Social Selling Mastery

Chapter 8FindSocially Surround a Buyer and the Buying Committee

The only difference between a mob and a trained army is organization.

—Calvin Coolidge

Organization has been and always will be a critical part of sales success. I also find it to be one of the first stumbling blocks for sales professionals, and a reason why social selling doesn't accelerate their business like it should. There are so many things to do socially, but where do you start?

Mapping Your Sales World Toward Your Social World

We all leverage some sort of customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep ourselves organized. CRMs are meant to be the backbone of our buyer information, activities, and next steps.

Your first task is to get organized socially, and plot a course to improve your social reach. Your sales universe is mapped in your CRM, assigned to your name. Note: If you're a sales professional who deals with inbound leads with no dedicated account assignment, don't worry, the same principles apply to you. Your CRM data is a collection of contacts, but your social network(s) are a collection of relationships. Your goal is to merge these worlds together so they mirror each other in a 1:1 ratio.

As an example, if you have 50 named accounts in your territory, and you know that on average there are 5.4 buyers in each account (statistics according to the CEB), you have approximately 250 buyers ...