“People do business and keep doing business with people that they know and trust.” – Kristen Lawrence in today’s Tip 718
How do you stay authentic?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Kristen Lawrence. Kristen is a Senior Director of Customer Success at Seismic. She is a seasoned, results-driven leader who specializes in digital selling and sales enablement. Here she is:
Kristen Lawrence: I can’t wait to travel again. I can’t wait to go to conferences and trade shows and customer headquarters for in-person pitches and meetings and events. I just love meeting face-to-face and having dinner or drinks and networking and getting to know my customers better on a personal level. Because that’s such an important part of not only gaining a new customer but also nurturing their ongoing health and keeping them a loyal client.
People do business and keep doing business with people that they know and trust. But as we all know that face-to-face time is on hold for the time being, which is why it’s more important than ever before to have those additional touchpoints online and using social selling or digital selling as a way to stay connected throughout the customer life cycle.
And I think most sellers agree with how important it is to share content online. And there are so many great tools to help you find and share company content. Your company might have one already, but with hundreds, if not thousands of sellers at accompanying with access to the same corporate content. One challenge I hear a lot is that sellers want to know how do they distinguish themselves from everybody else? How do they stay authentic?
So here are a few tips to help you stay authentic with the content that you share on social media. For starters, mix it up, share a balance of company content and third-party content. Meaning articles published from outside sources like Forbes or entrepreneur or a trade publication that doesn’t talk explicitly about your company. Now mostly then brands recommend an 80-20 rule, which means share 80% third-party or human interest content and just 20% company content. And a lot of them are even moving more toward a 90-10 balance. Because social selling or digital selling is all about building your personal online brand. And you can use a tool that helps you find that third-party professional or personal human interest content. And don’t be afraid to share that. Post articles about sports you like and books you’ve read and causes that you care about. Alongside articles from third-party industry publications. And of course your company content too.
Next, once you’ve found those articles, don’t forget to read everything before you share it online. I heard a story once about a sales executive that thought he was sharing a piece of content from a neutral source about trends in their industry, but he didn’t read it, and turns out it was written by a competitor and it promoted their products and services. Now, good content sharing tools they have checked for that. They have checked for competitor mentions that are built-in. So if he was using one of those tools that would have never happened, it would have been stopped before it was published.
But regardless, it’s really important that you read all of the articles and content before you share it. You might get asked about that one time about what you post, but most of all, when you share content online, it’s a direct representation of your brand and your interests, and you should be proud of that. So read all of your content first.
Then another way to increase your authenticity is to add your own commentary before you share content. It’s a great way to humanize that article and make it a little bit more unique to you. So you can add an introduction to the article that calls out a key takeaway or a statistic, or you can add your own opinion or perspective, or even ask a question to start building a dialogue and create a conversation. Start to build those digital relationships online.
And then finally, keep it consistent with content tools that make finding and sharing content easy. It’s honestly as simple as spending a few minutes a day to find and schedule and share and engage with others on social media, but just like anything worth doing. You need to build it into your daily routine and you can start slow if you need to. But then before you know it, it’ll start to become a habit, and eventually, you’ll be able to look back at this amazing, powerful online digital brand that you’ve built along the way.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Kristen and Seismic, click over to DailySales.Tips/718 where you’ll also find a complete transcript of her tip.
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!