10-60-30 Rule of Social Selling

from Social Media Today 12 Apr 14 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz

If Social Selling is all about Connecting, Listening & Content Sharing, then getting started on Social Media can be a daunting task. Have you ever wondered which tools you could/should be using? And more importantly, how much time you need to spend on it?

Connecting. Social Networking platforms are made for connecting. Here you will find the obvious candidates such as LinkedIn & Twitter. But, not everyone is on LinkedIn. In a B2B situation, Facebook seems the last option Social Sellers jump on. But since so many people have a profile there, it might make sense to link here too. However, you need a clear strategy on what & how to share. Finding & connecting new prospects & clients are here clearly the marching orders. Nothing new so far. Make discovering new contacts part of your daily routine.

Listening. Here it becomes a little more complicated & time consuming. There are at least two reasons for monitoring: 1) understanding what your contacts are saying/doing/interested in and 2) finding interesting content to share in the content sharing stage. Listening to what your contacts are saying can be done through Hootsuite & LinkedIn saved searches, while finding content could be done through Google Alerts, LinkedIn Pulse, Feedly or any other RSS feeder program. How much time you will be spending on this part of your social selling routine will vary a lot depending on the number of contacts, the activity level of those contacts, the variety of topics you are following and how much reading you will be doing yourself.

Content Sharing is everywhere on the internet, but the prime locations are Slideshare, YouTube (or Vimeo), Blogs & Forums. Once you have that content, you will want to share it – using tools such as Buffer or Hootsuite. Additionally to sharing interesting content from others (less than 40% of all your content) you will need to create the balance by you. You might create presentations, blog posts & general status updates/tweets. Let me be clear that this is a time-intensive task and thus easily postponed. Once you created your own content, you will want to share this with your contacts via Status Updates & Tweets. Finally, through the monitoring & listening programs, you will also find more opportunities to engage with & help your clients & prospects. Your entrance ticket to become a trusted advisor. Again, it is hard to put a number on this when it comes to time spent. Do not consider this lost time, but think how much time you saved by not having to drive to your client to have a conversation.

10-60-30 Rule of Social Selling Social Selling is more about the approach rather than the use of a number of tools (see above). Over the course of time, this has evolved into a daily routine. Experience has demonstrated that the different steps & tools must be inter-woven with everything you do during the day. Today, you should spend about 10% of your time working on the connecting bit, 60% reviewing listening tools (unearthing) in terms of client conversations & content and 30% in actual sharing & personal content creation. Most of time goes to reading & qualifying whether this information can be shared to provide more value to Clients.

Comment: So how does your Social Selling routine stack up?