Mastering Modern Selling
At Mastering Modern Selling, our mission is to equip you with the insights, strategies, and tools necessary to excel in the ever-evolving landscape of sales. Traditional sales approaches, marketing tactics, and lead-generation methods are becoming obsolete. In today's market, buyers dictate the buying process and have little patience for cold calls, email blasts, or aggressive sales tactics.
In this new era of sales and marketing, success hinges on building meaningful relationships with prospects and buyers. We believe in leveraging the power of modern strategies, techniques, and technologies to foster these connections. This approach, often referred to as Modern Selling, encompasses leveraging digital and social channels to create demand and cultivate strong relationships with prospects, partners, and customers.
By mastering Modern Selling, you and your team can enhance your visibility in the marketplace, establish yourselves as trusted advisors, accelerate pipeline growth and revenue, and position yourselves as the employer of choice in your industry.
Join us on Mastering Modern Selling as we explore the principles, practices, and innovations driving success in today's sales landscape.
Mastering Modern Selling
SS2.0 - #54: How to Dominate the Newsfeed with Social Selling and Digital Marketing
Ever wondered why traditional cold outreach no longer gives desired results? Discover how capturing your audience's attention has drastically changed in today's digital age, as we move from not just capturing demand but creating it. With only 3-5% of ideal prospects actively looking to buy, we share innovative ways of getting in front of prospects early in their buying cycle, even before they're ready to make a purchase.
Turning your social media platforms from just a networking site to a powerful tool for amplifying your content and building brand awareness is no easy feat. Listen in as we discuss leveraging social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to reach more prospects than ever before. We also explore the use of tools like Restream and Buzzsprout to create efficient, engaging content that can be shared across these channels. We shed light on the critical role of personal branding in social selling and how thought leadership can control or influence your reputation in the market.
Prepping for an event? We've got you covered! Unearth the secrets of maximizing event ROI through strategic pre-show planning, creating an engaging presence, and boosting your brand's reputation. Furthermore, we chat about the power of having the senior leadership active on LinkedIn, and how live events can accelerate business results. Get ready to dominate the digital space with your personal brand, thought leadership, and content. So, tune in, take notes, and revolutionize your B2B sales strategy!
Don't miss out—your next big idea could be just one episode away!
This Show is sponsored by Fist Bump
Your prospecting partner to authentically fill your pipeline with ideal customers.
Check out our Live Show Events here: Mastering Modern Selling Live Show
Subscribe to our Newsletter: Mastering Modern Selling Newsletter
Welcome to Social Selling 2.0 Live Show and Podcast, where each week, we explore the future of B2B sales. Social has changed the B2B and professional services landscape forever. Capturing and keeping buyer attention has never been more challenging. Our mission is to help you discover new strategies, new technologies, new go-to-market systems and stay up-to-date with what is working now in B2B sales. Your hosts are Carson Hedy, the number one social seller at Microsoft, tom Burton, a best-selling author and B2B sales specialist, and Brandon Lee, an entrepreneur with multiple seven and eight figure exits and a leading voice in LinkedIn social selling. Brandon and Tom also leads Social Selling 2.0 Solutions, which offers turnkey consulting, coaching and training to B2B sales leaders. Now let's start the show.
Speaker 2:Brandon, how are you?
Speaker 3:Hey Tom, how are you?
Speaker 2:Welcome to episode number 54, social Selling 2.0. 54.
Speaker 3:54, man Getting up there, we're going to blink and it'll be 100. I mean, we blinked and all of a sudden it's October. Do you believe it's October? Everybody Whew.
Speaker 2:Yeah, If you believe it's October, please put it in the chat, because I don't believe it's October. It seems more like I don't know March, maybe something like that.
Speaker 3:Well, here's what we'll do with everybody coming on, Put in the comments like normal. Tell us who you are or where you're from. Tell us if this is your first time seeing the episode, Then if you're US based I don't know if anyone else got totally scared when the emergency broadcast test went off about what an hour or so ago. I knew it was coming and then I forgot about it. My phone and my watch went off and the Apple Watch vibrates. Oh my gosh, I jumped out of my chair.
Speaker 2:Were you like heading? For the basement or something ready to take cover.
Speaker 3:No, as soon as it like within a second, I realized what it was because I knew it was coming. But that's a fraction of a second there, man, I can't hear, well, I soiled myself.
Speaker 2:This is a little bit strange, because we don't have a guest today. We've had a guest, I think, almost for the last eight or 10 weeks. Carson, I think it's going to be coming here before too long. I know he's in the middle of shifting jobs so he's been juggling a lot of things and it just seems so quiet here with just you and I, but it doesn't mean it won't be a great show.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'd love to hear if anybody, if you're here, would you throw in the comments, because we had a challenge with Restream and the event and it got canceled and we reset it up. So it's not normal to not have comments on there of people saying they're here, oh, there we go. Mark will be a guest. We need Mark to come back as a guest. At least we got Mark here.
Speaker 2:I feel better now. No, we had a lot of problems with it today. I don't know if that was related to your emergency broadcasting thing or not. All right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's Mark, All right good.
