Author: Moshe Pesach

An exciting presentation by Jamie Shanks of Sales for Life, recently covered how sales leaders can train their team in the art of social selling. But what is social selling? With so much information and connectivity available, it can be hard to know how best to leverage this valuable tool and how to move your sales process into the electronic world.

The basic sales process remains the same, people want to buy from other individuals, so there still needs to be communication and conversation, even if this occurs in a digital format. You’re moving them along their buying journey and communicating with them just as you did in the past, you’re just doing it using technology and social networks.

Starting a Social Selling Process

Your sales process starts by finding people who may be interested in your product or service. You can leverage your social networks to do this by setting alerts that notify you based on different triggers. This could include when companies merge or a lead switches positions. You can also find leads by reaching into your own social network and mining it for connections. Technology makes it easy to track these relationships and changes, but you have to keep your network up to date and pay attention to it in order to leverage this data. Your goal is to surround the company and send different people within the organization multiple marketing touch points that are educational and useful.

Teaching your sales team this art this begins by working with your sales team to convey your brand digitally. Go through all their social profiles to ensure the brand message is consistent, uses the right keywords, and that their profiles are open and inviting. Have them review their profiles and messaging through a buyer-centric lens.

Refining Social Content

Once your team’s social profiles are in tune, look at the content they’re sending out. Is that messaging adding value and are they leveraging the information from their networks to know who is interested in what material? Is that material conveying a consistent brand message? Sometimes it helps to do a spot audit of one sales person’s biggest account to see how well they’re connecting with the account’s contacts on social media, how frequently they’re engaging, and what material they’re sharing. Then you can offer coaching on how to improve their techniques for the specific client that carries over to other accounts.

You know the sales process should never contain a message or email that doesn’t add value, either through educating or informing your customer. You can help your team accomplish this by giving them digital content to share on best practices, industry updates, and exciting news. Mix content you’ve created in house with content you’ve found to position your team as experts in your industry.

Once they’ve got the process and content figured out, work with your team to teach them how to develop their sales accounts by looking for new leads to add to their social networks. When the leads are in your network, you can track the content they’ve looked at or engaged with to determine where their interests are. Challenge your team to grow their social footprint by one person each day.

As a leader, you must be ahead of the curve in demonstrating these digital sales strategies to your team and showing how they are effective. Start by telling stories of how digital sales is working for specific customers, then begin to gather data to show it’s having a positive impact on the company as a whole.

Once you’ve started training your sales team, and you get some people having success implementing social selling, then bring your team together again and have them to teach each other the successful ways they’re implementing new strategies into their existing techniques. Nothing gets someone to master material faster than having to teach it.

If you’d like some help starting your digital selling strategy, check out our guide to email follow-up. It’s helped businesses in many different industries set up digital marketing and sales automation that increase efficiency and complement what is already working.

While sales isn’t the only profession that has to deliver impactful presentations frequently, it’s certainly something sales professionals do regularly. So how can you go about keeping your prospect’s attention and covering all the information you need? Try these five creative presentation ideas I learned from Julie Hansen of Performance Sales and Training to improve your presentation style and gain new and effective presentation skills.

#1 Break Your Talk Down Into Chunks

People are constantly being bombarded with new and exciting information and the average attention span has gone down to five minutes. This means long, linear presentations are no longer the most effective way to present your material. Instead, you should break your talk into three to five minute chunks and focus each chunk on a certain part of the message. Changing chunks is as simple as changing topics or shifting to a new point.

#2 Focus on What’s Most Important

Your prospect has already read your website and reviewed enough information to determine whether you’re likely to be able to help them, so skip the parts of the presentation where you introduce your company. Just like movies and novels start with the most compelling part of the action, your presentation should start by answering the main questions that they’re likely to have. Focus on what’s going to be most important to them.

