Creating an Awesome LinkedIn Profile

Potential customers and employers both research us before deciding to engage. Masterful use of LinkedIn is therefore essential for anyone seeking to progress their career or succeed in business and sales.

Everyone needs a strong and authentic personal brand and your LinkedIn profile must attract and engage those aligned with your professional purpose and values

Your LinkedIn, Facebook and other social platforms are and extension of you and your values so never write, post, upload or publish anything that is not also consistent with your employer’s brand. Stay positive and show insight in all that you do in LinkedIn.

It takes a lifetime to build your brand but just a moment to destroy your reputation

If you are currently seeking a new role, understand that hiring managers use a CV to screen candidates out of their process so make sure you tick all the boxes of skills, qualifications, experience, commitment, insight and positive personal values.

If you're a leader or salesperson, you must transform the way you use LinkedIn by moving away from it being an online CV! Instead use it as a personal brand and engagement site. Avoid posting or publishing your company’s brand, products or services. Instead make your LinkedIn profile shine as your personal microsite where the value you provide and the values by which you operate are front and center.

There are approximately 500 million LinkedIn members with 2 people joining every second of every day. The overwhelming majority of people you need, in order to be successful in your professional life, are all there. According to IDC Research, 75% of buyers use social media to research sellers before engaging. Add to this the research from Corporate Visions that revealed 74% of buyers choose the seller who first provides insight and value; it begs the question: What do people see when they find you online? Do they see a Porsche driving, quota crushing, transactional, pushy salesperson with a profile aimed at their next hiring sales manager; or do they see a warm and friendly professional offering insight and value? This video is very funny!

Here are the essential things you need to do with your LinkedIn profile to create a credible digital personal brand that paves the way ahead to accelerate engagement.

1: Settings. Go into LinkedIn settings and disable notifications to your network. Do this after logging-in by navigating to account / settings and privacy / privacy / sharing profile edits / select ‘no’. This is important because you will be making many changes within your profile and you don't want to be bombarding your network or cause them to wrongly assume you are updating your profile because you are looking for another job!

2: Photo. Ensure that your photo is a professionally friendly head and shoulders close-up. It needs to be in-focus and well lit. Always avoid a high contrast bright backgrounds. Also avoid the Zoolander Blue Steel look, glamor shots, power pics, wedding shots, mug-shots, sporting shots, trophy shots, and pictures taken more than 5 years ago. People form an opinion within a second and your photo and headline is what will most influence them. Do you appear to be credible or arrogant; friendly or cocky; approachable or unprofessional? Make sure your photo has the right background which means there should be a soft image behind. Not your cubicle which makes you look like you don’t deserve to meet with a CEO; and certainly not a stark wall like it was taken at the police station. Never hide your photo from people viewing your profile: Check LinkedIn settings under account / settings and privacy / account / basics / showing profile photos / select ‘everyone’.

3: Headline. Instead of your title and company, have a headline under your name that describes what you do for customers or those whom you serve. What is the difference you make for clients? Avoid passive words such as helping, seeking, enabling, etc. Instead make a positive statement such as ‘Transforming customer experience for retailers’ or ‘Delivering process efficiency for the mining industry’ or ‘Making customers the heart of strategy and systems’ or ‘Creating memorable events that deliver results’. Your headline should describe the results you create for your customers but not in a way that makes you look like a complete tool. Avoid cliches, acronyms and over the top phrases.

4: LinkedIn URL: Personalize and shorten your LinkedIn link (the URL that takes people to your profile). View your profile page by clicking on the small thumbnail of your photo in the upper right / then on the right side of the screen as you begin to scroll down select ‘contact and personal info’ then click on the small pencil icon, then click again on your LinkedIn URL (maybe LinkedIn will have made this easier by time you read this!), then change to something that is not already taken by another member with your name. Don’t forget to save and this link should be included in your email signature.

5: Contact details. Complete your contact details. If you are in sales, forget privacy, and instead make it easy for people contact you. Whenever you change employers, always remember to update the website links. View your profile page by clicking on the small thumbnail of your photo in the upper right / then on the right side on the screen as you begin to scroll down select ‘contact and personal info’ then update details as appropriate.

6: Summary panel. Create a summary that describes the business value you deliver and the values by which you operate. Write it in the first person and neither be too over the top nor hide your light under a bushel. This is where people can get a sense of what you believe and how you operate. This starts to create trust and set the agenda on value even before a single word has been spoken. With the permission of Emma, one of my clients, here is an example of how we transformed her LinkedIn profile to support her outreach with the heads of Government health departments. First, we changed her LinkedIn photo from her sitting in an office cubicle / workstation to instead have her dressed as the senior manager she is and standing at her CEO’s high-rise office window with a harbor view in the background. We took the photo with my iPhone so don’t use the absence of a professional photographer as an excuse!

Then we created a Summary that highlighted her insights, the value she provides, and her credentials and personal values in delivering the right outcomes for those with whom she works. This is her Summary:

The Australian healthcare sector is modernising the way services are delivered with technology and consumer expectations transforming the delivery of both public and private sector healthcare. I work with government, health and peak body organisations to achieve better outcomes through digital transformation. I help them translate their policy initiatives into business strategies, and build evidence-based business cases that make the best use of health sector funding.

I am passionate and committed to deliver for my healthcare sector clients and I have two decades of experience in senior government, not-for-profit and private sector roles. With a Diploma of Health Science, ten years’ experience as a registered nurse, and a Bachelor of Business, I have both understanding and empathy for the challenges facing the Australian healthcare sector. My extensive experience in human services, and the quality and reach of my professional network, helps me provide a positive influence with a wide range of senior stakeholders within government and industry.

This worked. Emma was immediately taken more seriously and started securing meetings with senior executives who had previously been ignoring her. She was also promoted within her company shortly after. Thanks Emma for allowing me to share all this with my readers!

By changing your LinkedIn profile to be a personal branding microsite, you enhance the way you sell but without any downside for a future career change with potential new employers. They will be attracted by the way you intelligently use LinkedIn to attract and engage potential clients.

7: Recommendations. Request these within LinkedIn from people who have engaged you in current and past roles. This is a way of powerfully building trust before you meet or speak with someone because the majority will review your profile. These recommendations are ideally from loyal customers or partners and evidence your positive values and the results you deliver for them. Simply use the request feature within LinkedIn to ask trusted relationships to make a recommendation which you will have the opportunity to review before adding to your profile. LinkedIn Recommendations are far more powerful than ‘Skills and Endorsements’ within your profile and focus on listing those skills that are valued by your customers.

8: Skills and Endorsements. Do not list too many of these and nominate only those relevant to your target audience. Focus on the skills that show you can help your customers.

9: Education, Qualifications, Volunteer Experience and Accomplishments. Provide details about your credentials but avoid bragging. It is especially important to show credibility in your ability to deliver and list any philanthropic activities that evidence your positive personal values.

10: Education, Qualifications, Volunteer Experience and Accomplishments. Within your LinkedIn profile, provide details about your credentials but avoid bragging or coming across as a ‘quota crusher’, as Jill Rowley famously says. It is especially important to show credibility in your ability to deliver for customers and list any philanthropic activities that evidence your positive personal values. If you achieved number one performer status then you could provide a description like this: Highest performer of the year and achieved this by working closely with my customers in the manufacturing industry to enable them to benefit from substantial improvements in supply chain efficiency.

Again, the focus with your LinkedIn profile is to target customers rather than potential employers. Create an authentic narrative that shows how you can help them deliver results through your insights, experience, positive track record and credentials. Make sure you convey the fact that you can do something worthwhile for them, rather than being a salesperson seeking to sell something to them.

Publishing Content

Let’s face an awful truth; very few salespeople are good writers and everyone in sales should be selling, not writing Posts or Articles during prime selling time. You can see there is a problem with salespeople writing content if they are not good at it and if it distracts aways from important prospecting and selling activities. Yet we are known by what we share and what we publish. Prospects and customers are watching so we must make it count.

I do not advocate that salespeople write content during business hours, they should instead pick-up the phone and dial prospects and customers.