Speaker 2:Relief relief.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well let's jump into this because I think this is a very important topic and one that we've had a lot of experience with over the last year, and I think, whether you're watching this live or you're listening to this as recording last week it was perfectly set up and sorry, tom, I kind of jumped and ran with it, but last week we had Morgan Ingram as a guest and it was a perfect setup to what we're doing today, because he came in. The first thing he said was number one. He says the traditional marketing, the traditional digital marketing. So really, things that companies have been doing in the last call it 15 years. I think it's a little bit shorter than that, but let's call it 15 years since, say, 2010-ish, with landing pages, with marketing-qualified leads, with MQL scores, with cold email outreach, and then, on the sales side, with cold email and cold calling outreach. As Morgan said, it's dying, if not dead. And then the other key stat that he brought up last week, which we've talked about I think it was so important and we need to talk about it more.
Speaker 3:We all need to be reminded of this is that, at any given time, about 3% to 5% of your ideal prospects are currently in market, but that's only 3% to 5%.
Speaker 3:So if that means the others say 95% are not in market, but we're talking to them from a sales perspective, like they're in market, we miss.
Speaker 3:There's just a big miss, and time, as you always bring up, is if they're in market, it's probably a red ocean for us, because that means they've been doing their own research. They're probably already talking to two or three other vendors and now you're in this thing competitively. But if we take a step back and we look from a perspective of creating demand instead of capturing demand, then what we're doing is we're getting in front of prospects earlier in their buying cycle, even before they're in a buying cycle, before they're in market. But it's a time that we can align our marketing and sales activities with the way that buyers prefer to buy these days, because we got to remember buyers don't need us anymore, they don't need salespeople anymore. They can do all the research they want on their own. So that's really the foundation of what we're talking about today and sorry, tom, I kind of jumped into it because I'm really excited for this topic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, boy, that covered it, I think. But I think it's important first of all, this 5%, 3%, whatever it is. It will vary, obviously, based on the market that you're in and what you're selling. But if you're a startup or an early-stage company that's selling maybe a unique product, a new product, it may be way less than that, because they've never heard of you, they've never even heard of the product. They may not even be aware that such a product exists. So the 5% is actually in some cases generous to paint upon what you're selling. For a lot of us, we're in probably a 1% to 3% range of people that are in market and actively looking to buy for whatever it is that we're selling in our market. And, yes, everybody is trying to go after those fish, we're all fishing for those things here. And then what we do with the other 90s 5%, or just call it 95 to be generous here, the other 95% is we treat them like you said, like they're in market, and all that does is piss them off and not want to do this Right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just do, we miss them.
Speaker 2:Right. So what we wanted to get to talk about today and we are going to talk about today is three strategies that we've learned not only learned but, I think, proven and we're really proving with some good analytics that help you go into that 95% and do two things. One get yourself so that they're at least becoming aware and having some interest in potentially, what you do, starting to build demand and starting to build trust. But when it does come time, when they do go in market or if they and they'd start doing their research, you're included. You're included, you're part of the process, versus you call it on your buyer circle of trust. Right, be on the outside looking, yeah, and we want to do that as early as we can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and this also sets up some of the examples that we've shared other times on the show, like the person who was in a C-suite with an $18 billion global company that I didn't even know was paying attention to our show, aware of the show, she had never commented on the show, so I didn't even know she was paying attention and then I get a direct message from her saying hey, I've been watching your show, I'd love to have a conversation about what you're all doing. I think we have a need, and that opened the door to this conversation. Now, if we were relying on just cold outreach, I'm sure I never would have gotten to her. You know cold calls, cold emails. It would have been met with the same way, especially going to a C-suite of an $18 billion company. It's very, very low probability of getting through that way. But by using the show, using messaging from the show, using shorts and snippets from the show to really build our brand, build our reputation and use it as part of our personal brand and our social selling, which is all from the personal side process, really made a difference. So a lot of those types of stories there's lots of those other ones that we have. We have a customer right now that we're working with.
Speaker 3:That was another one that said, hey, let's, hey, do you have time to talk with us about what's happening, what we're working on, what we're doing? We think you guys could help. You're like, yeah, absolutely so, yeah. So, tom, I'm sorry, I'm really excited about this topic and so I'm gonna let you kind of lead the conversation so I don't run us in five different directions, and I'd love to hear from people on the show right now too, and if you're listening to the podcast, you know you can comment on our podcast or go to our LinkedIn page. But I'm really really curious what other people are experiencing right now when it comes to their cold outreach or their traditional digital marketing, and how's it working. How effective is it? Or is the data that we see, the experiences that we've had about the efficacy, dropping dramatically? Is that what other people are experiencing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think what we wanted to cover today are three things that we have learned, and I think all of this sort of falls under the broader social selling umbrella. Some people might say, well, this is a bit more marketing, this is a bit more selling, okay, but it really. There's three areas that we have seen, that tactics and strategies you can use to go after that 95%. That's a lot more effective than cold email, cold outreach, cold calls, cold everything like that. That. We're all doing everything we can to push away from it. So you started the touch. There's three that we wanna hit on. I'm gonna mention all three and then let's kind of deep dive in each one.
Speaker 2:So the first one, which you started the touch on fancy term here that we call episodic content, and what we mean by that is content that is episodic. It goes from one week to the next, hence, like the show here. The second is personal brand. So personal brand is how do you use personal brand to start to become visible and aware in that 95%? And then the third is, which is an area that we've been doing a lot of.
Speaker 2:I guess testing with recently is and certainly Morgan brought this up last week is how do you use live events and amplify the live events? More and more companies are doing live events more than ever. It seems like it seems like live events are very much back in the picture. How do you use those, especially when they're so expensive, to get the most out of them and to leverage that FaceTime? So we're gonna hit each one of those. And, yeah, let's spotlight Mark's comment here because I think he said it well. Right, code cold outreach does not work well. Many calls with few connections to a suspect. It's an unexpected interruption in their day and unwanted interruption in their day.