#3 Customize For Your Audience

Different buyers of the same product will be interested in different features or aspects. Take the time to think about what might be driving their purchasing decisions and customize your presentation to talk to the specific prospect. This is more than putting their logos on your standard slide deck. This is doing your research and getting into their heads to be able to answer those most important questions first. Ask yourself how your features will impact them. When you understand your customers, you can help connect the dots between the problem they have and the solution you’re offering.

#4 Know Your Key Point

What is the one thing you want your audience to walk away from your presentation remembering? For a sales professional, it’s probably that you can help them solve a certain problem. If you know the key point you want them to take home, you can then build the rest of your presentation about that topic and present it in a number of different fashions to improve its stickiness.

#5 Keep Your Audience Engaged

When your audience is actively engaged with your presentation, they are much more likely to remember the details of the material you’re presenting. There are many different ways to engage your audience, asking questions is only one. Simple engagement such as slides, videos, and stories is the first step. Active engagement such as questions and contests are even better. You can add these engaging sections in between the different chunks of your talk to help break it up and keep your audience attentive.

With these five tips, you’ll be sure to keep your audience engaged and spark an ongoing conversation about how you can help your prospect. While we can’t replace the charisma and art of the sales professional in the field, Team StepUp can support your company with great branding, insightful content, and lead generation. We can also help with automation – get a taste of how automation can improve efficiency with our free guide to email follow-up. These and other automation tools free your sales team to do what they do best – take the story of your company and share it with your best prospects, personally.

Where does team motivation come from? In our blog post last week we talked about training for sales teams, which when done right can definitely contribute to motivation. Some motivational speakers might argue that a great video or talk can give your sales team the motivation they need to grow.  Warren Greshes, of Speaking of Success, would disagree. Greshes argues that it is next to impossible to externally motivate someone and the only effective way to motivate anyone was to figure out their personal motivating factors.

Rather than trying to motivate someone externally through inspiring them or pushing them, it’s better to help them become intrinsically motivated. As a sales leader, your job is to give your team the tools and techniques they need to be successful. First, you have to start by finding out everything about each person on your team, from their personal goals to their wants and needs, just like you would if you were trying to sell to a client. Once you have that information, you have the key to motivating them by showing them how working for you moves them closer to their personal goals.

Go Through a Goal-Setting Process

It can take some time to go through a goal-setting process, but help them draw up a one to five year plan with specific steps attached. You may have to connect the dots and help them see that the lifestyle or personal goals they have are obtainable and exactly how much selling they’ll have to do to achieve those goals. Everyone is motivated by something different, so you’ll need to sit down with each person and discover what motivates them and what their goals are.

In some situations, you may need to help them draw the lines between how they envision their future and how their career success will get them there. If they know what kind of lifestyle they want in five years, then you can turn that into specific numbers of sales calls or meetings they need to make each quarter to make it happen. In other words, you translate their efforts into the money necessary to create the lifestyle they want. Money by itself doesn’t motivate, it’s the lifestyle money enables. It’s important to understand that business and personal goals work together to create motivation.

Tie Long Term Goals to Short Term Action

Once you know the goals, you can reverse engineer and write down milestones you want to meet every month to build up towards your final goal. Then write your goals down, set the metrics you want to meet, and track everything. Tracking allows you to manage someone by showing them what else they need to do to meet their goals and keeps you from having to micromanage your sales team.

Sustaining motivation over time is done by showing people how their actions are moving them forward. A five year plan is great, but you should break that into smaller milestones so that you can measure your progress and celebrate your results more frequently. Once you help your sales team members make a plan, you’ll want to revisit it every quarter to make sure they can see how they’re moving forward and make changes as life changes.

Your sales team is your client, so in addition to helping motivate them to work, you also want to provide them the training, tools, and support they need to reach their goals. You can start by sending them the link to our guide on email follow-up, which sets out key tips and tools for customising and automating email follow-up and making efficient use of the leads your sales team gets.  You’ll have to motivate your sales team, but we can make sure they’re getting the content, leads, and digital support they need to turn those goals into reality.