 Hello and welcome to our Business Skills webcast series. I'm Michael Bunker. I'm an employee of Redback Conferencing. I'm very excited today because we're joined by Raul Koumar, who is the CEO and founder of Resignate. So welcome and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me here. Absolutely pleasure. Everyone, I'm really excited today. We've got an amazing topic. We're looking at the world of social selling. And this is something that I've been trying to wrap my head around for quite a while. So I'm very excited that you're here and you're here to impart your wisdom on us. So let's kick things off straight away and tell us about the world of social selling. Yeah, social selling is fundamentally a trend that started around ten years ago with the explosion of social media. There were a lot more channels becoming available other than the traditional channels of phones and meetings and traditional networking. And social just allowed salespeople to use a completely different set of channels and tactics to reach out to their buyers. And social selling is just the art and science of leveraging these channels to reach out to the buyers, to prospects and to competitors. And to staff if you want to hire them. So changing the landscape. Completely. Yes, well and truly. Very good. So tell me more about it. So let's jump straight in. So with social selling, what can we expect in today's day and age instead of just the outbound telephone calls and everything? What are salespeople needing to do? Yeah, look, you need to firstly be on the platforms and be on the platforms not just as someone who's present, but be on the platform as a brand. I signed up to a gym membership about 20 years ago and I haven't really been. I've continued that membership and that presence doesn't help. You know, you need to actually be actively engaged. So social is about leveraging LinkedIn, leveraging Twitter, leveraging the other channels. And don't make the confusion that Facebook is not relevant or Instagram is just for B2C landscapes. You'd be amazed at the number of B2B companies and B2B buyers who are looking at non-traditional channels quite seriously. So it's just about leveraging social and digital channels to advance that sales agenda. Very cool. Shall we get started? Let's get started. All right. Well, firstly, thank you for having me here. Read back in yourself as well. Thank you. It's been a pleasure working with you so far. How's this you? When Resonate, my organization talks about social selling to people, we hear a wide variety of responses. You know, we hear people saying, I don't know what social selling is or I see it just as a fad. You know, I am social selling currently isn't working for me or I want to improve. It's OK to be on that spectrum. It's OK to be absolutely anywhere on that spectrum. Social selling is not for every single industry. If you're selling to aerospace and all your buyers are in the aerospace arena or they're physicists or you're selling to the medical faculty, your buyers will not be on social. No. And if they're not on social, it's OK not to have a social presence. Absolutely. Or change industries and be in an industry which is more sexy, I suppose. But we hear a wide variety of responses from people. So why bother with social selling? There are a few reasons. Firstly, B2B buying has fundamentally changed. I mean, you've been in sales yourself for a long while. Yeah, over 10 years. OK. And you've seen it change. Absolutely. So I think even with the challenge, I'm now having even younger employees coming in and me having to explain to them, I never had a lead list. I didn't have a similar campaign to what we do here right back, which is our business skill series to showcase our platforms. Didn't have something like that. So it was a hundred percent outbound calling. Right. Where now sales guys have a lot more channels coming in. I guess social selling is another one. Absolutely. And sales has never been easier and never been harder at the same time. So that is the excuse for the for the seniors anyway. So B2B buying has changed. Analog has become digital. Yes. And we've digitized almost every version and every platform and every business unit of our businesses. For some strange reason, sales is a profession. B2B sales is still stuck in a very traditional phone call only and meetings only dynamic of working largely. Now, I'm not for a single moment suggesting that the phone is no longer relevant. And I'm not suggesting meetings that you shouldn't do them. I'm simply suggesting that just like you have digitized every part of your business, sales too needs to start including digital elements to it. Yes. So when we're going to a cafe, we're still being served food, but we're using applications like table to book the table. Yes. We're using whatever it might be. So it's important not to start making choices between, well, I'm going to choose the phone or I'm going to choose social. It is bring the social elements and the digital elements into your traditional way of working and form a new tradition, new way of working. So did you own a Blackberry at any stage? I never had a Blackberry. I was very, very attached to my Nokia's back in the day, so I never made the switch over. Right. About 90% of the market share at one stage at a B2B telephony business was very much around Blackberries. Oh, yes. Now, not many people have Blackberries nowadays. Oh, God. I had every version of the Blackberry until the iPhone 2 came out. Okay. Now, what ended up happening is not that Apple had a grand business venture, they just had a grand consumer venture. Yes. And people loved their iPhones and they brought these iPhones to work and BYOD or Bring Your Own Devices was born. Over a period of time, Bring Your Own Applications was born. What ended up happening is IT departments, much to their disgust, who didn't want to look after this new device. Not at all. Yeah, had to take that device quite seriously. And this was a classic case of consumer thinking beginning to disrupt business thinking. And now we're at a stage where the business world is nicely divided between the Samsung devices and the iPhones. And Blackberries nowhere to be found. So in your B2B sales, your buyers are beginning to get quite affected positively through their consumer habits. And they're expecting some of those engagement styles and tactics from B2B sales reps unbeknownst to them. They're not doing this in a strategic manner that I will only engage with people on social platforms. Yeah. It's just how they are working. Yes. Another question for you. Which logo out of these do you think was born first? Was it LinkedIn first to market or Facebook? I would have to say Facebook. Yeah, I thought exactly the same. Really? Until I read the stats that LinkedIn was two years prior to Facebook to market. I'm really surprised by that. It's just that when LinkedIn went to market, not many people were interested in LinkedIn as a platform because the human psyche was not wrapped around social networking. Yes. Now comes Facebook. Makes Zuckerberg really wealthy. Oh, yes. Makes