All sellers should however self-educate by doing research and create their own insights that enable them to carry the right conversations with senior people in the marketplace. As a result of this activity there are two primary types of content that can be created in LinkedIn within the seller’s profile:

1. Posts or Updates that are short and often for the purpose of sharing other people’s content relevant to your audience or customers.
2. Original articles or blogs that are typically more than 400 words and with embedded images or videos

Posts and updates: This is where you need to subscribe to a content sharing tool such as Buffer which has a plugin for your web-browser. This makes the process of capturing content and scheduling it for publication into your social media accounts extremely easy. Anytime that you come across a piece of content that will be appreciated by your customers, simply click the Twitter share button on the content’s page or the buffer icon in your browser... and bingo! It is queued ready to go without you needing to give it another thought. But where do you find this content?

Every professional stays current by reading the latest articles, journals, blogs and publications relevant to them and their patients or clients. The best salespeople do the same. If you sell into a vertical industry, or if your market is defined by a particular demographic, or if your buyer is a particular role or persona; then you can identify the places where they learn online. As your customers that very question! “Where do you go online to stay up-to-date?” You could also ask: “Who do you follow as a leader in your industry?” or; “Which analysts or commentators to you rate more highly?” Then you go and subscribe (RSS feed) to their blog and configure a Google Alert for their name.

Now you’ve built a platform for sourcing and sharing content that will be of interest to your buyers. If your marketing team can help you with a corporate tool similar to Buffer, then use it, but do not share corporate propaganda as it will be perceived by your audience of potential customers as spam and they will probably disconnect or ignore you.

All of your content must be of value for your target audience. Your goal is to be seen as an aggregator of high-quality relevant content for those who are too busy to source it for themselves. If you were selling a cloud software solution for accounts payable automation, then your primary target audience is the CFO role. You would investigate where they learn online about outsourcing and find the analysts and journalists that write about the latest trends and research for transforming the finance function within corporations. What are the major conferences? Who are the speakers? Which research has been published? Sharing this kind of content and associating yourself with credible brands is a smart thing to do.

Treat everything you publish online as if it will be there forever and only publish content that you would be happy for your mother or next potential customer to read.

Articles or blogs: This type of publishing requires more effort but it is massively powerful for proactively dealing with objections and setting the agenda on value and risk mitigation for the customers. At a minimum, everyone should have three articles that they have published within their LinkedIn profile and aim for 600 to 900 words in your posts (that's just over one page in a Word document) and there are two valuable topic categories to stimulate your writing:

The first topic to write about is proactive objection killers. This is a self-learning exercise that beats any sales training because it creates clarity of message with a narrative that has the power to avoid objections altogether! List the common objections you receive and then adopt the positive counter position. As an example, I have worked with recruitment companies where sales people commonly receive this objection from a hiring manager: “If I met with every head-hunter that wanted my time I’d never get anything done. I’m too busy to meet so just send me a CV if you have a viable candidate.”

I’ve helped recruiters write articles about why investing twenty minutes saves twelve hours and dramatically reduces hiring risk. In this example we take the excuse for not wanting to meet and make it the reason to engage. The seller reviews the LinkedIn profile of the target person and looks for posts or articles that show their values and then adopts this narrative. “It’s because you’re busy that we need to meet. It’s not enough to screen based on skills, qualifications and experience; you must also eliminate anyone early, who is not a cultural fit for because that’s where most of the risk is with a new hire. I define value in the fewer number of CVs I send and I’ll invest the time to understand how you personally define cultural fit to significantly de-risk your hiring process. That’s why I need 20 minutes with you understand how your personally define cultural fit for anyone in your team. Twenty minutes together will save you twelve hours and give you the right result… when can we get together for 20 minutes on Thursday?”

Can you see the transformative approach here? Instead of leading with the ‘product’ of supplying candidates for a role, the seller is leading with why a conversation matters. The reason for a conversation is that the seller can help the buyer Save time and reduce risk; and that’s what is being sold initially… a way for the buyer to save time, reduce risk and assure the culture that have built into their team so they can achieve the necessary results.

In addition to positive proactive objection killers, sellers should develop insights that hook interest with buyers. Again, this is highly valuable sales training as it forces research into the customer’s world. It should be done outside prime selling time and treated as homework in the evenings. What are the trends, risks, disruptive forces, innovations or case studies that potential customers need to know? How are their customers or markets changing? Beyond information, what are the insights or lessons to be learned? What are their biggest risks concerning commoditization or disruption? The people you follow for creating Posts or Updates are the source for these articles you can write and it is not a difficult task to create an article that quotes several experts and then add your own commentary before posing a question of your own audience to create engagement.

Every seller needs to be a capable micro-marketer and I highly recommend David Meerman-Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR. If you are serious about creating a stella personal brand and embracing ‘social selling’ (a misnomer really as it is mainly social marketing), you must read David’s book. I studied his advice and then adapted my own within strategies within LinkedIn, and as they changed their algorithm I adapted to continue to drive followers as a publisher.

At one stage, the best way to build followers (audience and connections) was to be highly active in groups, and then it was about writing original long-form blog/article content in Publisher which would occasionally be picked-up by the editors of Pulse Channels and pushed to a larger audience. Then LinkedIn dramatically reduced the notification stream to first degree connections for content creation which created a big hole for many seeking to build following. LinkedIn subsequently decided they needed more engagement in streams of content just like Facebook so individual Posts (previously labelled Updates) became the key to attracting followers. I continued to be active in all channels within LinkedIn buy focused on where I would get the most traction. Within two years I became the most read person on B2B selling within LinkedIn globally and secured my book publishing contract which is how you are reading this.

Let’s anchor what needs to be done up to this point with your brand. You’ve created a professionally attractive profile within LinkedIn and enhanced it by showing insight and value in what you publish. You’ve identified the thought leaders who are relevant to your target market) that you will begin to follow in LinkedIn and Twitter to connect with to ‘curate’ their content and share with your network. You can begin to be a "forager for the tribe", as Michael Hyatt describes it, to be a content hub for relevant quality information about a topic domain or industry. You then have a reason why people should connect with you because you provide insight and value relevant to those in your network.

Beyond first impressions, publishing content is the big differentiator for salespeople as they build strong personal brands. Here are three topic categories to stimulate your writing in the evenings and not in prime selling time:

• Proactive objection killers. List the common objections you receive and then adopt the positive counter position. As an example, this post helps set the agenda for a recruitment consultant about why the customer needs to meet with them and take the time to define and explore 'cultural fit'.
• Insights that hook interest. What are your potential customers concerned about in the areas of risk, commoditization or disruption? This post talks about disruption and the need to have the right culture internally to remain relevant even if you dominate a market.
• Something topical that leverages current events. I published this post within 30 minutes of Harrison Ford's plane crash hitting the news.

By changing your LinkedIn profile to be a personal branding microsite, you enhance the way you sell but with no downside for a future career change with potential employers.

Does your LinkedIn profile show why people should invest their time, energy and personal credibility connecting with you? 

Here is an excellent summary by LinkedIn covering all the elements for creating the ideal LinkedIn profile.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image: Flickr: kris krüg - Sir Richard Branson at WE Day Vancouver 2011

Why You Should Fire Your Sales Manager Or Boss

The Sales Manager’s job is to provide an environment within which their sales people can succeed. This means providing intrinsic competitive value in the product, service or solution being sold. Then viable territories and targets, the right levels of support, training and enablement tools, demand generation leadership, and remove internal roadblocks. What more could you possibly ask for? Well for me there is one more thing – positive values and leadership. Success is a partnership and all the elements need to be in place for a team to be effective. Synergy is amazingly powerful stuff when everything comes together.

But life is too short to work with people you neither like nor respect. The first boss I fired was good person and we remain friends today but he could not provide me with a viable territory. It wasn't really his fault, and he had been told to hire a sales person to 'dominate the white space'... LOL! I discovered, painfully, that the 'white space' is that part of the market that's already being serviced by your competitors or where there is little need for what is being offered.

