Episode 253: Janice B Gordon

How do you supercharge your social selling? According to Janice B Gordon, one of the steps is keeping your social selling content relevant to your customer. You also have the freedom to showcase your personality and form connections. Listen to this episode of Sales Reinvented to hear the 7 strategies Janice uses to supercharge social selling effectiveness!

Outline of This Episode

• [1:03] Keep your social selling content relevant
• [2:22] How to improve digital selling capabilities
• [4:32] 7 strategies to supercharge your social selling effectiveness
• [8:07] The attributes that help a social seller succeed
• [11:12] Tools + techniques to improve digital selling
• [13:22] Top 3 digital selling dos and don’ts
• [16:22] You never know who’s reading your content

How to improve digital selling capabilities

As the world is coming out of the pandemic, everyone is online. Janice points out that if your customers are in the digital pond, you have to be right there with them. 89% of top-performing salespeople find great success on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Janice also shares that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of executives use social media to make buying decisions. They’re influential, they have large budgets, and they buy frequently. That’s why it’s important to sell online.

Organizations need to train and coach alongside the seller. They often just give them training on selling and shove them off and say “Go and do it.” Janice emphasizes that it just doesn’t work. There needs to be a fundamental mindset shift, especially for an older person. It can take them longer. You need to develop and move people from where they are one level at a time. You’ve got to walk alongside the salesperson until they get it.

7 strategies to supercharge your social selling effectiveness

Social selling is about finding relevant people to have a relevant conversation to serve them more efficiently. Relevant people are ideal customers, stakeholders, and influencers. You have to understand your target market so you know they are relevant to your particular goal. A relevant conversation demonstrates that you understand what they’re looking for, what’s useful to them, and what will help move them forward. In this episode, Janice shared 7 things that can help you do that.

1. Nail down your ideal customers (the people that love what you do).
2. Define and optimize your personal profile for sales. Your profile is the window to your expertise and personality.
3. If you have a website, people can find you through content on LinkedIn, which might drive them to download something on your website. People spend far too much time on their websites, not enough on their social profiles. If that profile doesn’t represent you, they won’t travel through it.
4. Engage and connect rather than connect and engage. You do this with your personality. Engaging comes with understanding your audience and getting on their radar.
5. Create visibility through your content that both engages and educates. It’s got to be relevant to them and help move them forward.
6. Turn social conversations into sales opportunities. Social selling is about developing relevant conversations with relevant people. Ultimately, you want it to lead to sales. Take the social conversation offline (or online) to a targeted meeting with them where they know you’ll talk about a solution with them.
7. Create a social selling customer growth plan. Once you understand your customers, you need to systemize the process so it is scalable. You want to attract more people to have more conversations to create more sales opportunities.

The attributes that help a social seller succeed

Social selling is about building opportunities to have relevant conversations. But you have to have confidence in your abilities. That’s why someone needs to walk with you to help develop the skills and confidence you may not have yet.

Janice believes that you have to engage with personality. Use your humor, your quirky stance on the world, and make it personal. You need a tribe of people that identify with your core values and your interests. It gives you a great starting point. You need to confidently talk about personal things that will engage other people. You have to do this to show that you’re three-dimensional. Janice recommends that you:

1. Share three pieces of content and ask questions over a couple of weeks. Why? To engage with the people that answer. A question develops into a conversation.
2. Co-create with the customer. Understand that you don’t have the answer to everything. But by developing your listening and questioning skills, you’ll co-create a solution to get more buy-in.
3. Lastly, you must love what you do. If you do, you’ll make a difference.

What are some tools and techniques to improve digital selling? Keep listening for Janice’s thoughts!

Top 3 digital selling dos and don’ts

What are Janice’s dos and don’ts?

• Never contact anyone unless you’ve done your research on them. You must have a feel of who the person is and what they’re about—even if you have to speak to someone else first. Why? First impressions count.
• Always use that sense of someone in your connection. Connect with them using your personality.
• Never connect and sell immediately on LinkedIn. No one wants to hear a pitch immediately.
• Don’t wrap a pitch telling someone about yourself. They never asked.
• Instead, ask them a question about something you’ve already read on their blog. Ask about them and their interests. Let them know you want to learn more.
• Do not connect and engage—engage and connect.

Read their blogs and posts, like and comment. When you comment intelligently, you’re demonstrating an interest in them. You can start a conversation. When you connect with them, they’ll recognize you and be excited for the conversation.

In this episode, Janice also shares a story that drives home the point that you never know who’s reading your content—so keep them coming.

• Resources & People Mentioned

  • Business Evolution by Janice B Gordon
  • Social Buying Meets Social Selling

  Connect with Janice B Gordon

  • Connect on LinkedIn
  • Follow on Twitter

Connect With Paul Watts

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

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Learn More About Janice B Gordon

1. Are there any great Digital or Social Selling books that you highly recommend? 101 Ways to Rock LinkedIn®Use Your Personal Brand to Rock Your Business Goals by Viveka von Rosen and Daynal Steele. Here is a free download: https://vengreso.com/101-ways-to-rock-linkedin
2. Who do you most admire in the sphere of Digital or Social Selling and why? Viveka von Rosen, Anita Nielsen, Timothy Hughes all have different approaches to social selling with process, humanistic, and concept.
3. Are there any aspects of your own Digital or Social Selling skills that you are working on improving at the moment? My SSI score hovers between 80 and 76 which is good, but my goal is to get it over 80 consistently, and to do this I need to use more of the LinkedIn tools. So, my challenge is to without investing more time on the LinkedIn platform, what can I do that bring my business and my customer value?
4. Hobbies, Interests? If I had a hobby, it would be traveling and immersing myself in different cultures. I love hosting Scale Your Sales Podcast as I get the opportunity to talk to interesting people and I enjoy most forms of exercise.
5. How can our listeners contact with you? If they ask Mrs. Google to search Janice B Gordon, you will find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube as Janice B Gordon along with the websites JaniceBGordon.com and ScaleYourSales.co.uk, email is Janice(at)scaleyoursales.co.uk