Speaker 3:So I think well, I'll say that and I appreciate that. And for those who don't know, Mark is a global sales trainer for IBM. He works with, I think he says, 18,000 salespeople across the country that he works with in groups and individual one-on-one. And I've heard Mark say this multiple times on Zoom calls with him and phone calls with him that they're struggling because the traditional cold outreach is just not performing the way it used to. And yet they're struggling with. What do we do differently? And even going into LinkedIn itself, when we recreate our cold email tactics, but we just use LinkedIn instead of email, we still end up with the same response rates, which is a lot of ignoring.
Speaker 2:Right, it's just cold outreach that's not resulting to anything. However, the channel is All right. Well, let's take each of these three. You started the touch on the episodic content Again, fancy word for some content, but it's content that you're doing generally in a sequence over time, and it has a theme or an episodic approach to it. So certainly a live show, like we're doing here, is a form of episodic content. Podcast, which is an audio version of what we're doing here, is episodic content. And people ask this all the time, brandon. Well, should I do a live show or should I do a podcast? And our answer is all of the above. A lot of reasons, right? A lot of people just like to listen when they're in the car or walking or doing whatever. Other people will attend them. They wanna see the live show because they wanna participate or whatever. So I don't know. That's an either or.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I would add to the mix, too, is webinars.
Speaker 2:Yeah, webinars yeah.
Speaker 3:Adding. So you got the live show, you got the podcast and you have webinars. And the other reason I like the live show with video is really like what we do with our live show and people listening. You've probably seen us in other platforms. We take excerpts from the show in 30 second and one minute clips and then we're publishing those out on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and even Twitter to amplify our reach. So anyone that doesn't necessarily wanna sit and watch the entire show or listen to it on a podcast. We're using the shorts and the snippets. Oh yeah, we add those to YouTube as well. I totally forgot, but we publish those out at scale. So every day, our snippets or our shorts are getting pushed out through the other channels.
Speaker 3:Now, why is this important? And I know a lot of times we hear people say, oh, you know what? We only use LinkedIn because LinkedIn's for business and where we get C-suite people. I mean, we experienced this just a couple of weeks ago. It's like, well, I don't use Facebook and I'm not on Facebook and I don't think we need to be on Facebook because that's just for personal stuff. But when you look at the data on average and I probably should have looked up this data because I haven't looked at it recently, so the numbers might be a little bit off, but I know the consistency. The trend is the same. On average, a LinkedIn user logs in twice a week. On Facebook, the average user logs in three times a day and on Instagram, they log in five to six times a day. So what does that mean for us? Well, it means if they are using Facebook and Instagram or even TikTok and I don't know the login numbers for TikTok right off but if they're using those for their personal life, they're logging in more often there.
Speaker 3:And if we're put our shorts there and we do some targeted advertising with custom audiences and things like that, we're getting our message in front of them more often. We're getting our brand in front of them more often and we know the challenge of being seen in this crowded, noisy space of digital. But if, when they go to log into Instagram, they're taking a break from their day they're at lunch, they're at dinner, whatever and they're flipping through Instagram and they see our short there, they see our brand. When we're more engaging with them on LinkedIn, there's already a familiarity and this is what we talk about digitally dominating the newsfeed for your industry, but we just have to be in more places.
Speaker 3:When you do a live show like this for 30 minutes or 40 minutes, with those shorts, you have all this content to be able to push out and be in front of people every single day and lots of places. That is so important right now because brand awareness and nurturing people while they're in that they're not in the revenue zone, they're still sitting back and kind of paying attention but you don't even know it. We need to be in front of them a lot. You need to have your brand and your people in front of them a lot.
Speaker 2:Well and unfortunately right. We've certainly lived through this and we hear this all the time. Well, how do I measure this? And it's very hard to measure it because you don't know who's watching, right. Linkedin doesn't give you very good analytics on who's watching this right now and there's other, as you just talked about. As I roll out some of the different things on the social media platforms, that's also can be challenging. So you have to kind of trust the process versus trying to look at everything about the analytics and how many people came from this or that. And every day I have two shows I'm on. Every day I hear from people that said I saw you on your show or I liked your episode and I had no idea they were there, right, and so it's that self-reported attribution that's going to that. You're going to be able to see. Okay, is this working over time? But you can't expect to measure it the way you may wanna measure traditional sort of actions.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I got a message today via in-mail, so it's somebody I'm not connected to. That said, and I can't remember the exact details of my paraphrase, but it was basically hey, I've just started trying social selling over the last couple of months. I'm really struggling. Do you have any advice for me to help me get started? Right, I don't know who this person is. I didn't know them before, but I'm gonna make the assumption that the show our snippets, my own personal posts and my personal brand. Our thought leadership, both as a brand and me personally, has influenced this person to a point that they sent me a message asking for help. Right, there's not a perfect attribution model with that from typical marketing like did they do a Google search? Did they come straight to our website? Did they click a link in an email? No, it was from the term we used as dark social. It's this type of content that gets spread out throughout the interwebs, that creates an impression, and then they're reaching out to us or reaching into us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I wanna touch on Butch's question. Butch, I'm not sure if you're referring to a live show like what we're a live LinkedIn show. Are you talking about a live, actual, in person event?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I bet he's talking about a live show like this. And you know, we gotta put together just a simple how-to with what we do for people and I'll get that done over the next week or two and add it to my LinkedIn article, my newsletter for people. But you know what we do. It's oh and, by the way, we offer this as a service too. We create, manage and produce live shows and podcasts and amplify the shorts. Create the shorts and amplify the shorts with paid advertising for customers. If anyone needs help.
