesting next steps, to teaching your sales personnel how to interact with today’s new breed of buyers.

There are no silver bullets, however, practicing Integrated Social Selling allows your resources to work together for an efficient and successful outcome.

Author: Rich Lucia
www.RichLucia.com