But before I had the difficult conversation about our future together I worked hard for 6 months ‘trail-blazing our value proposition’ into a new vertical. I did the analysis by sizing the market, profiling potential clients and finding the industry influencers. I ran demand generation initiatives by working closely with marketing and I met with the industry leaders. I adopted a top-down selling approach to overcome the resistance we were encountering at mid-levels.

I felt I had earned the right and am committed to success and I said to my boss: “Either you’re going to fire me in 9 months for poor performance or I’m going to fire you in the 60 days for not providing me with a patch in which I can be successful. I’m happy to keep building this new vertical but I also need additional territory if I am to make my number.”

Seriously, when you're at the interview, always ask: What's my territory going to be, how viable is it? Also ask: 'What happened here to make this role available – why wasn't my predecessor successful?'

Before we continue, have a smile watching this video about Joshua Peters and Michael Blunt from my book. At the end of this post share your most outrageous stories concerning someone firing their boss. Perhaps via e-mail telling them to open their top drawer where the security pass, laptop and final expense claim is sitting?

In one of my posts I provide guidance to sales managers on who belongs in their sales team and how do they decide who needs to be managed-out? The "rule of 24" helps them make the decision but for sales people assessing whether to fire their boss I recommend the three Cs. The following is an excerpt from my Book, The Joshua Principle.

Success is a 50:50 proposition. By this I mean that you bring fifty percent of the potential for success and your employer represents the other side of the equation. You know that companies look for Competence, Commitment, and Character or Cultural fit when hiring someone and you should also consider these same things in evaluating your potential employer. In addition to the three Cs, you need them to discuss the three Ps. You should evaluate the potential for success within their organization based upon their response to the following topics: People, Proposition and Patch. Your employer has an obligation to provide an environment within which you can be successful. This means that they need to have people you are proud to work with (competent, committed and of good character), and a value proposition that is uniquely differentiated in the market; and a territory – patch – that is viable with an achievable quota.

Another good reason to fire your boss, or client for that matter, is when there is misalignment of values. An immutable law of selling is that people buy from those they like and trust... they also stay and work with those they like and trust.

Is your boss a person of integrity? The best boss I ever had was a woman. I think we need more female leaders because they are naturally wired for better relationships and better morality. People who are trying hard need to be nurtured, not napalmed with flame-thrower forecast pressure from lunatic managers seeking to manage what cannot be managed – revenue. Jason Jordan will convince you this is true.

Another boss I fired was the regional VP and I was country manager for Australia. He was a slippery soul, very cunning and good at self-optimization. He was happy to bold-face lie to staff about them being okay, and then instruct me quietly later to fire them. He happily abused his expense account and travelled internationally for his own personal purposes, staying in the finest hotels with limousines driving him everywhere. I didn't handle it at all well but I learned much about how not to fire your boss.

The last time I fired my boss was after receiving an e-mail telling me to fire 40% of my employees in 48 hours by booking 15 minute back-to-back appointments before office hours in a hotel lobby to then hand them envelopes and advise they were locked out of the office and all systems. It was suggested that I follow the script and tell them that someone would be in touch to make a time for them come and collect a box with their stuff in it. At the time we were the most profitable region in the world – #1 amongst 40 offices globally. But when acquisitions happen, strange decisions get made. This true story is featured in an upcoming book on leadership written by Anthony Howard: Humanise, Why Human Centred Leadership Is The Key To The 21st Century.

So as you consider your current career; does your boss care about you, is he committed to your success? Is she competent? Do you have aligned values? Choose those with whom you share your life; especially with your work.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Photo is of legendary voice artist and actor, Matt Wills. Video was produced byJoel Philips who also plays role of Joshua Peters. Joel is a man of many talents... musician, actor, producer and leader.

Main image photo by: Michael Blunt (aka: Matt Wills)

Pharrell Wins Grammys Because He's A Master Salesperson

Pharrell is a humble, stylish and confident genius but it didn't come overnight. He applied the timeless principles of a master closer to become an overnight sensation, put out a smash hit to accompany the international box office hit from Universal Pictures 'Despicable Me' and cleaned up at the Grammys. Here's how he did it:

Anthony Robbins has been saying it for decades – "Selling is about changing someone's emotional state." Being a musician has so much in common with professional selling: Endless personal rejection requiring a deep well of determination and you have to give your all to be successful... no holding back!

We've all seen it on American Idol or Australia's Got Talent or The Voice – Keith Urban telling the contestant that they "didn't really sell it" or Simon Cowell on X Factor saying: "I didn't believe you." The greatest songs take us somewhere emotionally because they tell a story of love, tragedy, redemption... they reach in and tear our hearts out or lift us to heaven with happiness.

Emotion has far more impact than production values. Passion takes you further than mere professionalism. Yes, you've got to be able entertain and sing pitch-perfect... but that's just the ticket to the dance concert. It's ability to transfer emotion that creates Grammy winners and sales legends.

You've got to believe in yourself, especially when others don't. Don't let the song inside you go unsung or as Wayne Dyer profoundly puts it: "Don't die with your music still inside of you." Stop telling and start selling what you passionately believe in. Show it and dare to wear your heart on your sleeve!

Pharrell gets the concept of building in a unique differentiator. His productions with N.E.R.D. cemented his prowess as a producer blending rock, funk and hip hop. He didn't sound like anybody else that came before: the hybrid synergy created an 'original' sound. Differentiating your product and service in sales is paramount. You can differentiate your own selling style by pulling from old school and new school approaches.

Pharrell understands the Ogilvy "one-word" brand equity. Just check out his signature hat by Los Angeles hat designer Nick Fouquet. The hat has become an icon as has his sound. Some sales people I know wear a pocket square or rock a theme color for their company. I'm not suggesting a gimmick but if it's an authentic point of flair it may make sense. My business mentor, Anthony Howard, embraces this with conservative panache. In no case am I the arbiter of business fashion but I can equate his hat to something that makes you say: 'wow, how cool'! What part of your solution, product or service stands out from the crowd? How can you work to uniquely differentiate yourself in the marketplace?

Pharrell stood out from day one as a gifted skateboarder and began to produce other artists, collaborating with great commercial success including Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, Robin Thicke, Daft Punk and Snoop Dogg. He embraces the synergy that comes from collaboration. The tie here is the concept of team selling where we fly in with a talented solutions consultant and work with our own internal C-Suite to make the deal happen.

The last piece that makes Pharrell a master salesperson is his ability to be a super networker. He is one of the most connected men in the entire music industry. His productions were in such hot demand because he helped pioneer a new technology called Reason by PropellerHead software that made tapestries of sound against canvases and mash-ups all digitally emulating analogue capabilities. He pushed the software to the limit and everyone wanted one of his tracks as a backdrop. You need to become a super networker in your industry, test out cutting edge software for B2B lead generation, trigger event tracking, drip campaigns and marketing automation and push the envelope as a B2B content marketer with LinkedIn Publisher. Think to yourself: What would Pharrell do here? How might he innovate?

Now it's your turn: What's your song inside? What metaphorical music is dying to get out? What other parallels do you see between music and selling? What music gets you pumped up to go out and give your all?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au. 

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Shawn Ahmed

Why Prime Minister Lost His Job

Politics is toxic and nowhere more-so than in Australia. Our Prime Minister was the bloke who threatened to ‘shirt-front’ Vladimir Putin over Russia’s role in the shooting down of MH17. He is from the right, like the Republicans, but without the Bible and handgun. Unlike the American political system, the party holding power can replace their leader even though they campaigned to the electorate under the banner of their leader to win office. The Prime Minister Abbott faced a potential revolt within caucus and came through unconvincingly. Although he fended off the first assault but then eventually lost the Prime Ministership to Malcolm Turnbull.

Politics is selling and Prime Minister Abbott must learn to speak from the heart, get real with journalists and the electorate to deal with the real cause of his problem. Let me give you an example of Abbott’s problem. Last week he was interviewed by our equivalent of an uber Fox News right wing commentator, Alan Jones, who threw an easy pitch for Abbott to smash out of the park – 'hit for six', to use a cricket metaphor. What happened… Prime Minister Abbott responded with vanilla custard sprinkled with liberal doses of ums and ahs (16 in just 45 seconds). Here it is.

