Where do you spend most of your time generating new business? If it’s not on your centers of influence in Marketing, you may be wasting your time. If it is, here are several tips to catapult your return on investment using social media with center of influence examples.
Why Spend the Majority of Your Time Marketing to Your Center of Influence?
Attendees at Nashville’s Selling Without Selling workshop answer this question best.
Over 200 people were polled at the workshop and the overwhelming majority spent at least 10% of their time cold calling. Only 25% said they spend 50% or more of their time focusing on their centers of influence. But, they admitted that their centers of influence generated most of their business.
The takeaway?
Spend the time you set aside for sales on cultivating new business from your centers of influence, because that’s where most of your new business lies. It doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time focusing on strategies that generate very little.
How TO REACH YOUR CENTER OF INFLUENCE IN SALES WITHOUT COLD CALLING?
In the past, cold calling was a primary means of generating new business. Some brokers still work with clients they won through cold calling many years ago. But, cold calling is time consuming, and in a rapidly evolving healthcare market, you need to streamline your sales efforts. If you don’t, you risk getting left out in the cold.
In today’s digital age, streamlining your sales process means using more efficient means to reach prospects. For better or worse, it means using social media. Platforms like LinkedIn are designed for generating better connections in less time. A little effort on these platforms goes a long way.
So, if you’re only going to spend a quarter or so of your time selling, do it on social media, and focus your efforts on LinkedIn. You can use Twitter and Facebook to support what you do on LinkedIn.
To help you get started, we breakdown five helpful social media tips.
5 DOABLE Tips to Catapult Your ROI Using Social Media
Social media can help you achieve better results, faster…so long as you’re using it effectively. Here are five tips to help you use social media like a pro!
- Use LinkedIn to do research. LinkedIn is where all the business people hangout. You can do really effective research with this platform by seeing who’s connected to who. But, this research should be directed by strategy.
If you also want to streamline your research process, try these incredibly powerful research tricks:
- Follow HR directors in your industry as they move from company to company, of course you’d want to develop a relationship with these individuals, so you can leverage their connections as they change employers.
- Use Google News Alerts to get updates about clients and individuals you want to connect with to cultivate business. Use whatever appears in the news cycle as your “excuse” to reach out and speak with them.
- Focus on what you can realistically achieve. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a social media expert to be successful on LinkedIn, or other social media platforms for that matter.
Brokers that successfully generate a lot of business from their centers of influence on LinkedIn and other social media outlets set smaller goals. They have a narrower focus, but they execute that focus with vigor.
If you’re social media sales process is all over the place and lacking effectiveness, it’s time to set smaller goals and narrow your focus. Build confidence and give yourself time to see that consistently focusing on one or two smaller goals yields big results.
We recommend the following:
- Limit your pipeline development to one day per week, ideally Tuesdays between 10am and 2pm since many brokers find they are most successful at those time.
- Set a realistic goal. For example, list 3-4 referral sources, 4-6 companies, and 6 clients to target and nurture those leads until they either decide to do business with you or go cold.
Focusing on less is an exercise in being more intentional with your marketing, and intentional marketing is what selling through social media is all about.
- Target a variety of people. You don’t always have to target HR professionals, companies, or executives. Widening your scope to include lawyers, accountants, and IT consultants is a good way to network your way into a relationship with a new business partner. However, this strategy works best when the person you’re targeting is a trusted advisor for the prospect you’re trying to land.
To decipher whether an advisor to a prospective client is worth nurturing as a lead, we suggest asking them about what they do for the company you’re ultimately trying to land as a client. If they are in tune with that company’s needs and goals—beyond the basics of what they’d need to know to assist them —they’re worth getting to know.
- Keep your circle small. This may sound counterintuitive, but there is a limit to the number of people you can hold in your center of influence. Those people you regularly have meaningful conversations with are the ones who will connect you to most of your new business, so respect your limitations and cap the number of people you regularly connect with to the number you can manage without damaging the relationship. Of course, those selected to be in your center of influence should be the ones sending you business.
- Cross-promote on Twitter and Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are two additional networks worth investing in. But, if time is limited, and it is for many brokers, use these networks as an extension of your LinkedIn strategy. For example, you would want to follow the individuals on your focus list (see point #2 in this list) and build your relationship with them on these platforms as well as on Twitter.
Need Help?
If you’re more comfortable or familiar with cold calling, it’s worth learning how to sell on social media. However, while you increase your knowledge of social media sales and marketing, you need to be compiling content. Social media is all about building relationships through valuable content. Of course, time is of the essence, and you’ll need to be as efficient as possible. That’s one of the many ways we can help. As an employee benefit solutions company, we provide an array of benefit administration solutions, including information you can promote on social media to attract new clients.