Speaker 3:But you wanna do it on your own, you know, use a tool like we currently use Restream. There's also StreamYard. The value of that is that you log into a studio, which is what we're on. You can send links and let guests log in and we all can attach or connect our own social accounts. So this show right now is streaming live to my personal Facebook, linkedin and Twitter accounts. It's going to our socialselling2.0, linkedin page, youtube channel, twitter account. I believe is what we've done, but it's going out to six right now. When Carson's here, it usually goes out to nine. When we have a guest, it might go out to 12 different feeds simultaneously. So use a Restream tool like this.
Speaker 3:We use Buzzsprout for our podcast, which is a great tool. Once you get it set up, we take our audio files, we edit them, and when we publish to Buzzsprout, it automatically then gets pushed out to about 15 different podcast players. So it goes to Apple, it goes to Spotify, it goes to the big ones, and so it reduces the amount of work that you have to do. I mean, we're talking about shorts and snippets, and live shows and podcasts. I know that could get overwhelming for people, but there are ways to do it in a more efficient manner, and the key there, though, is this type of content that we're doing. This long form content is the foundation for lots of shorts. We do 15 to 20 shorts per week, based on a single episode, which gives us plenty of new stuff to be sharing throughout all of our social channels.
Speaker 2:And a lot of that's evergreen, so it can be used over and over and over, and there's tons of stuff coming. When you look at the AI world some of the tools that are coming with AI, the ability for people who are doing their research to find the types of things that we're doing through AI and other places is also gonna expand. So think of us as just anytime you're doing something like this, you're creating content and data that ultimately, is gonna fuel some of the AI engines in the future.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I know Carson's really swamped today as he's transitioning roles at Microsoft and wasn't able to join us, but I was hoping because he's done a really amazing job with taking our long form shows, using AI to create 10 and 20 different social posts throughout the week for his own personal brand and then pushing those out to LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and others. So he demonstrates and use that well and we just have not used AI as much for the social side. Our marketing assistant does a lot of that for us, but we probably need to get her using AI to save a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know, and we'll talk more about that. All right, so first strategy, episodic content. I think we've covered that well. The next strategy, which, and all of these are related.
Speaker 3:Can I add one more thing to that, though, because if there's sales leaders or C-suite out there thinking, well, this is about marketing, it's also about selling, and, as I know, we're gonna go into the personal brand side, so I think it'll be a good transition. But these snippets are great pieces of content that sales people can share, whether they share it in email, they share it in direct message on LinkedIn or other platforms, or even if you're to a point, you can text to people and send them a link. Hey, this is a 30 second or a one minute clip talking about XYZ topic. I thought you'd find value in it because and share that type of information with them. So we're not asking them to watch a 30 or 40 minute show. We can feed them little chunks of content as a way to demonstrate our expertise and the company's expertise. I think it's really important for leaders to understand that that this is. It feeds both marketing and sales outreach.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because we did touch on this with Mandy a couple of weeks ago, right, yeah, Look, this is a great way to pull together more of what the marketing team and the sales team are doing by looking at relevant episodic content that the sales people can use to drive sales, not just drive marketing actions, and this is what we're right. I wanna that's a great point because I wanna reinforce this is all about driving your sales actions, which then tie in to the second strategy that we've seen continue to work is personal brand, and what I want, brandon, I want you to touch on is what is the difference between building personal brand and social selling? Like, I hear that question a lot, and is there a overlap between them or where is the gray area between them?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that's a great question, and I would add that if we could look at personal brand and if you're sitting there going, what exactly is a personal brand? It's a reputation, right? How are you known in the space? Not just your brand, but how are individuals in your company from your C-suite, your leadership, to individual sales people, to your customer success people to ops, people to developers like do they have a reputation? If people think about your company, do they think about just the name oh yeah, they're in this industry. Or, even better, when they think if you say a company name, they go, oh yeah, their CEO is so. And so I've seen them a lot online. Their leadership is this I've seen they do a show, they do webinars, whatever it may be. Personal brand is about a reputation. Thought leadership is about controlling or influencing that reputation. That's the way I would differentiate. And then, going into social selling, it's how do we use that personal brand and our thought leadership to create opportunities? So it might be from.
Speaker 3:I like to break down social selling into two stages as well. There's the prospecting stage how are we building a healthy connection with somebody before we move into a sales stage, which is where we're trying to discover if there's an opportunity there. This is really important. Go all the way back to the beginning of our show and our show last week with Morgan.
Speaker 3:If only 3 to 5% of our population of prospects is currently in market and we're trying to have a sales opportunity conversation with all, 100% of them, 95% of the people, we're just bugging them. They're not in market, they're not thinking about it, it's not on their mind and we're trying to say do you want to demo? Can we talk about this? We're missing them entirely. And if we're aggressive with it constant drip of emails, constant drip of LinkedIn messages trying to get in front of them then we're also just bugging them and we're tarnishing our reputation so that when they are in market they may think of us but they may think negatively because we bugged them with our constant messaging.