Alan Jones finished the interview with: “You’re hopeless at talking about yourself… it’s clear that a lot of people don’t really know their Prime Minister. Who is Tony Abbott? We’re going to 77 stations – tell us about yourself... who is the real Tony Abbott?”

Prime Minister Abbott’s response (without the annoying ums and ahs): “Well; I’ve always been a bit reluctant to blow my own trumpet Alan; and I like to think that the facts speak for themselves. I’m the father of three daughters; I’m the brother of 3 sisters. I love my community, which I try to serve as a volunteer fire fighter and as a surf lifesaver. Obviously I like sport and try to get plenty of physical exercise because I think that's good for your mental health as well as everything else. But most of all, I am the Prime Minister of this country and I am spending every ounce of energy, I am dedicating every fiber of my being, to try to ensure this country flourishes.”

Alan Jones knows how to sell. He highlighted that the current government has inherited a debt crisis. Australia had 20% higher debt per citizen than Greece and the daily interest bill for government was $37,000,000. The Australian government was borrowing $110,000,000 per day to service debt and fund the budget deficit. Australia’s GDP was approximately 55% of California’s and it would take an Australian worker earning an annual salary of $75,000, 400 years just to service one day of interest payments for Australia’s national debt.

Here’s what Prime Minister Abbott needed to do to climb in opinion poll rankings. First, ‘ditch the script’ and forget the artificial humility. He is Rhodes Scholar and champion boxer... get on the front foot by being embracing the very things people claim are why they don't like him. Here is what I would have coached him to say to Alan Jones.

“Alan, I know people love to hate me… it’s become a sport – but I probably deserve it. I was chief head-kicker for a while in the Howard government and I made lots of enemies as a result. It was my role in the team at the time and if politics is just a popularity competition, then I’m in trouble. But you know what – I think the public are sick of populists who are incompetent. The last mob cost more than a thousand lives will poor execution of policy with boat people. They frittered away decades of hard work to destroy what was the strongest economy in the world. They set us on an unnecessary path of economic destruction and we’ve got to fix the economy with strong leadership. I know I need to listen more and improve my public speaking skills but [back to what he actually finished with] I am spending every ounce of energy, I am dedicating every fiber of my being, to try to ensure this country flourishes.”

He should be self-deprecating and embrace the haters. Humbly and humorously wear it as a badge of honor. Have a belly laugh (maybe his heart-felt laughter looks much better than the awkward smirk attempted smile; and he should wave like mad when they boo him at sporting events. When journalists ask him why he rates so low in opinion poles, he should just smile warmly and say: ‘You know sometimes I hate myself too [have a laugh at yourself]; but I have this crazy belief that Australians want someone who can run the place well. Competence in delivering what we’ve promised is what I’m focused on. Hopefully enough people will love to hate me enough to allow us to continue getting the place back on track economically and with sensible policy.”

He also needed to:

• Learn to smile and laugh naturally. Embrace the hate and wear it humorously as a badge of honor.

• Hire the best speech coach to overcome his 'ums' and 'ahs'. Maybe Geoffrey Rush is available after what he did in The King’s Speech.

• Stop walking like he just got off a horse rather than a bike. I know he rides his bike nearly as much as Lance training for the Tour de Drug Testing, and as Tyler Hamilton wrote in his book, The Secret Race, professional cyclists are beautiful on a bike but walk like old men. A natural gate can be developed even for those who’ve had major knee or hip surgery.

We need the very best leaders in politics. They need to be authentic, not cardboard cut-out personas. Winning political office is selling and marketing; Winning reelection is about competence in delivery of what you promise... and sales and marketing. Sell; deliver; sell again. Selling is changing someone's emotional state, not the imparting of information. If you want to lead, be the real deal.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: DonkeyHotey

An Open Letter to Social Sellers Everywhere

Dear Social Seller,

Now that I've got your attention I must warn you. It is dangerous to implement basic social selling techniques. I wanted to take a moment to express a word of caution in applying a cure-all or over-simplified approach to strategic selling within social mediums. A one size fits all approach simply won't work. Any advanced selling system is based on the fundamentals however you have to leverage a process and acknowledge the nurturing required for an effective sales cycle to happen in social environs over time. Let me make my case...

When we treat social selling as the next big thing, as if it were a transactional cold call where we can achieve million dollar closing results with one or two calls, we take the sector backwards. All the same guiding principles apply to social selling so it's been my personal mandate as of late, to advance social selling into something elevated that I've dubbed Advanced Strategic B2B Social Selling. It's a modern twist on an ancient classic. Dave Brock says it the best ever: Prospecting is the New Prospecting! What's not to love about that?! But it's actually a profound commentary on the decadent global state of interrupt and push-button selling, a condition that social sales has allowed some to slip into.

My hair may be greying but I've noticed this 'social-for-social's-sake' undoing highlights a major gap in the sector. For Millennials and others looking to leverage LinkedIn or Sales Navigator at the core of your strategy, I would highly recommend dropping everything and reading Neil Rackham's books like SPIN Selling. Then take those learnings back to it... I would also recommend savvy sales managers make the investment in power modules on top of CRM like TAS Dealmaker and Pipeline Manager, or even go with Pipeliner CRM, to take control of their pipeline and manage key account growth. Don't just install it, train your people on it thoroughly, weekly and quarterly.

The folly of Sales 2.0 or Social Selling is it's often missing the context of the coming Web 3.0 paradigm. The vision of what strategic social selling can be is a highly focused weapon for change management over time. Understanding and mapping a political power base is more important than ever. The Status Quo and Do Nothing are more megalithic than ever with budgets slashed on razor thin margins. It's becoming even more of a winner-take-all and oh how the mighty fall! Incumbents are disrupted every day by smarter, faster leaner point solutions.

Connecting on 'social' with frenemies or blockers in the account can sink deals just as you aim to accelerate them. You need to pinpoint the mobilizers, your advocates and build consensus amongst champions inside the prospect's ecosystem. Leveraging trigger events without the underlying knowledge of military strategy is fatally flawed. We must understand the ripple effect our actions will create on the account based on sound business acumen, assessing the customer's balance sheet, reading their annual report and gaining a deep knowledge (and understanding!) of their culture. A lack of understanding of what's motivating all stakeholders in the account, could literally set you back an entire enterprise sales cycle. Yes, using social selling can get you fired or even cause you to time warp backwards down a 12 to 18 month spiral of your hard won efforts!

Is it possible to accelerate deals using social selling? Yes, yet I am of the mind ifonly you mix the old school with new school methods. There are strategies and there are tactics and you must know the difference. In selling, powerful prospects are trying to outwit you on a three dimensional chess board with a backgammon board underneath. When you move your piece you must be 15 steps ahead. Aggressively pushy, quota-crusher selling behavior on social will get you blocked or deleted. Cunning wiles mixed with intuition and a sixth sense thin slice for reading people and situations born out of tens of thousands of hours in the field, will be your compass to navigate these land mines as you build a bridge of trust over troubled waters. It's so incredibly noisy, it's become deafening to purchase anything in this day and age. That's why executives shut you out and procurement takes over with the reverse auction to ignore your value and throw the lower price competitor in your face.

Should you get rid of your desk phone? I prefer a cell phone to show localized caller ID so prospects actually pick up. I digress... Where I'm going with this is that Trigger Event selling is a science irrespective of technological channel. Challenger Selling is somewhat of a remix of recurring themes which renders Solution Selling, Strategic Selling, BattlePlan, Insight Selling and Consultative Selling absolutely more valid than ever. Learn and practice them all and then mash them up into your own mixed martial art form before you step valiantly into the Muay Thai octagon!