the Winklevosses quite upset. And it launches Facebook. It also launches a completely different psyche, a completely different tradition of working with each other in your families. Absolutely. People take that approach, they bring it to work, and they start now looking at LinkedIn very differently as well. And I think it was Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, who said that Facebook was the best and worst thing that happened with LinkedIn. Because it created an environment where people would use LinkedIn more, but they were spending an inordinately high amount of time on Facebook. Yes. So again, consumer-oriented network completely changing business-oriented networking. Yes. If you look at Instagram or you look at Facebook today, they have business-to-business models beginning to be formed. Yes. You can sponsor. And you know, this whole thing about that Instagram is only relevant for cafes or buying swimwear. Not at all. Not at all. It would be the same mistake we'd be making all over again by not embracing a new platform or a new channel. Yes. So B2B selling has to change. B2B buying has changed, as we both have discussed. Yep. Here are some stats. I'm not a big fan of these stats, but these three stats are quite important. Yep. The first stat talks about that 98% of sales reps with more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections meet or surpass quota. Really? By the sales benchmark index. And I found that equally unbelievable until I was running a team of approximately 40 sales reps in my previous role as the CEO of a corporate training company. Yep. I had about 40 sales reps and I found that the reps with more than 5,000 connections were doing quite well. Now, I'm not saying that was the only reason that it was a contributing factor. If you move to stat 2 by Forbes, 78% of sales people using social media are outperforming their peers. If you were to look at your team, those who are very digitally and socially savvy, there's a strong correlation between that savvy and their performances as well. Just collect your thoughts at the moment. Think about it. You've got 12 reps. You will find those who are highly active on LinkedIn very good at social. They tend to have a better performance ratio as well. I'd agree with that. Okay. Thank you for that. I'm happy to buy you that case of beer that I promised you. Yes, absolutely. Three quarters of B2B buyers are using social media to research vendors and that's by IDC. So these are powerhouse research houses saying take social quite seriously. Yes. Would you fundamentally agree with A to Z being a relationship cycle? I mean, you're leading a team. You're a successful seller yourself, a sales manager yourself. Would you say that you go through suspect, prospect, outreach, qualification, meeting in the sales side? Yes. Would you also say that once you met with the person that you identified the opportunity at about 5% and then move it forward to a proposal and down the pipe to a close? Yes, absolutely. Social does not play a role everywhere. Social plays a role almost everywhere. So it's very good for suspect identification, moving things to prospect and outreaching and qualification, getting that meeting organized. However, once you've got the meeting happening, you need to move to traditional dials of meetings. Yes. Where a huge social dynamic comes into play is content marketing. So if you use content and you are moving the dials from A to Z, leveraging content for different buyer personas at different stages in their buying cycle, that content will also help you on your opportunities from one to X. However, it's a combination of social and phone together, social and meetings together that work, not one or the other. I absolutely agree with that and especially with getting down to the 100% because I know there's a report somewhere in the market where it's like individual buyers must connect with the business up to 12 times before the purchasing criteria is actually met. Absolutely. And so social fills in a lot of that. Absolutely. So a piece of research was conducted by LinkedIn and other organizations globally. It was called the State of Sales 2017. This was mid last year. They did it in Australia and Canada also in the US. The Australian data from the buyer's perspective, the blue is buyers strongly agreeing that they are more likely to consider a brand's products or services. This is B2B. Yep. If their sales reps are sharing content connected with the right people, targeting the right people, reaching out through social channels and have an informative LinkedIn profile. Now that's the buyer's perspective. I think they surveyed about 300 leaders to come up with this information. On the Swiss side, the seller's perspective, they asked sellers with high social selling index scores on LinkedIn. That's the only measure. It's a lead measure. That's not the only measure. But they asked social sellers, what's social selling doing for you? Let me ask you, I mean, if I was to say that I was to train your team in social selling, I'm hoping I will be. Yes. But if I was to train your team in social selling and they will be able to close more deals, connect with the right people, have a stronger brand, provide more insight, have better relationships. As a sales leader, would that be of interest to you? Absolutely. So be it the buyer's perspective, or be it the seller's perspective. They're on the same page. Social is working and they are on the same page, 100%. And why they're doing so is that buyers are increasingly using search and social networks to research vendors and look for solutions. My startup started in April last year. We purchased 26 things all up, including lease with Regis, as far as real estate is concerned. Every purchase started on Google and was validated through social. We purchased six of them, the purchase of the printer, the telephony equipment that we purchased. So it's interesting. It happened in my own startup over the last year as well. And buyers want to stay connected with people and sales people want to stay on top of mind. So buyers here are researching on social, on digital. Sales people want to stay on top of mind. Social is the best place for that to actually happen. And this is why companies are beginning to invest in social selling. So very quickly to you, what's your definition of social? My definition of social would be the, for us, I think the red-back definition is the content, the inspiration and education. I like that. So what we do in our marketplaces is we try to not jam anything down our customer's throat or our buyer's throat. It is all about educating, inspiring what they can do differently with digital products. And by at least giving that regular content, those regular touch points, hopefully inspiring them enough to come in and actually say, yep, we want to deal with you. Well, inspiration, education, I might steal that actually. I'll source it back to you. I define social selling in my organization, Resonate Define Social Selling as the art and science of leveraging social and digital to achieve sales and business