Category Archives: Social Media

Thank You, Thank You Very Much

elvis-rl-blogI found myself in the city of Nashville last week and had the opportunity to walk along Broadway. It was amazing. People everywhere were enjoying the city’s history as the sounds of country music filled the streets from every bar I passed. I watched the smiles as passersby soaked up the experience when there it was, a life size statue of Elvis Presley.

I could almost hear the thunderous applause followed by the King himself saying, “Thank you, Thank you very much.” I began to think, how often in sales do we take the time to say, “Thank you”? I know we live in a sales world of CRM and contacts with our customers revolve around forecasts and revenue projections, however I am talking about contact with a sole purpose and a sole purpose only, to say thank you. Not some passing thanks for the last order and then asking for another, but a face to face to just say I appreciate your business then disconnect.

Sure, using social media in sales is important, but our sole purpose for interaction with another human should not be to beat them with a URL, to drive them to your website, or deliver content that will help raise your credibility. Saying, “I appreciate your business” without another motive might just display something that is more valued than your company’s product or service, something called caring and sincerity.

So, the next time you wish to get closer to your customer don’t send them a survey, retweet or a blog, take a lesson from the King. Look them in the eye and say, “Thank you, Thank you very much.”

Author: RichLucia
www.RichLucia.com

It’s No Time to Invite Company Over if Your House is a Mess

You have finally made contact with your new prospect. After a brief interaction, you managed to generate enough interest to move to the next step. However, your next step might not be your prospect’s next step.

As you reach into your pile of brochures and sort through your PowerPoint point slides, what do you think your prospect is doing? They are looking you up on LinkedIn and your website to learn more about you and your company. If your profile on LinkedIn is a mess and your company’s website has seen too many excuses of, “We are working on a new site” then you may as well have taken your new prospect by the hand and walked them off a cliff.

Gone are the days where you were the only point of contact and a smile was your rite of passage. Information is easily found and if your electronic profile doesn’t match your presented one, you lose.

Integrated Social Selling, as part of a system, trains you to pay close attention to all of your initiatives, making sure they are in lock step and presenting you, your company and your brand as a unified holistic solution.  Before you invite someone into your home, make sure it is fit for company.

Author: Rich Lucia
www.RichLucia.com

What Happens In Your Home Should Stay In Your Home

I always found it a bit ironic that salespeople rank the highest in not wanting to be annoyed by telemarketers calling their homes. “Don’t they realize it’s dinnertime and, no I don’t need carpeting or draperies? Who would buy something over the phone anyway? I don’t even know these people.”

Yet 14 hours later, following direction from their sales manager, they plow through lists of strangers calling them cold, hoping they feel differently about the interruption.

It is unfortunate that we have to encounter this torture in our own homes but to take it to our workplace and duplicate the madness makes no sense. Better it should stay in the home. Integrated Social Selling puts practices like this to the test and makes sure that as we pursue business, our initiatives are congruent with our mission.

Author: Rich Lucia
www.RichLucia.com

Don’t Worry About The Competitors Outside Your Company

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

Copyright Rich Lucia 2007-2013