If you are just starting out your career in selling with your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ in hand, put down your social selling quiver for a moment today. Put down the compound bow Robin Hood, and learn to shoot with antique fire arrows before you go storm the castle! Hit pause and go read the great authors on this subject. Study the great books that deal with complex sales challenges and parameters such as Jeff Thull's Mastering the Complex Sale or Mahan Khalsa's work with Franklin Covey. If you are an ambitious sales manager looking to move up the ladder and make your mark in 2015, make sure to steep yourself in Proactive Sales Management by Skip Miller, Selling to VITO by Anthony Parinello, Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes and Jason Jordan's clairvoyant Cracking the Sales Management Code. Wouldn't it be nice to manage the KPIs that can actually be managed and leverage the sales activities that actually lead to revenue outcomes? Get crystal clear about what actually can and will move the needle; read Mike Weinberg's book: New Sales. Simplified. Not only speak the MBA lingo of leading and lagging measures and indicators but then... leverage them to move the boulder. Social selling didn't make it easier. It made winning even more of a Sisyphean task!

If you sell products or services on a longer enterprise sales cycle time continuum, heavily touted transactional-based social selling means will simply fail. There are critical success factors that must be learned by experience in order to effectively manage your time, pipeline, powerfully leverage a CRM, set the 'right' meetings, open powerfully, discover before you present, nail an on-site meeting and master a telephone. Mike Weinberg's pithy hyper-concise book has managed to encapsulate the highest levels of new business development. Jill Konrath is a sage when it comes to cataloguing multi-faceted strategies to penetrate new accounts whilst selling to big companies.

There's been a stunning array of get rich quick, instant gratification, fad diet type social selling material put out recently. Just like any quick fix, it simply will not work sustainably. We gain the weight back and lose our shirts if we don't walk out of the casino. Social selling is limiting and should be used responsibly as a compliment or a supplement, never a crutch. It almost needs a Surgeon General's warning! My research and experience bears out that it can only become a core strategy once the aforementioned materials are studied and lived. It's a deep nurture, enablement, awareness-building and big deal force multiplier.

It does not replace the greatest technology ever invented. The indisputably original YOU. There are hundreds of other amazing complex and strategic selling books, theories and disciplines out there but I have mentioned just a smattering as they've had the most profound impact on my career, development of my ownRSVP methodology, writing The Joshua Principle and it is my fondest wish that they will help you to get started and begin to be dangerous. I must puncture the social selling bubble and forgive me for casting aspersions on the social selling revolution as Messiah.

In contrast, imagine how powerful you'll be by becoming a Level IV Trusted Advisor wielding a premium LinkedIn profile while you challenge the status quo? Jim Holden posits that only 3% of all sellers ever achieve or operate at this level. It's critical to understand what it means to become a trusted advisor, and how that trust is earned through collaboration, persuasion and consultative value creation. Beyond the features and the benefits are the politics in the account, hidden economic / competitive factors, outcomes and risk we must manage deftly at a senior level. The CEO who signs only pulls a seat up next to her for you to collaborate on a mutually arrived at solution which grows over time, if you've added significant, unexpected strategic value above and beyond the norm.

So what's the social selling message to the advanced sellers out there – for the road warriors seasoned in closing seven-figure deals? Take the road not taken. Jump into the deep end head first and never look back. If you have gray hair, you actually have an amazing edge. Don't worry for a second – you will not drown. If you have business acumen and situational awareness, understand enterprise sales cycles and political power-bases, embrace proactive sales management and how to navigate a highly matrixed account with 'bee swarming' as one of my readers called it recently (i.e. meeting with various stakeholders in order to move a deal forward); you'll get on swimmingly. If you have a rock-solid sales process [maybe an amalgam you've built yourself], then you actually have a tremendous edge.

Think of LinkedIn as yet another phone and integrate it into your process. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is like the most advanced cell phone in the world. It's Google Glass. Think of Twitter as the spokes, the amplification that used to be encapsulated as Direct Response Marketing or e-mail blasts. Apps that filter Twitter give you context, then you're being strategic with the tool from firehose to laser.

The medium changes but the message stays the same. The methodologies that always separated top performers who won in the field, still win in the digital age. Iconoclastic salacious books sell with shock and awe but you need tried and true methods to sell complex products / services, if you want to stand a fighting chance of transcending self-commoditization and getting blocked by the digital gatekeepers [where do you think the traditional gatekeepers went?] They now screen the CEO's LinkedIn Profile! We must be the key-masters of the new digital fortress, leap over the moat blasted from the trebuchet of insight.

As sellers, we live and die by our results. When I train sales people I train them to execute. I spend a ton of time on 'execution' of which I have only found two books written on in the context of selling. SPIN Selling and The Four Disciplines of Execution are ones for the ages! Be proactive, learn to avoid the busy fool syndrome and place a major emphasis on execution whilst vastly simplifying your sales process. It's not rocket science. Humorously, I recently worked with a fellow with a background in astrophysics and even he was excited to get these concepts straight.

The 57% statistic on 'buying cycle' by CEB is a bit of a red herring because great sellers know they can uncover demand or even create it in any economy. They've been doing it over the telephone for time immemorial. It's called influence, understand the science and persuasion. [Cialdini] Even with contact rates down, they're still breaking the ice and bringing in high value meetings - every day. Hear that sound? That's your phone not ringing. That's the mouse clicking. Reach out and talk to live human beings. It will change your career, income and life. You're job will be 1,000% more enjoyable.

From my lens, relying on lead-gen vaporware widgets or content strategy alone is why only 60% of sales people hit their quota. Over-achievers are communicators and leverage every channel conceivably available to get to the target - whatever it takes, maintaining integrity but staying the course. I've also seen the Machiavellian social sellers out there who want to 'kill it' or 'crush it.' Hmmm...How would you feel if you were objectified into a bull's-eye? Soften up, leverage a bit of polish, panache and finesse - this is a human-to-human game. Digital didn't change that. You look more offensive in 'all caps' with your 3,000 percent benchmark report featuring empty promises of inflated ROI. We see right through you and hit delete.

Many of you reading this in the global social selling community I'm connected with [and I've sought you out, some 300 - 500 awesome thought leaders] are experts in your field. You're already pioneering ways to fuse the old and the new. I would just hope you too realize this gap and take the time to step back and help a new generation learn what still matters in the older methods. Why not always build in some key takeaways on sales process, frameworks, methodologies, syllabi and good old fashioned roll-up-your-sleeves training into the mix? Challenger Sale gave organizations an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater and announced the death of Solution Selling. The aptitude tests came out to detect the Challengers! Now we can all just show up, provoke with insight and we'll win by challenging key executives. Just tell the smart people how you're smarter. [Gong!]

They still MUST know, like and trust you first. People buy from those they like and trust; it's an immutable law of selling. Consultative selling is not dead as Linda Richardson puts it. Although we don't want to ask, "What's keeping you up at night?" because it's supposed to be right there on Google, it doesn't mean we can't create a value hypothesis in advance. We must diagnose before we prescribe and work collaboratively with active listening to peel the onion back to their real problems, problems the customer doesn't even know she has. We can build a solution comprised of many solutions that digs to the heart of the problem. We can work together to build the business case. We can sit beside our dream clients and work to derive value progressively (ongoing) for all parties involved. We can negotiate on a win-win basis.

Newsflash! Human nature and thousands of years of evolution have not changed the basic game we're playing. Personally, I'm not going to invest millions into something I haven't vetted thoroughly face-to-face and through references as well as performing sound, back-channel due diligence. Would any CEO buy sight-unseen over social alone? #Never. Maybe if it's the biggest incumbent in the marketplace but even then, what if they don't give you white glove treatment as they've gotten too big for their britches to provide concierge service? In this caseDavid can often defeat Goliath [case study]. It's a game changer when you feel your vendor can transmute vendor-status into a true partner and provide you with world class, above-and-beyond, service levels.

I want to encourage social sellers to return to being strategic sellers. My message to the social selling intelligentsia is 'let's take a more intelligent approach' and study our history so it doesn't repeat to bite us in the you know where. Let's go old school! Reading this and setting your sights on 150% to 200% quota this year, you may be wondering, how can I get there? Go read the classics. Get a library card and shut down the computer. Lock your smartphone in a safety deposit box for reading time – that's a move more valuable than Kruggerands.