goals. The reason I say art is you would have learned a lot about sales over the last decade, which has nothing to do with social. Absolutely. But those techniques, those tactics, those strategies are equally applicable on social. So if you are very good at referral selling, that referral selling still applies in the social sphere, it's just done socially. If you are very good at researching about an account before you made that first call, that's equally important today. It's just that you would include social in that dial today. So the art of sales, which people like Keith Eads and Tony Hughes and Jeb Blunt and Anthony Arrino have spoken about over the last decade or two decades, equally relevant today. Neil Rackham's spin selling, equally relevant today. The techniques haven't changed. It's just the landscape. The landscape has changed. So that's where the science comes into play. And the science is the tactics of leveraging LinkedIn, of Twitter, using video art for video-based calling, and so on and so forth. And it's not only social. There's a lot of confusion that social selling is all there is to it. If you asked any marketer, including the marketers here at Redback, social marketing is part of digital marketing. Very similarly, social selling is part of digital sales. There's a bigger landscape beyond social as well to achieve sales and business goals. It's not all about selling. It's about finding staff. It's about making sure you're informed and educated about your competitors. It's about knowing about your partners and supplies. For example, the video equipment that you have here, you could build a very strong relationship with the video manufacturers, with the hardware manufacturers, leveraging social who are in distinct parts of the world. It's a different way of thinking. Yeah, a very different way of thinking. So one of the things is that you'd probably agree that finding leads and finding pipe is a huge issue for us. It's getting tougher and tougher. Like you were saying earlier, sales has never been easier, but it's never been tougher either. We don't have to make a choice between traditional and social. What I educate my clients or the people I train on social selling is think of yourself as a physical persona and a digital persona and dance between the two, bounce between the two. So if you met someone at a trade show or an event, connect with them on LinkedIn and then send them an email and then go ahead and educate them, leveraging LinkedIn or Twitter and go ahead and meet with them and present and close. And we've gone from this crazy world of always be closing to never be closing. And I don't think either is accurate. You need to close at the right time in a transaction. And yeah, you need to always be opening and social allows you to open a lot better. People also ask me, I can't do social because of the time. What's the advice you give? 30 minutes a day is all it takes. Is that it? It does not take more than half an hour. If you're untrained, and this is not a plug for my services, if you're untrained. So before I met my good friend Jamie Shanks, the CEO of Sales for Life, who I partnered with for some of the content, I was spending up to four hours on social per day. It was a very high workload of, and so I was staying in the office just longer, trying to do my day job in eight hours and spending four hours on social. I've cut my cadence down to about 30 minutes a day and that's all it takes to do good and effective social selling across four or five different channels. You just need to know the tactics that I use. The hardest part is where people begin. So the partners at Sales for Life and Jamie, they came up with a very nice acronym called Feed or Find, Engage, Educate and Develop. And that's how I train social selling. I say go and find people on social networks, not only LinkedIn. The world is beyond LinkedIn. Engage with these people. Engage on their home turf. It might be Pinterest. It might be YouTube. It might be a completely different arena where you actually do the engagement. In China, I think it's WeChat. It's huge. Use WhatsApp. Engage absolutely anywhere they're willing to engage with and then move to education. Educate your network with your blogs. Educate your network with your LinkedIn articles and then develop that network further. So if there's nothing else you take from this one hour conversation, take the Feed routine and just think about it this way. You're feeding your family. You're feeding your pipeline. You're feeding your dreams and goals as cliche as it sounds. Feed is the ideal way to approach social. Find, engage, educate and develop. And survive. And maintain that job as well. So I've broken this feed up into a few arenas because I wanted to show you some hands-on pieces. As far as find is concerned, a lot of people tend to use search as their definition for find. Find goes beyond search. It goes beyond sales navigator. It goes beyond LinkedIn. It goes beyond just having a lead list into an area like profiling and into an area like surrounding. So the find module that I train is broken up into find, profile and surround. And on the find side of it, I want to give you an example. On LinkedIn, if you were to go in into your university alumni or your TAFE alumni, there is a search. All you have to do is go into LinkedIn. This is the free version of LinkedIn. So it's not the navigator. No, it isn't. You're not paying $100. And by the way, I think navigator for $100 a month is really cheap. LinkedIn, please don't put up the prices. That's not what I'm trying to say here. Please don't because we've got the licenses here too. Yeah, absolutely. Don't ever shoot at my cost. The reason I say that is a mobile phone plan typically is $100. Yes. But with a mobile phone, even if you're making 20 calls a day, you can only educate 20 people a day or engage with 20 a day. If on your LinkedIn first string connections, you have 3,000 connections with every post, you're actually engaging with whoever of the 3,000 saw your post. Yes. And the time taken in the post is no greater than a call. Right? So if you were to go into LinkedIn, the free version, and hit that lens button over there, you'll arrive at an area called schools, which is the American nomenclature for universities or colleges. Yes. Right. You go there and I went to University of Technology, Sydney, studying software engineering. You go into UTS and click UTS and you end up at their alumni. And you click that alumni and that alumni opens up 147,000 people who have in their profile UTS as their school. Yes. Now if you are selling to CIOs or chief information officers and in that search alumni arena, you were to just type in CIO or chief information. So I can see there are 331 people who are CIOs or chief information officers who went to the same university as me. Yeah. And I can use the connect button and say we have 30 mutual connections. Mm-hmm. And on top of that, we went to the same university. The same school. Could we please connect back? That's awesome. I've managed to connect up with some fairly senior people from UTS. I've