Many sales professionals I talk too struggle with determining when engaging with a new prospect is appropriate in the online space. Sharing information, listening to the conversation and doing for others are often described as being the core attributes of a savvy social sales player. At the same time, we’re sales people, and we have quota’s to achieve each month. It’s natural to wonder how soon is too soon?  While I don’t have a perfect answer, because the answer to the question is that it depends, I will emphatically say that you don’t engage the first time you show up. You make your mark – over time – demonstrating your willingness to share your expert credibility for the benefit of others. Potential buyers will soon recognize that you are someone they need to know. There aren’t any shortcuts; however, you have to put in the time to become known.

So beyond posting a profile on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, how do you actually go about creating a lead generation, customer engagement strategy that quickly helps you achieve your objectives? What steps do you follow to help you pave the way for a smooth connection when the time is right?

This simple five step model that I created may help you organize your approach to engaging with the prospects on your lead list.

1. Target. In our book, The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, Joan and I talk in detail about determining the characteristics of your ideal buyer. Until you do, you will find it difficult to determine where they congregate online. If you expect to earn a return on your investment, you need to make sure that you are focused on generating leads in the right places AND with the right people. Your mantra is “go narrow/go deep”. The more focused you are the faster you get sales traction.
2. Search. Having clearly identified the attributes of your ideal buyer, you can use tools like LinkedIn’s advanced saved search feature to create social lead generation lists that are then updated automatically each week. On Monday morning’s, you can look forward to receiving an email from LinkedIn that alerts you to the new people having joined your lead generation list. Imagine starting the week with a list of potential buyers to pursue. Research information about buyers, their companies and source real time trending topics in the Answers section of LinkedIn or through search.twitter.com  Remember that you need to know as much information about your potential buyer as you can and that includes trends they care about, as well as what the competition has to say when you leave the room. Never under estimate the power of search in your lead generation toolkit. And back to point #1, you need to know exactly what you are searching to find.
3. Review. Now that you have you saved search list, what do you do next? First organize your list and create a priority focus hierarchy. Use a simple A, B, C mapping approach to determine who gets attention first. Obviously, you’ll be connecting with you’re A prospect first, followed by B’s and so on. Since LinkedIn is a sales power tool, start there and spend 10 minutes per person reviewing their individual profiles. You can make the process even easier using a tool like Gist, a social aggregation tool that integrates with Outlook, Gmail and a host of other email services. Gist does the undercover work for you and locates information about a person on the social web saving you the time of searching various social sites on your own.
4. Plan. You’ve laid the groundwork. Now it is time to reach out, but how will you approach it? Will you need an introduction, or do you feel confident enough in your ability to craft a message that captures enough interest for your buyer so that they want to talk to you? If you need an introduction, who can help you? What can you do for them in return? The key is to prepare. You may have one shot at getting that yes.  Use it wisely!
5. Connect. Finally, you reach out to your prospective buyer. Remember to keep the initial contact focused solely on “what’s in it for them”. This isn’t the time for your feature dump. Keep your focus on the goal – giving your prospective buyer a compelling reason to start a conversation with you. Once you make that contact, you can develop a relationship that will open to the door to sales opportunities.

Barbara Giamanco, co-author of The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media (Praeger, August 2010), is a sales and social media strategist, consultant and speaker with a 30-year proven track record in sales.  She capped a corporate career at Microsoft, where she led sales teams and coached executives.  Throughout her career, Barb has sold close to $1B in products and services.  Today, Barbara is CEO of Talent Builders, Inc. a sales performance consulting business. Known as a sales transformer, top sales teams hire Barb to help them leverage new media to explode sales performance. A sought after speaker, Barb has facilitated programs with thousands of executives who consistently rate her as “exceeding expectations”. She is a certified Get Clients Now!™ facilitator, an Inscape Certified DiSC® Trainer and earned her coaching certificate from the Coaches Training Institute. http://www.TheNewHandshake.com

“Whether or not you believe classical methods work, Social Lead Generation does not discard the model; it leverages a new media to change the protocols and methods of communication.” So writes Marcio Saito, blogger at The Click Company Community. He goes on to say that, “Social Media creates interactive channels and allows companies to nurture engaged communities in a way that is scalable. In Social Channels, it is possible to communicate without intruding, to listen to a large number of people and aggregate it effectively, and to personally engage when appropriate.” For me, the two most important points in that sentence for sales people to pay attention too are: “listen” and “engage when appropriate”.

As you transition some of your sales prospecting and lead generation activities over to the use of social sites, the principle when communicating in the online world is much the same as meeting someone face-to-face. Create opportunities for connection and visibility without direct selling approaches. You want to get your potential buyers engaged in a conversation with you, and you do that at the right time, in the right way, the right place and without talking about yourself. Ask a thought provoking question that engages them and others in dialog. Remember that your sales role is what it has always been: to create a relationship with a prospective buyer that then moves the buying process forward. The social web changes everything and nothing more significantly than the changes in buyer behavior. Now that your prospects have moved to online social communities to acquire information about products and services to meet their needs, you must move there too.