Pick a mentor who is twice your age and pick their brain with a volley of situational questions about real world experiences in the field over decades. Let them spill the war stories, what it really took to get the deal over the line. Find someone in your company to practice, drill and rehearse with. Go through the hard questions, dry run your presentations, practice Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-Payoff (benefit) questions (SPIN). Practice active listening and open questions that lead to value. Become a student of history and politics. Read multiple newspapers [yes, the paper ones] every day to look for trends and trigger events. Start to form a gestalt in your mind so you can bring an informed perspective when you finally do sit down with the very important top officer. She'll be more impressed by a global perspective and lack of blinders on than any attempt to wow her with your technocratic prowess.

Close the laptop, tablet and log out of the smartphone. Humanize your approach. Take notes in long-hand. Build out Design Thinking or First Principles based brainstorming processes to generate truly unique insights. Test your hypothesis for a compelling business case out on your own CXOs. It's going to take a bit more work than reading a tweet to transform a key customer's business, don't you think? I remain convinced that executives in 2015 are yearning for something more, something deeper. It starts with sellers who truly attempt to understand their business, their challenges and strategic objectives. Challenge yourself. Be original! Dare to be visionary in all you undertake. Carpe diem!

There are parallels to diet fads in my mind or those late night infomercials blurting get rich quick. Social selling has been held up by the promise of immediacy. It's up to you if you're going to be Lawrence of Arabia and lead the people to glory or deep into the next mirage dying of thirst. The alchemist of our social selling age is within each one of us. If we've ever had any modicum of success in selling to our dream clients, we know intrinsically how it really should be done. Teach with integrity and walk your talk.

Challenger Selling has been misinterpreted as hubris toward the powerful which will just get you delegated down to who you sound like: a transactional telemarketer. Social Selling and Challenger are actually brilliant facets of deeper methods underpinning them, methods that came before [thank you Neil Rackham] that are majorly nuanced. These could be your silver linings playbook but you must mine the diamonds my friends! To use these constructs powerfully requires responsibility. Don't operate the heavy machinery of social networks with your C-Level customers while intoxicated by the 'it's easy' peanut gallery. Understand executives fully on a deeper level by taking a lengthy pilgrimage to the Holy Land that is a diverse knowledge base, something I call the Strategic Selling Pantheon: Keith Eades, Jim Holden, Neil Rackham, Miller & Heiman, Linda Richardson, Craig Elias, Tibor Shanto, David Brock, Jeff Thull, Art Jacobs, Tony Parinello, Mike Weinberg... there are more, the list is long but it's not endless.

I feel like I can almost count the bloggers on one hand that are taking the new insights and fusing them with the luminous old world laws. My realization in writing this is they know much more than what's on the surface so my open letter is to encourage all social selling thought leaders to open up and share their rich history. What got you here? Shoot from the hip, heart and tell me your story. Let me feel the foundation of how you think and why you've arrived at the insights you broadcast! Then it has meaning for me.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. - Henry David Thoreau

The best thing that you can do to be lethal in social selling is to step back and learn the difference between transactional and strategic methodology and then go steep yourself in a master class on Audible or Amazon. If you're a Founder or CEO selling a SaaS product under $250K per annum, you should consider not betting the house on a costly field selling organization. If you are running a thriving inside sales team, study the bible of predictable revenue scaling that isPredictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and mix this with Sales Navigator licenses to bring a whole new level of pre-call research and trigger event omniscience to your process. Translation: massively lower your cost of sale. The Board and Investors will be ecstatic.

If you're selling enterprise software, mobile, ERP, hardware, cloud based applications, big data, IT, security - PaaS, IaaS; if you're selling to government or Fortune 2,000 companies with byzantine procurement; if you're selling in response to RFPs... this letter applies to you. History repeats itself and the great secrets of selling have been laid out for you. Your path amongst the stars has been charted. We are all standing on the shoulder's of giants so let's not miss the opportunity to carry the knowledge forward to new generations.

Older generations, let's not be too stubborn to embrace change and apply the time-tested laws of strategic selling that we know produce outcomes; and apply to the new tools and platforms that can enable them. Pass the knowledge down but also absorb the new rules. We all know the dinosaur adage and the visual of pulling a wise elephant out of the quicksand. Selling is undergoing a mini-Renaissance right now. But we are missing the full double rainbow helix effect of the Age of Enlightenment if we can't connect ourselves to our roots. We need to know where we came from to evolve and see around curves.

It's a brave new world so I would suggest reading David Meerman Scott's 'The New Rules of Marketing & PR,' if you have not already! This is where my journey began. Mentees located me around the world based on my YouTube videos reflecting on Challenger Sales and they kept suggesting DMS's book...and others. I also got connected with Tibor Shanto and Craig Elias [Shift!], as well as social selling leaders such as Tim Hughes at Oracle UK, who are building a unique blend of "enterprise social selling" fusing old and new to withstand the downward pressure of selling disruptive solutions into established legacy markets.

As you may have noticed by now, I've plunged-in to the deep waters of the social selling revolution but my vessel of curiosity has rapidly been attacked by a giant squid. I have found a Mariana Trench of a major niche or gap to fill – the sector is crying out for more advanced methodology for social selling. And they don't even know that's the secret to making it more effective. Or maybe you all do, and that's why this open letter is more of an open reminder – a nudge to do more. Explain more... Where are you coming from in that recent post? Call out the book you've just quoted, reference the method that you learned in training in the 80's or 90's or Oughts and why it might still apply or doesn't at all. Maybe one piece of it needs a slight tweak or change? Pointing that out could be eye-opening, enlightening and highly illustrative to someone hungry to know. Let us learn with you...

Has selling changed? Are there systems that have gone the way of the Dodo? Sure, but most have been adapted and the authors are still at large figuring it out just like we are. They're leveraging survey data and training as we speak. It's a data-driven approach but there's one X Factor they'll always have on the youth: Wisdom. On the flip-side there is the wisdom of youth. Not knowing you can't do something produces miracles. The Millennials often have no limits, break all the rules and thereby redefine the game as we knew it.

If you'd like to embark on this journey with me, to understand how we can leverage social selling, social media and social networks to close seven figure engagements purely inside and accelerate them, stay tuned to this channel and my upcoming book.

Call me crazy or even dead wrong. Either way, I would love to hear your responses below. Are you thinking of social selling from a lens of elevating the channel? If you're a seller where are you still struggling with social selling? How are you avoiding complexity and commoditization in increasingly crowded markets? What's helping you compete and win as you navigate increasingly complex, matrixed organizations where everyone has an SVP title? Are you developing a foothold in the power base? Are you frequently sitting down with CXOs? Actually?! Are you going up against legacy incumbents as a cutting edge start-up technology to land and expand, breaking through with social selling at the helm? How are you tying all the technologies together? Are you a micro-marketer radiating your thought leadership expertise to move from push to pull? What message would you send to the Social Selling elite?

Sincere regards,

Tony J. Hughes, Sales Reverse-Mentor

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by: © Tony J. Hughes

Unicorn Alert!!! My Top 100+ STRATEGIC Social Seller List

Strap on your narwhal horns of "strategery" and fasten your seat belts. This list is in no particular order but is nothing short of awesome! Without further ado I'm releasing my Web 3.0 Champions Twitter List to the world: Web 3.0 Champions(664 Thought Leaders Influencing Strategic Social Selling 3.0 and growing daily! - Please go follow all of these luminescent minds and fly this list into your HootSuite, TweetDeck or social dashboard of choice for full blown content fireworks overload like New Year's over the Sydney Opera House.)

Ladies and gentleman of Earth... a new hashtag is born like the birth of a star in a champagne super nova.

#strategicsocialselling

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. - Sun Tzu

You heard it here first! I've compiled this mega-scroll from a variety of sources after an overwhelming response to my open letter to social sellers everywhere. I think we can all agree there is far too much of social for social's sake going on. It's reached epidemic proportions like Beanie Babies, Paris Hilton and the Macarena. Who let the dogs out Grumpy Cat?

