A spoken presentation (YouTube) by Jon Ferrara about growing sales through social content and conversations. Key advice: research people before engaging (use tools like Nimble), engage to serve rather than to sell, transition digital interactions to human face-to-face meetings, ask questions and listen to learn how to add value, and let relationship-building lead to business opportunities over time.
Chapters
I share content that is inspiration, education around those areas. And then usually people who want to be better at those things listen to those types of posts and engage also the audience of the influencer who wrote it, also the influencer themselves. All these people will engage. And then what you do is before you engage and respond to that person, ideally you do a little homework on that person so you can engage in a more one to one, relevant, authentic way. Like with you, I'd see that you are a small business influencer and consultant yourself and I might reference that in our in the response to you. And there's tools that you could use in researching somebody very quickly in the process of engaging with them online in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Nimble happens to be one of them. And then when you do engage, don't engage with the purpose to sell them, engage with the purpose to serve them. I believe that service is the new sales. And that's sales is a four letter word. And nobody wants to be sold, but everybody wants to buy a better version of themselves. That's what you should be selling, a better version of that person. Which means when you engage with them, whether in the little bit that you do digitally or ideally in that digital engagement, what you want to do is bring that digital communication to a human face to face. When you do that, don't just jump into talking about yourself or your products or services. What you want to do is you want to do your homework about the person and the company, ask them some questions, shut up and just listen. If you let people talk, they'll tell you everything that you need to know in order to find ways to add value and then make suggestions about how you might help them grow by introductions or ideas about growing their business. If you do all that properly, they're going to ask you about yourself. And at that point you can talk a little bit about yourself or your products and services. But ideally, the whole purpose of doing the cycle of engagement isn't to sell, it's more to serve and to build relationships that are pay forward relationships that ultimately will come back around and help you grow.