managed to connect up with some fairly senior people who didn't even go to UTS purely on the back of the number of mutual connections I have. So on the fine side of it, even the free version of LinkedIn is amazing. Sales Navigator is that much more powerful and I strongly recommend having a Sales Navigator license. Yes. Moving to Profile. Let me ask you, which bio profile do you sell typically when you're selling Redback Conferencing? Oh, God. We, from all profiles, depending because it's complicated as Redback can be. There's many different products that we have. Right. So we scale everything from small businesses all the way to multinational companies. Would the CFO be a profile? Absolutely. Okay. So here is an example. This is a person at Goodman, who's the group CFO. Yep. And I have only one mutual connection with this person. Mm-hmm. Now, let's say the CFO is who I want to sell to. I've only got one mutual connection and he might not know Angus, E-Rain all that well. Mm-hmm. Okay? And we both connected to Angus. But I'm also connected to the CIO and this time with 95 mutual connections. Very nice. So I would go through that channel, build a relationship with Scott Varkiaha and eventually say to Scott, hey, Scott, would you be kind enough to drop a line in to the CFO and get me introduced? Yeah. Since I've engaged with the CIO enough, that is a back channel into another person who might be the biopersona. And in today's day and age, would you agree that one person is no longer making the decisions? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. God, our biggest struggle now is that too many of our sales guys will go in and get one champion and not realize and they've actually decision makers maybe just part decision maker. Absolutely. You definitely need more contacts just to any B2B seller is sell in person to the core persona you're selling to but connect up with everyone else because when that core persona sits down on her or his boardroom environment and says, well, we got these two providers, what do you guys think? Yeah. You'll get a very different answer if you're connected to absolutely everyone and if you've been educating absolutely everyone. Yes. All right. So on the note of surrounding prospects, some of our customers say to us that this particular client is not on social. You know, we are working in the foreign exchange arena. This person is not on social. I get that all the time. Google is a really underutilized social selling tool. Okay. And here is an example of surrounding a prospect. In this case, I'm surrounding the prospect leveraging the search Ericsson and artificial intelligence. Let's assume that I sell AI solutions and let's say I sell to all telcos and Ericsson is one of those telcos. Yes. If I was to type in in Google and set up a Google alert for Ericsson and intelligence, three stories pop up. But the story in the middle is around Ericsson's CEO on 5G revenues. Okay. So I go into that particular story and Ericsson is building AI networks for their 5G future. This could be a very good article for me to use to tag the CEO in. Yeah. It could be an article that I can use to build a relationship with everyone at Ericsson. But the other thing is because I've set up an alert for all things Ericsson and AI, I will find out on a daily basis and weekly basis wherever in the world the story broke whether that person is on social or not. It's quite funny. We've got a very amazing lead generator here whose whole role is outbound booking and meetings. His name is Mamoon. And he's extremely talented and his success comes from using the financial review. So he goes through every day, sees the articles, sees the guy's names and stuff, but I think showing because that's very old school fashion. It is very successful at it but showing him the likelihood of saying look, for those businesses adding these in there, only going to benefit from subscribing to social or not, you can't avoid Google if you want even if you want to because anything that's in print publications appears on the Google version. So when it comes to social surrounding, you've found people, you've profiled with the common connections or university commonality. I would also recommend leverage Google and other channels to make sure you've got a holistic view of the buyer which means look at their YouTube channel. Look at their Vimeo channel. Look at their marketing channel. A company called Marquetto great marketing software. They are so active on Twitter. They are so active on Insta that you can learn through those channels and go back to the country director and say, hey, amazing that you've launched marketing nation in the US. Are you launching the platform here as well? So you can use different channels to get those relationships going. On the feed routine, the second dial is that of engage, right? Engagement is about two separate things and when I was coming here this morning, I got a call and he said to me, I've connected up with the CFO. She connected with me last night. Should I now position my product and services? And I said, no, hold back. That is the thing that we mustn't do on social. We mustn't convert an initiation into a sales pitch immediately. I guess that comes with the mentality of always be closing. Of course it is. You're trying to straight away get in there. Absolutely. It's not a case of always or never be closing. You've got to pick the right time. But what I recommend then take the next four to eight weeks following their feed, sharing content, tagging them, etc. So they get warmed up to you as a persona digitally and the same in return and eventually what you can do is through a few exchanges of messages you can say, hey, I'll give you a quick call. Just wanted to have a business cashier but now they're more likely to engage with you. So I break up engagement into a variety of things and I mean great champion there with a recent win. He's not a great champion because just the serves are great. He's a great champion because he's using several tools and when it comes to nurture you need to think several tools and when it comes to initiation you need to think several tools. My good friend and business partner Tony Hughes recently wrote a book called Combo Prospecting and it's all about leveraging a combination of email, phone calls, social all hand and hand to make things happen so the philosophy of engagement has to be widespread traditional as well as social. And here's an example of something you could do. Okay. You go to your LinkedIn profile have a look at who's viewed your profile. This is my colleague Joe Barnes and this is his profile 1,076 people have viewed his profile. That's a lot of people viewing his profile. Yeah, Joey's a handsome boy. I don't get too many views. Now on the other side you can see who the profile views came from. A lot of people don't do that. A lot of people look at 1,000 people have viewed my profile. So what? But here's where engagement starts. You can see a guy called Andrew Phillips the VP public sector and financial services at Unisys. Yep. This is an opportunity to go back and