Listening plays a critical role in the online space and can benefit sales professionals in two ways:

1. Quickly respond to a request to help someone else or respond to a question that captures attention from others in the group. Positive visibility is your success outcome.
2. Use participation in groups as an opportunity to “listen” to trends in the conversation, which could be something valuable you’d share with your potential clients.

A good rule of thumb when getting started with your online networking efforts is to invest the time to learn the spoken and unspoken rules of each community that you join. Always begin by joining groups where your potential buyer is most likely to participate. Observe how people communicate with each other in the group before diving in.

The social web provides sales professionals fantastic opportunities to build emotional equity with within groups and with potential buyers before actually engaging in a 1-1 sales dialog with anyone. As you gain experience working in the online space, creating new business relationships will begin to happen naturally. You won’t even worry if you are engaging at the right time, because you will know that you are. That’s lead generation at its best.

Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither is your online sales presence and reputation. Generating leads using social tools like LinkedIn makes the lead generation process easier and faster than it used to be, and you need to resist the temptation to expect an immediate sale the moment you jump online. Your success depends on having a purpose, plan, persistence, participation and above all – patience! And, that’s pretty much what’s required of sales success anyway, whether your lead generation efforts are happening online or off.

Barbara Giamanco, co-author of The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media (Praeger, August 2010), is a sales and social media strategist, consultant and speaker with a 30-year proven track record in sales.  She capped a corporate career at Microsoft, where she led sales teams and coached executives.  Throughout her career, Barb has sold close to $1B in products and services.  Today, Barbara is CEO of Talent Builders, Inc. a sales performance consulting business. Known as a sales transformer, top sales teams hire Barb to help them leverage new media to explode sales performance. A sought after speaker, Barb has facilitated programs with thousands of executives who consistently rate her as “exceeding expectations”. She is a certified Get Clients Now!™ facilitator, an Inscape Certified DiSC® Trainer and earned her coaching certificate from the Coaches Training Institute. www.TheNewHandshake.com

How can businesses open the floodgates?  Is there a strategy for involving customers in your business decisions?  These are the questions we are all asking as we examine and explore the power of the social media.

According to an editorial in Selling Power Magazine, Gerhard Gschwandtner said we must stop selling in the old way.  He wrote, “. . . selling has fundamentally changed and pursuing the old tried-and-true tactics results in more of the same: high stress and lower sales.”  He went on to discuss what he called the “conversation” economy and gave us action ideas that correspond with the new handshake:

1) Join the conversation

2) Match your sales process with the way customers buy

3) Replace pitching with collaboration and

4) Make buying easier and create social networks that showcase your knowledge.

In The New Handshake:  Sales Meets Social Media, we introduced a decision-making model that might help companies understand how to involve people and at what level.  Tannebaum and Schmidt (T&S) created this model in the early 1970’s and published it in the Harvard Business Review.  We combined and reworded the stages to make it easier to comprehend within the framework of the social media.

Basically, what T&S did was create a model based on participation and authority, theorizing that as you give more participation to groups in the decision-making process, you give up authority or control.  This then becomes a clear and a basic question company’s must address as they become more transparent.

The model begins with complete authority in the Tell Mode:  You simply tell people what you want and expect no feedback.  As you move up the continuum slightly, giving up some authority, you move into the Sell Mode.  Here you share your decision by “selling” or persuading others to your point of view.  You really don’t want feedback, but you at least care about what others think.

The third stage moves toward the center of the continuum where you’ve made your decision, but you are willing to change it.  You are in the Test Mode.  You throw the idea out there and listen to the responses and maybe you’ll change your mind.  In the fourth stage, you move into the Consult Mode.  Here you have not made a decision.  You wish to consult with others and listen to their views and then you will decide what to do.  Finally in the last stage, the Join Mode, you join with others to make the decision together.  This is where you have the least authority and the most participation.

Ways to Adapt the T&S MODEL To Open the Floodgates

Excerpt from The New Handshake. . .

1. Use the Tell and Sell Modes to create visibility. Your blog posts and
your Tweets simply tell readers about your product or service. You
might also add information about the proper use of the product or
service and you could include testimonials from others. The Tell
and Sell Modes’s purpose, then, is to create an understanding of the
product or service, not to engage the customer in decision making.

2. Use the Test Mode to discover new ways to operate, to try out new services, and to explore how services are being provided. You ask them to react to what you have created or decided.

3. Use the Consult Mode to enable you to really engage your customer.
If a large number of your customers are hooked into the social media—that is, your customers are actively involved by creating blog posts, they are responding to and bookmarking the content on the Web, or they are signing up on social media sites—you can engage them in many of the decisions that your company might face.

4. Use the Join Mode when you want your customers to make decisions
with you. In the Join Mode, you no longer make the decision alone.
Here you share decision-making with the customer in a completely collaborative manner. This level of participation becomes messier.

The best example of the Join Mode and the social media is with Wikipedia. The founders of Wikipedia decided to “crowd-source” their online encyclopedia, with the idea being that many people have more information
together than we each have separately.” This model presents a new way to think about how much customer involvement you want and how the social media might play a role in that involvement.  It gives us some tips for developing a strategy for opening the floodgates.

Sign up and get the first chapter of The New Handshake:  Sales Meets Social Media by Joan Curtis and Barbara Giamanco or purchase early.