Speaker 3:So Social selling for me it's got to be looked at from two stages Prospecting, create that rapport and that healthy relationship and then move into selling. And I know there's a lot of people out there that will poop who that they'll say you know, building rapport isn't necessary, it's not important. I I just strongly disagree with that, because people do business with people who they like, people who they know, people who they trust, and if we don't start from a place of rapport, we're we're trying to jump right to the putting a ring on somebody without ever getting to know them.
Speaker 2:So, to summarize, your personal brand is Is a some a function of, obviously, your content right to a degree, your content, your posting, your Commenting they said that already right, commenting, posting, you know content, everything that you're doing there and how you're interacting in general and how you're perceived when someone goes and looks up to you on LinkedIn or even looks at you at Google for, to some degree, but looks up who you are and is this person Credible and is this person somebody who I would want to have a healthy connection with and a healthy relationship with?
Speaker 2:And then, ideally, going One step further, is hey, I, even if I'm not interested in buying, I'm interested in what they're talking about. Right, so I think that's the biggest thing that we want to do on those than that 95% is. If someone's not interested in buying, that's fine, but are they interested in what we're talking about? Are they interested in the subject? Are they interested in what the subject or the outcome is of the subject that we're talking about, whether or not they're thinking of buying or not? And I think that's what we're trying to do with personal brand is, build some of that reputation of hey, this is a person that I would like to be associated with because I find what they talk about relevant, interesting and valuable and For them to know us and find our content interesting and valuable.
Speaker 3:We need a lot of repetition, and that's because everything's noisy, people are busy. It's not like publish something once and expect people to remember us in two months or three months or nine months or when they move to the next company, and then they're in a position to make those decisions. It's got to be that consistency. And so it brings us back to the episodic content, because then we have all these shorts and snippets that we can use to stay top of mind. So personal brand is really about how do we use our and I'm just going to start with LinkedIn but how do we use our LinkedIn presence? It's our profile and our activity in order to create conversations and Relationship with our targeted audience. So it starts with our profile and we got a look from a.
Speaker 2:I mean I just want to go any further. I want to you said with our targeted audience. Right, I really want to nail that they are targeted audience. Maybe that 95 percent it's not going after that 5%, it's building with that 95 percent, not necessarily in the 5%. I just want to keep reinforcing that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and, and I would. I would say to a Question that we get asked or a comment that gets made a lot is yeah, yeah, yeah, social selling. We know it works, but we don't have time for it. All right, we've got these 30 days or these 60 days. It's some point that 30 day run just as exhausting. And if you look at the data, people aren't hitting their numbers Because they're communicating with everybody in these 30 or 60 day or quarter windows.
Speaker 3:So if you go and this is what we're talking about from from the beginning if only 5% are in market, but we're talking to all 100% of them like they're in market, we're losing opportunity to fill, to backfill our pipeline.
Speaker 3:So it's it's the process we talk about of going slow to move fast. We've got to nurture that, we've got to create it. So it's a difference between creating demand and just hunting for people who have their wallets out or are currently ready to buy, and it becomes much more efficient when you create demand. And yeah, it takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it and it's not Huge amounts of time. It's not like you need a year to do this, but you got to get started in order to start building that Backflow of pipeline of people that are thinking about you. They're preparing themselves to reach out to you or to talk to you, and you don't even know that they're doing that. You don't even know that they're in that stage, and I want to hit a couple things and then we'll move on to the third, the third strategy.
Speaker 2:But I think Brian brings up a great point. I'm starting to find that that consistency thing very relevant to what I'm doing, very relevant to what I'm doing and you couldn't be more correct, brian, because you do people sometimes need to see something six, seven, eight, ten times before they considered even wheeler ballot, right, and yeah, and so consistency is very important. And having things over and over and over and the fact is, consistency and and doing things over and over builds credibility. Right, we were more credible at episode 50 than we were at episode five, right? No other reason for that. We did 50 episodes, whether they were good or not. We did 50 episode right. So it's like gives consistency, and doing things Week in and week out and all of those things that all help to elevate and build that thought leadership and personal brand.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and before we go on to the third one, I want to make sure because we haven't talked about this two things I keep thinking about. One is commenting, and one is the term buyer enablement. So, from a buyer enablement standpoint I think it's become a bit of a trite term. It gets thrown around a lot, even in areas where Something isn't really focused on the buyer, but we say it's our buyer enablement approach, even though it's really more from a seller enablement. Here's our process, here's what we're going to do, and we're going to expect buyers to follow in line and just march every step of the way. What we're talking about is truly coming at this from a buyer enablement perspective. How do we meet buyers where they are right now, every buyer where they are right now, in a way that leads them into our revenue zone or into an opportunity? The value of this is that, if we talk the same way with all 100% of people, where we're educating, we're staying top of mind, we're sharing what we know, what we learn, what we experience. If they're, you know, a Week away from being in market or they're four months away from being in market, the conversation still has power. Right, it's the same. It's gonna hit this. Hit them the same, no matter where they are. And then the last piece on that with personal brand is commenting. It is the most Underutilized and the most powerful tool that we can use and linked in for a couple of reasons. Number one is Brian talked about. He's starting to find the value of consistency when we comment and we strategically go and comment on prospective customers post or their post activity. And that's really important because we hear a lot when the first things we know, oh yeah, but our prospects never post, that's okay if they're consistent with being in LinkedIn, they're commenting on other posts, they react and like other posts. Then we can leverage the power of LinkedIn, which is the notifications. So when we go to their post activity and we comment and consistently, not every now and then comment once a week, comment twice a week, comment three times a month whatever that right rhythm or sequence is for you, they're seeing us, they're seeing us. They're seeing us. We can't control if they see our post. You've got the algorithm you've got when they log in. You've got all kinds of algorithm things that influence whether they'll even see our posts. But we can take the same content from our posts and use it in comments and contribute to other people's posts through commenting and creating conversation, and the same thing happens. They see our picture, they see our name, they get a notification with our picture and our name. They see us active and if what we're saying resonates, what we're talking about makes sense, it's adding value to them.