say, hey Andrew thanks for dropping by my LinkedIn profile. Hope you're keeping well. If you're in the city next time let's catch up. And by the way great win for Unisys at Australian Defence. Yes. Great way of nurturing right then and right there. But it's also a great way of prospecting right then and right there because the second person Vijay Anand is the sales director at Wipro. So I can go back and say, hey Vijay thanks for dropping by my LinkedIn profile. I usually write about digital selling and social selling and sales in general. I see you're a sales leader at Wipro. Would you mind for us being connected? I'll also notice we have three connections in common and you're working in the tech space Wipro and I'm selling in the tech space as well. Nice. You subtly convert one profile view into a connection and the great thing about that it's not a phone call. Yeah. Vijay won't just forget about it because you will make sure that you will update it. Yeah. Okay. So moving to nurture and I've copped a bit of criticism openly on LinkedIn on this one here that you know why would you wish someone a birthday or an anniversary and so forth. So let me ask you how long have you been at Redback? Coming up to six years. Okay. If at your 50th anniversary your boss walked up to you and said Michael you've done a great job over the last five congratulations for your anniversary. How would that go down with you? Yeah. Recognition is always a good thing. Okay. Now I didn't know you prior to the meet today I know of you because we've been connected on LinkedIn. What if I purely out of the blue sent you a message on your 60th anniversary and saying hey Michael well done on completing six years at Redback hopefully your journey is going well all the best for the next six years. How would that go down with you? I'd be very happy and thank you for that. Yeah. There you go. And a lot of people a lot of CFOs at that time. So it is a good way of going further. Now you know some people say well what if it isn't sincere that's got to do with who you are as a person. Yes. Because if you attach your brochure to that anniversary then that's a problem. Same goes for birthdays. Yeah. I tend to send a birthday message to practically everyone who has a birthday and then in my network and about 50% of the people come back and say thank you very much that was really kind. Yeah. And I think something positive on someone is seen purely agenda driven. Yes. I can see that though from some people online and stuff but as you just said depending on who the person is. Absolutely. If all the stuff that they're posting on is all very sales and everything you might think it is that because of the negative connotation to it. Absolutely and it doesn't have to be that way. No. From a nurture perspective I use a professional angle and a personal angle. So if an organization or if they've gone ahead and acquired another organization I'll go and wish them all the best for this acquisition and so on and so forth. You would be amazed how many CXOs come back with a positive piece of information or their EAs do on their behalf and say thank you I'll pass the message on. Absolutely. I think people get too many negative things when they get something positive it's always nice. Absolutely. So this is the element Michael that doesn't get done enough on social. Yeah. And it's interesting when I asked you what's your definition of social it's very rare. That's really funny. Yeah. That social practitioners talk about the education they tend to just talk about their products and services. Yeah. So on the education side I'm talking about educating your network with content. It doesn't have to be your content. Yeah. But it must be content relevant to your buyer personas. Absolutely. Right. So if you're selling to CFOs you don't have to just talk about Redback cutting the cost of events but it has to be a percent of buyers trust content recommended by people in comparison to 48 percent of buyers trust content of companies. Wow. So if you at Redback are producing a piece of literature and that was shared by your top sales rep the chances of that being trusted by the top sales rep is higher than corporate marketing and that's not a dig at market says it's always the social media's about people. It is. You're connected to that. Absolutely. So why bother with the individual content sharing there are various reasons I'll just take the top two which is visibility and brand and the interest of time here is a an example of a client and a friend Pete accent at Oracle who we've trained. Now in this case Pete's gone ahead and written an article out around actually he has shared an article written by someone else around CFOs are going virtual and here is why and one of them is because CFO. Now David Boyer has 3,541 followers. Pete didn't write this article Pete simply took this article he added three very good lines right at the top saying interesting short interview by Anders and David on what a virtual CFO can add to a small business David the writer has gone ahead and liked it what Pete's done is he's shown Anders and David that I've shared your material and two comments. Now I hear people saying, and some of my competitors say this, a like means nothing at all. That's not true. If your network is relevant, and if the content you're sharing is relevant, a like means something. Well, let's test this. What's one of the top buyer personas you do sell to? CFO would be the biggest one. If you had 100 CFOs, and you put up a post in relations to, CFOs are now considering digital platforms to keep their organizational communities together. And out of those 100 CFOs, nine of them liked it, would you not say that there's an opportunity to take that conversation further? Absolutely. Yeah. So when people say that content and likes mean nothing at all. If you're viewing it just for the sake of vanity metrics, it doesn't mean anything at all. You're right. But if you can convert that like into a conversation, it does. And in this case, you can see that Pete could go to those 3,541 followers if one of them has actually liked and kickstart a conversation. The other example I wanted to give to you is that of branding. Here are two sales reps selling in the same market, exactly the same products and services, working for two completely different companies. One is a lovely guy called Prabhu, and the other I'm sure is a lovely enough guy. I don't know Chihotam, but Chihot. Now let's compare this. If you go to Prabhu's profile, you can see a smiling face, an article, another article, a lot of activity on the right hand side. He's wearing the Oracle badge really proudly. Yes. Okay. You go to the other profile, and it's been quite lately. Yeah. So if you're a decision maker, and you've had outreach from both of these people, you go back to both of these profiles. Where would your propensity lie to work with the first or the second? First. Yeah, it's exactly right. And that's so important from a branding perspective as well. So I want to move to the area of develop, which is the ending of our feed routine. Developing is about