I feel these folks are truly putting the STRATEGIC into SOCIAL. Who did I miss? I'll continue to update the post with your thoughts. If I missed you or someone you care about, please like, comment write in or inbox me immediately with why they're STRATEGIC: tony at rsvpelling dot com.

plural strat·e·gies

Full Definition of STRATEGY

1 a (1) : the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to afford the maximum support to adopted policies in peace or war (2) : the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions b : a variety of or instance of the use of strategy 2a : a careful plan or method : a clever stratagem b : the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal 3: an adaptation or complex of adaptations (as of behavior, metabolism, or structure) that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success <foraging strategies of insects>

So many metaphors in here, at least that's how Merriam-Webster defines it. How do I define strategy? Here's my definition if closing six, seven and even eight figure deals leveraging social + strategy as a force multiplier is something intriguing to you. I may have just cracked the code and am coaching strategic social selling effectively right now on three continents. I've thoroughly enjoyed speaking at Oracle recently down under.

There's power in mashups! These folks get it. You could say they're unicorns. They use the new tools and fuse them with classic methods. They think intelligently and strategically with social applying it to closing enterprise deals. A bunch of these thoughts leaders can be found on the big lists: KiteDesk, Onalytica(where I humbly find myself at #87, which is encouraging after a few months of rookie effort mixing Strategic Selling methods with David Meerman Scott New Rules of Marketing and PR), InsideView and the InsideSales.com Summit Klout List. If you show up on this list, I've interfaced with you, learned something valuable from you and respect your technique.

People ask me what inspired the ideation and sheer volume of the last 135 posts on LinkedIn Publisher in 90 days; it was all of you. Remember these people on the list and make sure you religiously follow everything each one of them says. Then you can change the face of selling as we know it and write a bestselling book. It's that simple! ;-)

• Timothy Hughes
• Koka Sexton
• Jill Rowley
• Mike Kunkle
• Jason Jordan
• Mark Hunter
• Gabe Villamizar – Millennial Unicorn
• Babette Ten Haken
• Jill Konrath
• Tamara Schenk
• Ken Krogue
• Brian Tracy
• Miles Austin
• Brynne Tillman
• Alice Kemper
• Sonja Firth
• S. Anthony Iannarino
• Steve Richard
• Kendra Lee
• Marsha Collier
• Jack Malcolm
• Mike Weinberg
• Jeff Sheehan
• Colleen Stanley
• Ann Handley
• Nancy Nardin
• Melonie Dodaro
• Eric Mitchell
• Michael Harris
• Dave Kurlan
• Viveka von Rosen
• Grant Cardone
• Bernadette McClellan
• Aaron Ross
• John Smibert
• Chris Young
• Alice Heiman
• Ago Cluytens
• Vala Afshar
• Bryn Hughes
• Brian Fanzo
• Jack Kosakowski
• Andy Paul
• Rachel Miller
• Michael Brenner
• Jo Saunders
• Heide Schwende
• Darrel Griffin
• Brian Solis
• David Meerman Scott
• Alex Hisaka
• Elay Cohen
• Trish Bertuzzi
• Jon Ferrara
• Anneke Seley
• Steven A. Rosen
• Michael Fox
• Keith Rosen
• Daniel Barber
• Lori Richardson
• Art Sobczak
• Tibor Shanto
• Craig Elias
• Deb Calvert
• Kelly Riggs
• Jeffrey Gitomer
• Jay Baer
• Michael Hyatt
• Dave Stein

• Jim Keenan
• Greg Alexander
• Charles H. Green
• Bob Burg
• Tim Hurson
• David Brock
• Doug Davidoff
• Mike Schultz
• Leanne Hoagland Smith
• Ted Rubin
• Matt Heinz
• Lee Salz
• Robert Terson
• Colleen Francis
• Ken Thoreson
• Tom Searcy
• Jeb Blount
• Josiane Feigon
• John Dougan
• Paul McCord
• Donal Daly
• Gary S. Hart
• Eric Quanstrom
• Tiffani Bova
• Tom Hopkins
• Gerhard Gschwandtner
• John Cousineau
• Joanne Black
• Jonathan Farrington
• John Golden
• Jamie Shanks
• Barb Giamanco
• Celina Guerrero
• Alyson Button Stone
• Nikolaus Kimla

Again, who's missing from the list? Are you a strategic social seller? Unicorn alert! Help me out LinkedIn???!!! Give a shout out and some love to folks you know and comment WHY they are STRATEGIC and SOCIAL. Why is he or she strategic with social selling? How are they thinking differently? Call out a quote, a book, an interaction?

LET'S SEE HOW BIG WE CAN BUILD THIS LIST in an interactive experiment almost like a modern strategic social selling chain letter. We all know the ones beseeching us to save the public TV station that go #viral. I'm hoping to save the sector from shiny object syndrome and 'look a squirrel' transactional Armegeddon.

THANKS FOR YOUR HELP! Now to celebrate let's all go to Rio!

P.S. An addition to the list: Michael Fox @adaptiveselling, Director Field Readiness at VMWare.

He provides strategic, adaptive, execution-oriented perspectives and expertise to professional B2B selling, especially how to develop high-performance sales teams; based on global experience in various sales and sales enablement roles. 
Check out his latest posts: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/86202838

Your top 100 list article was awesome, just wanted to give you a shout out. I am surprised combining unicorns, Will Ferrell, and Arnold didn't break the internet.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Monica

President Obama Narcissis-stick validation of SPIN Selling

This is the selfie shot with a narcissis-stick that went around the globe. Anyone who doubts the power of social media to build brands and sell a message must be living in a cave. Yet so many business people still act as if social is a fad – an aberration being touted and smuggled into the workplace by millennial and Gen-Y employees.

It's time to wake up! Savvy social media strategy won the presidency – twice. It's winning your deals for your competitors that you never even got invited to. There are 330 million people on LinkedIn, 2 people join every second, there are 200,000,000 unique views per day and 28,000,000,000 page views per quarter. 40% of users are in LinkedIn every day, 60% of business-to-business (B2B) buyers research before engaging. It's the biggest publishing platform in the world. The average CEO has 930 connections in LinkedIn... and you're still wondering if you should invest time in uploading a more professional photo!

Tweet this: Those who use LinkedIn for a 'warm introduction' are 500% more likely to secure a meeting. Also Tweet this: Those who have strong Social Selling Index scores (I am in the top 1%... believe me it works), are 50% more likely to achieve their revenue targets.

Social media is not some weird geeky teenage non-understandable web of confusion. It's simply a bunch of free messaging, publishing and engagement platforms where hugely powerful networks of people hang-out. The smartest businesses use social to listen, research, publish, engage and collaborate. Take off your hand-made black leather loafers, ditch the socks, roll up your Armani trousers and wade into the digital waters... it will transform your business life and results.

We live in the age of personal brands which are becoming stronger and more relevant at double the rate that which corporate brands are diminishing. Embrace the thing you fear and banish ignorance. I'm 52 and was a Luddite but I've done it – in less than 90 days I'm riding the Sigmoid curve of reinventionusing social.

SPIN Selling is timeless and Neil Rackham a demigod of all things B2B strategic selling; the mad professor of unified sales theory, the wise sage of the totally insane cottage industry that is the sales training community (Miller Heiman, CEB and TAS excluded). Many of you follow my blog and thanks for all the support (except for you Mr Deep Iceman... you know who you are).

President Obama is to be congratulated for reading SPIN Selling and engaging Professor Rackham in his skunk-works sit-room social media war-room designed to keep the Republicans from storming The Whitehouse at the end of the second term. I'm looking forward to writing Neil's biography, sipping tea in the English or Virginia countryside... but I digress. Scrawled on the whiteboard in the Oval Office is the Democrats social media strategy, and in almost illegible permanent marker (don't you hate when someone does that!), Donald Trump wandered in and added his own words to transcend politics to commerce.