Speaker 3:We're building and growing our personal brand faster than we ever could just by posting, and what this allows us to do is individuals on a team. I don't care if you're in customer success, you're in operations, you're leadership, whatever. You build a personal brand because you're contributing to these conversations. We don't all need to be influencers. What we need is to be influential with a small group of people 100, you know there's people talk about their top 100, their dream 100, I think that's great. Some of us maybe it's 150 to 200 people. But if we are consistently contributing our voice, our experience, our knowledge, our awareness to those 100 to 200 people through posts, through comments, through using episodic content, getting this information and being consistent, we build a very strong personal brand and we stay top of mind and we become known for when they are ready. That is what personal branding is all about. We use LinkedIn and our activities to create conversations and become known in the industry.
Speaker 2:Well, and you don't. As you said, you don't have to be an influencer, you honestly don't even have to be influential, but you have to be relevant and you have to be there. That's it relevant and communicate, and that can go a long way. All right, let's move to number three. This is an area we're getting a lot of interesting data from, which is leveraging your live in-person events versus your live digital events. More and more companies are doing in-person events. There seems to be kind of a resurgence of that. I'm seeing, anyway, different types of events shorter events, longer events.
Speaker 2:Whatever the case may be, but if you think about it right, an in-person event is probably one of the most expensive marketing investments you're going to make. You almost always have travel, you may have a booth, you may have all kinds of things that go into making that investment. On the other hand, it may be one of the most powerful things you can do, if you're leveraging that event well, to have meetings and conversations that just are very difficult, if not impossible, to have online. One thing it's just really this whole fragment in world of 30-minute Zoom meetings. It's hard in a lot of times to get anything going, whereas if you have an opportunity to sit down with somebody, even for 30 minutes or a half hour, you can accomplish a lot, lot more.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we're learning as we talk to people that are really out trying to do live in-person events is well, how do I make sure I get the most out of that event? How do I make sure I have quality conversations when I'm there? How do I make sure that I'm getting a return on investment on the money and the people that I'm sending there? The key thing that we've identified is that an event is not about how many scans you can get. I think events have historically been a traditional sort of lead gen MQL. I scanned 500 people and now I can start.
Speaker 2:These are quote-unquote leads, even though they just came by to get a piece of candy from the booth. Those aren't really leads. Really. What it boils down to is how do you use the show to have high quality conversations with people that you've already built a relationship with or you have relevance with or you have influence with? Those conversations are going to be literally 10 or 20 times more relevant and more valuable than somebody coming by getting a booth scan. That's the first time they've heard of you. What we're looking at, what we're finding is, is that the things that we're talking about with episodic content and personal brand and thought leadership, all of those things can then be used to lead up to your live show, basically schedule over the course of the year to make those way way, way more relevant. Then there's other things we can do, which we'll talk about in a minute, but that's the basic process.
Speaker 3:I have two stories and examples to share about that. One of them is a little while ago. I was working with the team and it was a combination of SDRs and AEs. They asked me to come in and do a short training as part of one of their meetings. I logged in to the meeting and they were running a little bit late. I was just listening and one of the marketing persons was on and she was telling the team hey, we just went to this conference and so we have a whole bunch of Nord leads that are going to be put into your CRM. You've got a whole bunch of fresh people to start calling. Of course, the marketers all excited about it.
Speaker 3:And then the marketer left and before I started going into training, I'm listening to them talk about it and their basic response was oh great, more calls that I'm going to make and leave a bunch of voicemails and not have people call me back because they're just people that came by picked up a piece of swag. Or the people in the booth are like can I scan your badge? Can I scan your badge? Can I scan your badge? And so they have all these quote leads that are not leads. They're suspects and they're not expecting a call, they don't want a call, they have no interest. But now you've got the SDR and the AE team that's being told you got this fresh you know bunch of leads to go after. Go get them. And they're all like they're just defeated because they're like these are low quality. And now I know I got to put them in my sequence, I got to make the calls, I got to send the emails and I have to chase a bunch of hollow air. That's not going to be fruitful.
Speaker 2:Worse than that, they're low quality and expensive Right. No scans are expensive when you put the cost per acquisition of a lead there.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, and what Tom means by that for everybody is you take all those leads, you put them in the CRM and now you've got the SDR team or AE team or BDR team whoever it is that are spending their time, which costs you a lot of money. You got five grand or more per head per month for them to pound phones and send cold emails that have very little fruit, right. So, on the opposite end, what we can do, and Trevor Van Weerden who's I don't know if he's on today, but he has a great example of this. I worked with him probably a year and a half ago. We started, about six months prior to a big conference of him, building lists of people he expected to be at that show, who we wanted to have meetings with before at the show. So six months prior, he started doing his personal branding, he started sharing content, he started commenting on their activity and he built a rapport, a relationship, whatever term you want to use. He built connection with them, he turned them into healthy connections.
