It Ain’t Social Selling If You Don’t Do Goal Setting

Bob Woods

Sales and setting goals for salespeople go hand in hand. Like ice cream and sugary toppings. Miley Cyrus and controversy. Or airlines and headaches.

Something else that goes hand-in-hand is quotes from famous people and articles like this one. When it comes to business-related quotes and quotable people, there are few people better to draw from than Tony Robbins. I especially like one of his quotes on this article’s topic of goal setting:

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
~ Tony Robbins

I think this is especially true in Social Selling, an area that sales and business professionals may not “get” when they first hear of it. Once they do start to learn about it, though, they’ll likely feel overwhelmed and wonder where to start with it.

This is where goals come in, and why setting them before you take the Social Selling “plunge” is necessary.

While I’d love to be able to teach you everything I can about Social Selling goal setting in this article, there’s no way I could do the subject justice in this format. For example, I have a whole chapter on it in my workbook, and I could spend a half full day teaching it in a seminar. In other words, it ain’t gonna happen in under 500 600 700 words (It’s tough to keep an article like this short).

Instead, I’m going to start you on turning the invisible into the visible with these tips:

Begin with the end in mind. While this is taken directly from general sales goal setting, it applies with Social Selling as well. Here’s the big question: In a year from now, if you said, “this was an amazing social media year for me (and/or our company),” what happened that made it so good for you? When you can answer this question, you can then build out your plan.

Measure a few specific items. As you may know by now, the Social Selling process can involve numerous moving parts. My advice: don’t try to do everything at once. Select a few of these elements with which to begin, and then measure the activity around them:

• Brand awareness/PR
  
• SEO/Website Traffic
  
• Customer interaction/Visitor Loyalty
  
• Lead Generation/Conversion rate
  
• Conversations/engagement
  
• E-commerce
  
• Education
  
• Market Research
  
• Advocacy
  
• Entertainment
  
• Growing a mailing list

If you find you’ve done a good job at integrating two or three items from the above, toss in another one or two. Keep yourself busy with it, but don’t overdo it. After selecting your items, build out some realistic goals that deal with where you would like to see results in three, six, nine and 12 months.

Determine activities that will help to achieve those goals. This is the proverbial “to-do” list. Determine what it is you need to do, decide how often you need to do them (daily, weekly or monthly), and then… do them! Here’s a few examples of what you can do (all are from LinkedIn-related activities):

• Request to connect with the people who view your Profile (the “Caller ID” strategy… very powerful)
  
• Request to connect with current clients
  
• Connect with current prospects
  
• Meet with/call your first-degree connections to exchange introductions
  
• Make introductions for others
  
• Post status updates
  
• Write and post your own (or company-supplied) Published stories
  
• Join new LinkedIn Groups

These are just a few of the many goals you can set for yourself.

Schedule your “to-do” items in your calendar as recurring events.Pretty simple here. Put specific times around each of your to-do items (or combine them into a “Social Selling Power Hour/Half-Hour). Then enter them into whatever calendar you use (Outlook, Google Calendar, etc.) as recurring events for whatever time period you’ve chosen. Just make sure you make the commitment to actually tick these items off of your list, even if you have to move around some time blocks on your calendar to get them done.

Also keep in mind that you can use Social Selling throughout the sales process. Here’s how.

I’ll end this article with another quote from Tony:

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
~ Tony Robbins

In other words, if you haven’t set any goals, you’ll never reach them. If you’re not getting any sales leads and closing business using whatever ways you’ve been using before, those methods won’t get you what you need now or in the future; in this case, closed deals. Social Selling definitely helps with the latter; goal setting is the way to go with the former.

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

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