Social Selling is an engagement game. To be effective, you need to think like Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked.” Apps like Tinder, Snapchat and Instagram all have ‘The Hook Experience’ in common. The Hook Experience refers to the model of manufacturing desire with four repeating steps: Investment > Trigger > Action > Reward.
Now imagine, if you can apply this method to social-selling. From my own personal experience as a social seller, here are 3 effective habits to engage prospects in a chaos of social noise.
Habit #1: Investing in self-gratification
You’re probably already building your personal brand through online self-gratification. We already look our best on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder, et. al. Make sure that you’re consistent across your social media outlets. If your social profiles have inconsistencies, you’ll get a range of audiences and they’ll get confused about who you are.
Personally, I audit and update my LinkedIn and Twitter profile twice a month with my value proposition. In order to stay relevant — and valuable — I write about a topic that hooks the type of prospect I want to engage with. This year, I’m focused on sales enablement and social selling (thus, writing this blog).
Does your profile clearly state who you are looking to connect with and why they should engage?
Habit #2: Looking for triggers with intentional consumption
Social listening is intentional consumption. Millennials have short attention spans. To be effective, we must be prospect-obsessed. I’m not advocating for stalker-level obsession but you should act as a digital servant. According to Nir Eyal, we respond to associations, memories, and certain emotions which dictate what we do next.
To apply his theory to social-selling, I simply go on Twitter and target a prospect by searching for a specific #hashtag related to my specialty (like #salesenablement).
Then I look for associations. These can be pain-points I can solve or emotions I can evoke. Be creative when you look for triggers.
In the example above, Kevin Thomas Tully, CEO & Founder of ScealCom inadvertently gave me a safe passage to connect because he states he’s “always willing to talk about sales enablement and optimizing the sales process.” A perfect fit!
I carefully listened to online conversations and visited his LinkedIn profile to familiarize myself with his recent activity. I made sure to learn about his presence in the social-selling community, and to read the articles he’s most passionate about (what he shared with his own followers). I carefully vetted the services he provides via his company’s website and obsessed on how to offer better current sales enablement packages.
To win Kevin’s trust, another tool I use to tune in for internal triggers is an extension called Crystal Knows.
Habit #3: Instant Gratification in Action
Social Selling is all about engaging and influencing now, not later. To be a digital servant, I act on timely content and I provide value by re-tweeting to increase exposure. Re-tweeting is the most efficient method. But to hook a prospect, we must provide value by performing a variety of actionable rewards that give the prospect what they want throughout the entire buying process.
The biggest challenge, however, is authenticity because retweeting can only go so far. True magic happens when you take the online engagement offline.
To me, being authentic means being vulnerable. For example, making grammar mistakes in direct messages is a sign of non-automated banter (aka you’re a real human). Mistakes are merely opportunities to solve problems, and they open the door to further conversation. In school, have you ever pretended to know less than you did to get the attention of someone you had a crush on? Well, some things never change.
Now back to my conversation with Kevin Thomas Tully…
As an outbound, social-selling activity setting, this appointment took me 5 minutes to schedule. Compare that to cold-calling 60 leads in 6 hours to set 1 appointment, which is why I believe social selling passes the effectiveness test. I’m also happy to announce that Kevin Thomas Tully is now a full-fledged sales enablement service partner of PandaDoc!
Social Selling is a trendy term that’s thrown around often these days. I’ve seen too many companies and pundits broadcast without genuinely engaging with advocates (their fans and/or followers). Broadcasting is not social-selling, folks.
As a rule of thumb, apply Nir Eyal’s hook and let me know how that changes your game.
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