Speaker 3:So a month before the show, before the conference, he was able to start reaching out to them and say, hey, you want to get to, are you going, do you want to get together and he builds his schedule filled it with meetings prior to even getting to the booth, so he wasn't relying on booth activity going hey, do you want to talk? Do you want to talk? Do you want to talk? He didn't go walk around the aisles and go search for suspects. He built relationships over six months and filled his calendar prior. So he had said he had the most successful event he'd ever experienced. And he's you know, he's our age, he's been selling forever, but he had the most successful event that moved him into the next year where he had the most successful year of sales, because he set it up the right way, and I get it that. That's not about your 30 or 60 or your 90 day goals, but on the end of it, the upside, the revenue that was generated was better than ever before.
Speaker 2:But if you look at it and you know Carson talks a lot about his annual planning right, he just went through his annual if you look at your, if you start your whatever your sales year starts, and you say, okay, I'm here's my goal for that year and I'm going to be attending, let's say, four events.
Speaker 2:Let's just keep it one a quarter right, and you can use those as sort of anchor points along the way that you're trying to then lead to to build up those quality meetings, those high quality meetings at each of those events.
Speaker 2:Now those events are being used to move opportunities to customers versus getting low quality leads that I'm hoping to turn into an opportunity, a very different strategy around the event.
Speaker 2:The second piece that we see, which is a byproduct of all the things we just talked about, is that, yes, you'll get pre scheduled meetings, but you'll also get a tremendous amount of booth traffic of people that already know who you are and will come to the booth and go. Oh my God, I loved your video, I saw your this, and so, even if they're there for the very first time and you're going to scan them, they're going to be a lot more high quality person coming there that you've already built some trust with and potentially some interest versus, somebody you're just trying to grab cold out of the aisle, which is what a lot of the strategies are for shows is how do I pull people out of the aisle? And so it's a very it's a very, very much more strategic way of using your shows and building that into your overall plan so that, as they happen during the course of the year, everything's leading up to that and then you can keep building and building and building.
Speaker 3:From that perspective, yeah, and I know we're running out of time, but we haven't even touched on the in booth video that you do when your brand is building a reputation about your live show and live video and podcasts and shorts and all that. Then, when you set up a camera with a light and a tripod and a microphone and I think the mic flag is so important because it makes it look more official you got this continuity, and doing that in a booth draws a lot of traffic. People are curious, right? I mean we know that we're all looky loose, right. You walk by a booth and there's a camera set up and there's lights and somebody's being interviewed and you have a real microphone.
Speaker 3:You're not just doing a selfie thing. It captures attention and it also brings up to mind oh yeah, I've seen their videos before and use those in the booth. And then we can also use those as snippets that we do geofencing advertising around, you know, for a one mile or two mile radius of the show, so that they're seeing us when they're at lunch and they open up Instagram because they want to take a break from work. They're in Instagram, they're in TikTok and all of a sudden there's video there and you're like oh that that booth's right over here, yeah right, it's drawing more attention and interest and leads people into the booth. I love Mark's question, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah, a mic flag mark is. If you've ever, you know, when you watch ESPN or whatever and they're interviewing somebody and they have that little ESPN or CNN or whatever on the microphone, that's called a mic flag.
Speaker 3:So it's a classic thing that goes around.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's amazing how much that mic flag if you put your own logo on it, right? So if you're in a booth and you have your logo and you're doing interviews with it, it's amazing that by itself, how many people will just get be interested and more interested. It looks more official, it looks more I don't know, it just looks cooler.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's more impressive and it's an attention getter Right. And then, if you're doing all these other pieces of the shows and the shorts and everything, it's that continuity of using video and then it's not just being video but it's the amount of content you create and then how you continually use that content, which we just keep reiterating over and over again. But thanks for that question, mark.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think if you were to tie all this together you know, the title of the show today was how to Dominate the News Feed with Social Selling and Digital Marketing If you tie all this together, what we're talking about isn't a one-trick tactic. It's like how do you look at what you're trying to accomplish whether it's over three months, six months, 12 months and then use these things together in a way, so the one plus one plus one is way more than three, right. And then what we've seen is, over the last year in particular, by implementing these things and watching people we've been working with and so forth, go through this that the overall amplification, the overall acceleration that occurs by using the three things together. And then, when you get to the show, that show is super productive. And so if you're spending 50 grand, 100 grand, whatever it is to be at the show, it's not a, it's not a waste, it's actually a big springboard to then get you to the next level. It doesn't really doesn't really work or it doesn't get the results you're looking for.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, summarizing this up, when you have one or two members of senior leadership with a thriving LinkedIn presence, thought leadership, their own videos, their own social posts, you have several people at leadership level. You know mid-leadership, wherever you want to call it. You have salespeople, ops people, customer success people and you don't have to have the whole team Right. Ask for the volunteers that want to learn how to do this and they're willing to do it, and it's not that they have to be on LinkedIn every single day. It's, you know, sharing posts a couple of times a week, commenting and engaging with a specific group of people 25, 50, whatever it may be and we're commenting and staying top of mind.
Speaker 3:That's how we digitally dominate the news feed, because now it's not just your company posts. You got your senior leadership that are posting and commenting. You have salespeople that are posting and commenting. You have customer success. That's posting and commenting, and what it builds is a persona around the company where your industry feel like they know you and when they're in market, when they're ready, they come to you and give you the opportunity to compete. And in some times, in some places, they don't even go to others because your reputation precedes you and they come to you and say we're ready for you now. I mean, we've experienced this multiple times with people that have just said, hey, we need your help, and there wasn't like, oh, you're in an RFP or anything else.
