This is the second of a five-part blog series based on the SalesGuru Community Event "Social Selling in Action: Best Practices from Eloqua's Top Salesperson." Special thanks to Docusign for sponsoring the community and this event. Catch up on part one here.
Every successful business person has a daily process. Part two of this series follows the conversation I had with Jill where she shares specific tools and tactics of her best practices for social selling, and how she manages work & life.
Jill:
My day starts pretty much the same way every day. Usually in bed, before I get out of bed, I have my iPad and my iPhone and I'm checking my email for any updates on a couple of different social sites, so LinkedIn and Twitter primarily. Also, our internal use of SalesForce.com's Chatter tool and I'm checking that feed as well, the summary from the day before.
When I get to my desk and I work a lot primarily from my home office...being a mom of 4 I need to be flexible in terms of getting kids from the school bus to activities and such. So I open my email, I open SalesForce.com, I open LinkedIn, and then depending on what time I have and where I am in the quarter...right, we're kind of mid quarter right now and so my social activity will slow down and my pipeline progression to close will take a bigger portion of my time.
But I open my TweetDeck and my Eloqua TopLiners Community because there is a tremendous amount of great content in those channels. The other ways I consume content there are some basic things like - sign up for alerts on the company I'm trying to target, sign up for their email communication. One of the reasons I do that is so that I'm now subscribed to their distribution list and they're sending me their email communications and it's keeping that future advocate top of mind to me. It is also giving me some new insight into that company - new product offerings, maybe an event they're hosting, maybe a campaign they're running and so I'll subscribe to their communication.
I read everything my buyer reads.
And I do what I love. So I'm not selling switches and routers and nothing against anyone who sells switches and routers but that doesn't get me jazzed or juiced. It's not something that I find interesting. So I have chosen Eloqua because I passionately love working with marketing and sales professionals and so I read everything they read. I read the Chief Content Officer magazine, I read B2B Magazine, a number of different blogs. I read analyst reports and so I follow SiriusDecisions, IDC, Aberdeen, Forrester, and their influencers.
I remember it's not just about the buyer, but the influencers of the buyer and I connect with those influencers because they have an impact on the buyer's decision."
Matt:
How do you prioritize how you spend your day? Because all of these things could consume and take you down a path where you're not getting other things done. So how do you balance your day to do the right things in the right order?
Jill:
I don't think about it as work/life balance. I live life and work is part of my life. And I live life. My children are very involved in my professional career and I have an incredibly supportive husband who celebrates my success.
When I won the Employee of the Year award and came home with the gorgeous Gold Marque Award, the kids had made an Eloqua sign and had made me cards and there were flowers. So as a family we celebrate each other's successes and they celebrate my successes as much as I celebrate that my 13 year old won Student of the Month for trustworthiness. I put that on Facebook.
I also put on Facebook that I loved Jeremiah Owyang's Slide Share PowerPoint recently on social business and I shared that piece of content in 3 different channels. I shared it on Facebook, I shared it on LinkedIn and I tweeted about it.
I took one piece of content that really resonated with me that I thought my network would benefit from and I shared it quickly and easily on 3 different networks. It's been retweeted, it's been reshared on LinkedIn and folks have liked it on Facebook. So that's a piece of content that really has resonated and it's something I did just that morning.
Sharing content has become incredibly easy. It is drop dead easy and you just need to start doing it. When you read an article look for the Share button, look for the Twitter symbol and make sure you put your voice on the tweet. I can't say that I always do it, in particular if it's a very long tweet and I go to retweet it and there aren't any characters left because a tweet is 140 characters. If there aren't any characters left, I may have to retweet something without adding my voice to it.
Tweeting and retweeting, an example on Twitter, if someone follows me on Twitter I get an email notification. I then go look and see who that person is first on Twitter. I decide if I want to follow that person back on Twitter. I look at their tweet stream and if they tweeted about something that resonates with me that I want to share with my followers, I will immediately retweet after sharing the piece of content or liking that tweet.
So someone has followed me on Twitter, I followed them back and I've retweeted them. Then I will take that to LinkedIn, where I may have even gone to LinkedIn before even deciding to follow and retweet that person. So really looking at, not in social silos, but really thinking in multiple channels how do you get to know more about that individual?
From a time management perspective it's an evolution. So I have been very socially active for a number of years and I've been on LinkedIn from the very beginning; I was one of the very early users of Twitter and so it's an evolution. And in the beginning, I'll admit that I had to schedule time on my calendar for using LinkedIn or for learning how to use it.
In the beginning, I had to schedule the time, but after doing it on a regular basis it really becomes muscle memory.
And people might think I'm wildly insane and I probably am. But on my mobile device I have my Tweet Deck, I have my LinkedIn, I have my Facebook and I have my Chatter and even when I'm on a run...or like earlier today I was on the treadmill, I was checking those streams and I was digesting content and sharing that content as I digested the content.
So I live life and social is part of my life, work is part of my life, events are part of my life and I just incorporate all these channels into my life and they've just become part of my muscle memory and what I do on a regular basis.