developing your network. And again, some of other trainers in the social setting arena and myself, we are strongly divided on this. A lot of them say keep your network very small, very targeted to just your buyer personas. Okay. My question to you is this. Your life prior to Redback, what role were you involved in? I was another sales role for an online video streaming and hosting company. Right. Are you absolutely certain in next 10 years time you will be involved in the video industry only and nothing else? No. No, you don't know that. I'm not trying to set you up for failure here. But no, no, no, I totally get that. Yeah. The point is that if you're not developing your network with consistency, you're basically saying that this snapshot of time is the only thing that is relevant. And that's not the case. You need to develop your network because you might go and connect up with a great university grad. And that university grad, you might be able to find her a role at Microsoft through your connections. And I'm not saying every single connection should be like that. And it's not all about altruism and the higher purpose. But I am saying think greater than your buyer personas. If you're selling to CFOs, you also need to think about the financial controller reporting into the CFO. You might even need to connect up with the accounts receivables person who's been in that company for 20 years and she holds great power of influence. Yes. So developing the network is quite important. I say to everyone go for five connections a day over a 200 day period, get to 1000 and then get to 5000 over a five year period of the relevant network. Now, relevant means the geography must be relevant. So I wouldn't connect with just anyone in any country with any job title. But we are all bright enough to know who is relevant in our networks. This whole thing about I'm going to constantly be focused on not growing my network because I stick to this qualitative way of working. Read a book called platforms and pipelines by Dr. Sangeet Paul Chaudhry, who's from the Harvard Business Review and from Harvard. And Sangeet talks about the importance of the growth of a network to get the impact of what's called network effects and platform dynamics. So do some study around this area and you'll see that development of the network is one of the most important things. I've written a blog around this called LinkedIn Quantity or Quality and it covers that article and my own experiences as well. I read this quote, my friend and colleague Joe Barnes introduced me to this quote, to be successful you need quantity of quality and that's the best way to look at social. Jill Rowley, who's a lady I have much respect for in the social space, one of the best social selling thinkers globally. This quote I read a few years ago that your network is now your net worth and this is so true. I want to share with you a personal experience here. Resonate launched in April last year. Our website launched two weeks ago. We took a whole year to build a website and it's not that good. Our entire revenue stream over the last year with completely bootstrapped came directly out of social. We are hitting our revenue goals for this year. We put a big goal and the whole thing was based on social. Actually, it was my mentor Tony Hughes and my good friend Tony Hughes who said you need a website. I need to introduce you to people but you need a website. So, so as to make sure I don't ruin my relationship with him, we really built that website two weeks ago. Not too much focus on it. Social has not let us down even once and yes, we're making phone calls. Yes, we're leveraging social but social is extremely powerful because your network becomes your net worth from a social perspective. My colleague Joe Barnes has 7000 connections in his first string. Gives him access to 2.8 million people in his second string. Now, I'm not saying I'm not saying that all of those people will all engage. Yeah, but we're not trying to become the largest company on earth here. Even if 1% of those 2.8 million start engaging with us of the right buyer personas, we're set. We're fine. I have 19,200 connections and those connections are not just USB suppliers sitting in different parts of the world. These are CXOs. These are people such as Peter Harmer, the CEO of IAG. This is Andrew Townen, the CFO of PepsiCo Australia. These are senior people who I'm actually engaged with. And that's 3.5 million in my second string connections. Now, back in the day, business publications would not have that kind of reach. Oh God, no, not at all. So it's important to think about the development of your network quite seriously. Here's a an example of the whole like and share thing. That's Tony. Tony is one of the most prolific B2B sales writers globally, known as the number one sales blogger globally. So my business partner Girish and myself, we've, we're just about to launch the B2B Sales Academy with him. I put up that image up there. And what that did is opened up two people in particular, and this actually goes to the point that likes and comments mean something. Craig Purcell, who's the director at Leadership Think Tank, and Paul Drinkwater, who is the sales director, APJ at token one. Straight away after that particular comment, we've gone ahead and engaged with Paul Drinkwater. Joey Barnes, our head of sales, has reached out to him, used his phone number, which he found elsewhere to connect. Well, that wouldn't have happened without that post. No, not at all. So likes and comments do mean something. So what I wanted to wrap up on was find, engage, educate and develop. Find and profile your buyers, your influencers, your contacts, socially surround them, profile them, use mutual connections, use your university commonality, so on and so forth. Engage with them. Start off by just getting connected. Once you've been connected, nurture those prospects further birthdays, anniversaries, all of that jazz. Yeah. Educate with content. So if your marketing team is writing content out there, share that content. Yes. But it doesn't have to be just your marketing team, your articles might sit in Forbes, your articles might sit on the CIO magazine, you could use Flipboard iOS news, you could use the best bloggers around video marketing, video platforms, and all of that would become your content. And then once you have found and engaged and educated, keep developing that network further and further. And yes, disconnect with irrelevant people. Over a period of time, some people will become irrelevant to your network. But eventually, your aim should be to develop that network further and further and further. As far as the tools is concerned, there's a lot of argument around there on it should be only about LinkedIn. No, there's a lot leverage Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, to get your rankings, Instagram, right on medium, right on LinkedIn, use buffer and Hoot Suite to actually push the content out there, use blogs, use blogs, your CRM, I think Salesforce and Dynamics are two of the top CRM platforms out there, using Google