Speaker 3:We're evaluating five companies and you know there's none of that no no, they've been evaluating over a period of time and because our show and our content and our personal brands are really dominating, because most competitors just aren't doing it, they come to you and they say we need your help. It's time to talk.
Speaker 2:And I'm going to an event. On Saturday. I'll be in an event, a conference. You know a booth might be too strong a word, but it's with my software company and we have a table there and I've already had people. I'm first of all, I'm going to track everything just so I can report back on Wednesday what happens. But I've had people from the show who watched my other show that I'm on going out of their way to introduce people and bring me to my, to my booth there, because I think that we should meet in person. I mean, the side effects are really large. So I'm really interested to watch how the quality of all this plays out and I'll document it. But you know, we've all been to a lot of shows, right, and we've left there, spent a lot of money and then nothing really comes out of it. This gives you an opportunity to really to change that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and don't discount and the celebrity word gets blown out of proportion, but call it the celebrity effect of it, right, when you have your show and the shorts are going out and they see you, and they see you a lot of times in the news feed and you're sharing quality content and a lot of other people are engaging with you, there's a bit of a celebrity effect that, when you then have the booth or at the show is a lot of people come to you because they perceive you and this is your personal brand, your reputation they perceive you as knowledgeable, influential, a key figure in your industry, however you want to describe it. But they're now coming to you and want to talk to you.
Speaker 2:And not because you're a celebrity, but because they value what you're going to talk about, right.
Speaker 3:And that's why it's a celebrity effect, if you will, right.
Speaker 2:Celebrity thought leader. Yeah, all right. Well, I think we've done a good job of covering the three accelerators. Just one last thing before we end off here, because a question comes a lot when do we start Right With this? I don't know that there's. I think that the most important place to start is to look at all three of these. So look at your events, look at what you've got coming over the next 12 months or whatever. What are the events? What do you want to get out of those? And then look at what you can start with on the personal brand, which may be the fastest way, and then start to look at, maybe after that, how you incorporate the episodic. But I think the way to start is to look at the right mindset and the right strategy for this. That's the place to start is to look at the strategy, the approach, and then some of the tactics can be layered in over time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'm going to be a little bit bold and say the best place to start is with senior leadership, and which is why, at Fist Bump, we've created our done for you program for senior leadership, for C-suite. So if your leadership I think a lot of times leadership thinks they should be more active on LinkedIn, but they don't have time or they don't know where to start, that's why we created this program and I do believe, personally, that is the right place to start, because when your senior leadership becomes active and it's not just marketing, creates some things and throws it up on their LinkedIn profile, but it's actually your senior leaders, with video, with carousel posts, with article posts and things like that when they become more active, it's got a trickle down effect to everything else and when they experience what we're talking about, they start getting LinkedIn connections coming to them, they get customers coming to them asking for help and all of a sudden, that light bulb goes off of like, wow, this stuff really works. So that's why I think and that's why we created it. To be honest, like training and coaching a C-suite person to do their own is really, really tough. They're super busy, they don't have time.
Speaker 3:But with Fist Bump our commenting AI, how we train the brain to sound like them so we can comment as if we are them. That is super, super powerful. So I would say, if you have questions about that, reach out to us. We'd love to share it with you. We can always train and coach people in our content, in our community, in our paid group coaching and things like that, and teach people. But if you want to hack it and just get right to the front of the line, just let us do it for you. We get people C-suite up and running within a month and they're then active. We're commenting on 100 people's social post engagements and creating video content for them, creating post content for them. It is really super amazing how quickly that changes the persona of the brand and your C-suite leader.
Speaker 2:And that ties into Mark's question about a personal brand assessment to evaluate your current personal brand and build that road map for improvement over time. We should do a show on that because there's actually there's a whole process that we look at to say, okay, well, where do you want to be, what do you want to accomplish, and kind of then work backwards to build that into the framework there. But really good point.
Speaker 3:All right, we're almost out of time here. We were out of time five minutes ago.
Speaker 2:Five minutes ago. Thanks for all the great questions. Yeah, go ahead, Brandy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, as I said before we go, if you're listening to us on the podcast or you're watching on the show, we really would appreciate. We appreciate you guys so much in our audience and the comments we get and the messages that we get, but if you're watching the show or listening on the podcast, we'd really appreciate subscribe If you think this is valuable. You know, screen capture it, send it to a friend that you think this would add value to. You know it's not all about the ratings, but it definitely helps. So we, you know we're currently number one, number two on Apple for social selling and that's exciting for us, and so if you get value out of what we do, we would appreciate that help as well, and we've got a big lineup of guests coming up again over the next few weeks.
Speaker 2:So hopefully Carson's job will settle back down so we can get him back on the thing here.
Speaker 3:But yeah, lots of good stuff Me goes back together.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, thanks, Brandon. Thanks everybody for the comments. Have a good week and we'll see you next Wednesday. Bye everybody. Hey, Tom Burton here and I wanted to personally thank you for listening or watching today's episode of socialselling2.0. If you enjoyed or found value in today's show, please share with your friends and colleagues. Also, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast outlet. And please also subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our free online community at socialselling20.com. There you'll get free access to the latest socialselling resources, training sessions, webinars, and can collaborate with other socialselling professionals. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.