Alerts. Don't think that because I'm on one channel, and I've succeeded on that channel, that that is the only channel of social selling. How would you use Salesforce? Look, Salesforce is one of the most advanced CRMs out there. They also have now artificial intelligence with Einstein and everything happening too. I think Salesforce has immense capability to connect up with the outside world as far as social is concerned. So if you've met someone through social to add a keyword or an identifier in Salesforce saying from LinkedIn, you can go and do a search on your invoices later on which relationships began on LinkedIn, you could also use you know, connections of connections and add them all to the CRM. So that could be, you know, for absolutely every CRM at all. My main point is think beyond LinkedIn, I think beyond sales navigator when it comes to social selling. As far as the maturity curve is concerned, we are now sitting at the peak of the early majority. I've seen more work this year on social selling than ever before. And I was sharing this with with Tammy, your colleague, five years ago, our problem was finding social selling clients. Now the problem is finding the time to be able to deliver training. So we are in that maturity curve here. It's not something that can be ignored. Yeah. So that's myself. I would request send me a LinkedIn invite. My name is Raul Kumar or to Joe Barnes to my colleague. We're happy to be connected as long as you're relevant to my network. I'm assuming if you're attending this you are opening up to questions and just to the audience out there, we will and our follow up email have the links to both of your profiles on LinkedIn. So you guys can connect there. Thank you. While I'm tying up. So we do have a lot of questions coming through. So thank you so much. Anyone else who wants to submit questions, you can use the ask a question button in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. We do have four more minutes, but we'll run over. So people that do need to tune off at 1145 please feel free to do so. You can follow you can watch the rest of the Q&A in the on demand. So first one question comes in. Let me scroll back to the very top of the list. What's the difference between social selling and social marketing? Yeah, the question comes from Julie. Thank you very much Julie. Social selling is very much the art and science of leveraging social channels to advance the sales agenda. Yep. Marketing is the art and science of using the same channels to advance the marketing agenda. Marketing is very much communication from the company to the broader audience. But social selling is about the sales person. So in your organization, I guess, Tammy would hold the marketing scorecard whilst you're holding the sales scorecard. Would it be accurate to say that Tammy and notice respect to Tammy that she doesn't get on the phone to make calls to the clients? No, but you do and your staff do. Yes. So that's the difference between social selling and social marketing that the marketer owns the marketing scorecard for the broader communication. The salesperson and the sales leader owns the social selling scorecard to advance the sales agenda. Perfect. That's a great way of putting it. Okay, so from Christine, is social selling relevant to the CEOs and senior leadership teams? Yeah, look, it'll depend on the audience. If you're selling to high net worth individuals and you're selling, you know, a commercial package of some sort, they might not be on social, it might not be relevant. However, every leader out there in the B2B sphere, it's their responsibility to take that organizational brand forward. Yes, they want to keep their competitors at bay. They want to show their thought leaders in the market. Absolutely. A CEO who is not on social, taking their organization further on social is not really doing their job. We talk digital transformation here, we need to transform how CEOs work. So absolutely, as long as to your industry, it's relevant, you need to be absolutely active. One example I can give to you is Matt Codrington from the NERBO, the managing director, heavily active on social, himself openly talks to partners to community, congratulate staff so on and so forth. It is a great way of the sales team getting inspired to take things further. So if you want your sales team to go there and succeed on social, you need to do it as well, you can't have a version one sales leader or CEO on a version five social selling sales force. Perfect. Hannah has come through is traditional selling such as phones and meeting still relevant and we touched on this earlier. And I guess I'm going to chime in a bit because I see definitely still relevant. But it is that landscape now where you need both. Absolutely. You definitely need both. You just need to change the landscape of what you're doing. Stephen, one part of social selling requires for the sales person to write content. I don't have the time to write content. Can I still social sell? Yeah, good question. Thanks for it, Steve. Content can either be created from scratch, which takes a lot of time or it can be curated. Yes. And if you were to take curated content such as from blogs or influencers or using applications like feedly or flipboard, you'll be able to have access to content quite quickly. So if you don't have time to create content, then curate content, which is do about one to two posts per day on LinkedIn, it'll not take you any greater than 10 minutes a day. And I'm sure we all have 10 minutes a day to be able to educate our entire first string connection base. Nice. Theo. LinkedIn is the primary platform for what do you say LinkedIn is the primary platform for B2B sales? People should use. Absolutely. It is. It's not the only one. So the other ones out there, I would take Twitter quite seriously. I would look at Google, not necessarily as a social but a digital channel. I'd look at video calling. I would look at Facebook company pages and Facebook. In general, I take Instagram quite seriously. I'm also starting to dabble with Snap. So you need to think beyond just LinkedIn. Also please note the youngest generations of people are on Insta and they're entering the workforce. They are becoming B2B employees and they don't know anything about LinkedIn or Twitter and they don't care for it either. I guess one of the challenges the market would also find is how do you change your selling tactic to the platform that you're using? Because relevant articles on LinkedIn wouldn't be necessary what you'll be posting on your Instagram. So it is choosing the right content at the right time. Absolutely. And I guess this does jump forward like as you were saying in the beginning you were spending four hours of your time. Yes I was. Doing your social selling. Yes. You've gotten that down to 30 minutes. Yes. But that comes with a real strategy. Yeah it does. So where do you start? Yeah look a great place to start is firstly get on the platform. Yeah. And make sure that your your brand on the platform is manicured so that if a buyer comes back to the platform and looks at it they find a relevant B2B sales professional. That's a good start. We can always train you. Yes that's a step up. Yeah if you don't know where to start Yeah. Okay so Cameron if I'm selling to one or two large enterprise accounts is social selling still relevant to me? Yeah great question Cameron. Enterprise selling social is very relevant. We are currently training up a client which in every country has only one client. So they sell to the telco. So in India and in Africa they're selling to Airtel. In America they're selling to AT&T and wireless and in Australia the only client is Telstra and we are training them on how to do enterprise selling using social. If you're working white space or you're working very wide breadth then it's about developing the network across several organizations. If you're working in only one company you want to find out everything about that company right then and right then the best way to do that is trigger selling. Set up triggers on LinkedIn set up triggers on Twitter and find out immediately what's going on. So on LinkedIn you can set up what's called an entering leader search. So you find out the moment a company has a new leader and exiting leader search. So they've gone from your organization or who you are selling to another organization. You can take that. That's quite a powerful one. Yeah relationship further. So absolutely even if you're selling to one account social selling definitely works. Okay so got a question from Ruth. Who pays for apps and subscriptions. Is this is it a company or the employer? Yeah great question Ruth. Get that frequently. I remember the very first time I was on LinkedIn I put it on my own credit card. Yep. Because I was trialing something. The overall cost of social selling is about a thousand dollars a year for sales navigator. Yep. About a hundred dollars a year for buffer. Yep. Or Hootsuite. And about a hundred dollars a year for for Feedly. Okay. And by the way there are free versions of buffer and Feedly available as well. Yep. But sales navigator is a paid product. It's overall an investment about twelve hundred dollars that that's tax deductible. So if your employer isn't paying for it and they're in an industry where it's not relevant I understand. If they're in an industry where social is relevant and they're not paying for it just find a new job. Go and work for a company which is more progressive and more disruptive. Absolutely. I like this one from Jared. My my manager or company doesn't believe in it. What should I do. Yeah. I suppose the same same answer as the first one to the first one. Yeah. If your manager doesn't believe in it and there's good reasons for it such as in your industry social doesn't work. Yep. I completely respect that. But if your manager isn't on board because she or he's resistant to change I would actually ask the question. And I was introduced to LinkedIn and social by a gentleman called Neil Waldron young sales rep working on my sales force back in 06. And I actually pushed back for an entire year saying this is not relevant. This is not relevant. It was it took me about a year and he said this is ridiculous. You're talking about transformation. You're talking we are selling transformation. You're not willing to transform yourself. So if your manager doesn't believe in the concept and the reasons are just that he or she won't change just really question how long your organization will be safe and stable under an unchanging guard. Yes. Totally agree with that one. So Kelvin how much we've covered this off a couple of times but I'm going to kind of rephrase Kelvin's question which was how much time does social selling take per day which you've said you've gotten yourself down to 30 minutes. Any more than 30 minutes a day you're spending too much. You're spending too much. But I guess the way I want to rephrase is so when someone's starting off doing social so how much time should they limit themselves in the beginning and then have a goal to work themselves down to what you say about an hour. An hour broken up into sort of two 30 minute sections. Yeah. If you go back into find engage educate and develop. I would possibly do my find and engage in one block and I'll do my education and development in a completely different block. So it's about an hour a day. We go for bad meetings for an hour. Oh absolutely. Frequently. Yes. And the bad meeting is with one client for one opportunity. Yeah. A good post on social if you've got fifteen hundred connections can educate fifteen hundred buyers or whatever percentage of fifteen hundred sees your post in one hit. Nice. Now I really like that. And it's very true you're wasting an hour with a meeting that you know is going to go nowhere. So there's no return on that where you could be spending an hour on such. Cut your lunch hour short by half an hour. So look any last questions please send them through. It'd be great to answer just a couple more. But at the end of this presentation at the end of this talk which was very informative and thank you so much. Welcome. What are the three key takeaways you want our audience to take away learning now about social selling. Firstly. If you are a traditional seller don't ignore social. Yeah. Get on this bandwagon it's it's staying here it's not going away and I'm not saying LinkedIn will be the be all and all ten years from now the channels might change the platforms might change the tactics might change. I guess disruption is quite important. So point number one psychologically get off wherever you are currently to a newer way of thinking. Yeah. Point number two. Invest that little bit of money in getting access to the professional editions either convince your clients or do so yourself. But make that investment. And get yourself skilled up whether it's through us at resonates or you go and search Google etc. In our case what we've done is we've taken eight thousand social media features taken them down to about six hundred B2B sales features and taken them down to about sixty B2B sales tactics and that's what we teach over a seven week program. So get yourself skilled up through reading blogs to reading books. There's a book called social selling mastery by my friend Jamie Hughes combat prospecting by Tony Hughes is fantastic back in the UK Timothy Hughes wrote social selling loads of good books out there get started with that if nothing else getting a cut on any of these books none of them. I wish I was that would mean good. I will get a cut on training with me so feel free to use that as step number four very much. Well look that's all the questions we've had. Thank you guys so much for joining us today. Thank you again for joining us. Thank you for out of this one. So and to our audience out there. Thank you again for joining one of our redback business schools webcasts will be again live next month. This on demand will be up within the next 24 to 48 hours and trust me there'll be a lot of social media posts about it to get you to watch the on demand. So once again thank you thank you so much and thank you guys for joining us. Cheers.