Situation: We need to win the election, win the deal, win mind-share. We need to define target markets, understand personas, engage early with relevance and context, set the agenda, engineer the process, win the sale and bank the check.

Problem: No cut-through with the electorate. No side-stepping the EA, no return calls from my voice-mail messages, no reply to e-mail, no response to our spamming and direct mail.

Implication: The opposition wins and we're out in the cold for years; a legacy of losership. Wholly suppositories Batman, what it is it!? My career is flashing before my screen in 1,000 PowerPoint slides with endless bullet-point builds... where's the gun!? Without quality meetings I'm out of business.

Now we're really talkin! (sorry Neil, securing a great meeting is a 'Needs pay-off' benefit to the seller and buyer). Yes, we're saved by engaging where my customers are. Social selling delivers real benefits and tangible ROI if you know what you're doing.

LinkedIn is the new telephone for introductions and securing appointments. It's the way you connect with people; the way you build credibility before even meeting, the way you show relevance and social proximity, the way to publish insights and establish credentials. It's the power network of social.

Twitter is how you amplify your message and spread the word... President Obama's team are masterful. Here are some staggering statistics about Twitter: 290,000,000 users and 500,000,000 Tweets daily. 80% are active in mobile and it's the ideal platform for ‘news-jacking’ (that's what this article is) and also listening for trigger events to then go and engage with context.

The final part of the social trinity for B2B is YouTube. There are 6,000,000,000 hours of video watched each month and 1 billion unique visitors monthly. 100 hours of video content is uploaded every minute. Remarkably, the footage is comprised of 99% cat videos (Just kidding!). You can save YouTube by putting some relevant content up that that shares your expertise and helps customers upstream, allowing you to join the party! Stop doing high risk, low value demos. Instead, create compelling videos that help educate your buyers and take them on the journey to where they are ready to talk about what really matters. You can be your own television station, creating your own channel! But wait, there's more, don't sell the free set of steak knives if they dial-in now; instead be a publisher of insights to educate and entertain.

We all need to sell with the social savvy of Obama and the sales mastery of Rackham. Old school and new school together are atomically powerful.

Get on board with social selling 3.0 or be left behind eating the dust of your competition. If you'd like to know how, email me: tony at RSVPselling dot com or send me an InMail.

P.S. Facebook is the leading consumer social platform and was used for President Obama to post his clever video. Facebook's stats are also staggering with 1.4 billion users monthly and 890 million active daily.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by: BuzzFeed Video: Obamacare Promo

Why Everyone's Ghostjacking But Nobody's Talking About It...Until now!

Virtual reality and the promise of a second life are at last upon us. Do we even need to jump in the hyperloop to explore the world with new eyes? I miss the ambitious 1990's and the days of the Lawnmower Man VR helmet and Power Glove. But here we are with Oculus Rift and HoloLens, Magic Leap holography and the promise of a brave new world of Marcel Proust. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes". Now we actually can. One investor called Magic Leap, 'so badass you can't believe it!'v

Drum roll please... Without further ado, I'm fairly sure I'm the first in the world to have coined this phrase:

Ghostjacking (v.) is the process of logging in to others' social media profiles to grock the context of their networks. Ghostjacking is when the CEO allows you to drive their profile in order to connect from the C-Level to the C-Level. Ghostjacking is the secret weapon that is accelerating enterprise deal cycles within social media right as we speak and I haven't seen it written about. Nobody's talking about this and many are doing it.

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson

I know what you're thinking – You are right in raising the risk of personal brand damage caused by poor execution. The ethics needs to be carefully considered also.

The office of The President, The Prime Minister, The Pope, The CEO, Rockstars, Hollywood icons… they all have trusted delegates who reach-out, reply to correspondence and manage social on their behalf. A letter from the Queen is not generated by the Queen herself. Delegates are instructed and authorized to engage within strict guidelines and in a very targeted manner. They’re instructed and authorized to ‘ghost’.

This is not new…Bringing this approach to the world of social is 'old world meeting new world'. Professional selling is catching-up but anyone who is clumsy through autobot gaffs or spamming behaviour will damage their personal brand enormously. I have screenshot examples that I share in my presentations and keynotes. Deceptive or disingenuous behavior will be punished by recipients. HUGE levels of partnership and trust are required to execute and there is much to consider... this really is cutting-edge stuff!

It's common knowledge that various team members will power others' social profiles in order to allow the corner office to delegate. What I've yet to see established, is a cohesive strategy if encouraging this. Imagine encouraging your SVP of Sales to run the CXO's profile in order to appointment-set at the highest level for maximum cut-through. As one might imagine, the response rate of a CEO reaching out to another CEO is ridiculously high.

There are a few ways I've envisaged doing this. One, is to leverage a series of approved personal templates that allow for some editorial control in the process. Two, is to record calls and frequent responses and then transcribe them into a template to give you the DNA blueprint or gestalt of that C-Level's thought pattern in order to be effective. The best outreach while ghostjacking is the language of the CEO: short, to the point, economy of movement and effort – blunt and even colloquial.

This is a controversial idea but one that can be aligned with your go-to-market strategy. It can be a major competitive advantage when coupled with the neighborhood technique. 'Hey I'll be in Auckland, let's do lunch.' Imagine you're in an RFP or up against a legacy incumbent. You have not been able to meet with the key stakeholders in the account. The CIO is dodging you. The ultimate maneuver is outreach by your Founder or CEO to theirs in order to hold a fireside chat or high level summit.

As a sales leader, reaching out from your CEO's LinkedIn to make that invitation can be the key moment that turns a tenuous relationship into a concrete one. The major hurdle in high performance, strategic social selling is getting in front of the right clients. I list 13 counter-intuitive ways to do this here on and off the Tron game grid.

CEB recently released research on the consensus sale and they state that "on average, 5.4 people are involved in today’s B2B purchase decisions."

We all know the parable of management by committee and where that story goes... #stall.

To buck this trend and in recognition that there's typically only one name on the purchase order, I'm advocating the most counter-intuitive 'get past the gatekeeper' strategy of all time! When power connects to power, the magic happens in accounts. I've seen a 16 month deal cycle move forward in 90 days with this technique. What's the precursor to a successful ghostjack? Trust. It's critical that in business we always operate with absolute ethics and integrity so work collaboratively and always put this tactic into a healthy context.

Ghostjacking is a riff of newsjacking as defined by the prescient David Meerman Scott. This is where you Tweet your content at a timely Google or Twitter trending topic or hashtag so journalists can pick it up in the news cycle bell curve, pre-decay-rate and you inject your harmonic story within the breaking news like a surfer dropping in to toe-surf a digital long board.

If you have a close relationship with your internal C-Suite as a sales leader, it may be worth exploring whether to share social access to a key profile in order to ghostjack or ghostdrive into new accounts and territories. This is an approved practice with a real senior internal stakeholder profile, accessing networks with the power of a pre-approved templated message. You can even craft a bespoke message and have your CEO edit it for authenticity and syntax.

Other clever and practical applications of Ghostjacking include:

• CMO powers the company Twitter account and leverages personal profiles to customise retweets. (This has been happening since the dawn of social!)
• Account Executives drive each others' Navigator accounts to look for changes in the patterns of the content stream and interrelationships as a Flight Simulator exercise
• CEO gives one Sales Leader the keys to the castle and a list of targets with a multi-template approach to penetrate key stakeholders. (Project management software like Jira or Workboard can be leveraged for real-time approvals.)
• Marketing teams take ownership not only of a Facebook Page but personal executive accounts to grow them meaningfully.
• Comment seeding in discussion groups or forums foments heated debate. I've often stated that polarity fosters interactivity which heats up social.
• Beestorming which is adding the entire C-Suite of an existing or new account. This is super high risk because one has to understand who the talkers, blockers, mobilizers [Challenger] and frenemies are. It's highly effective to log in as a C and super-link into the power-base to understand the political ramifications.

Whether you cringe reading this or are an advocate, nothing changes the fact that we all know this stuff is happening and it's the unspoken truth. Even if you're leveraging ghostjacking from an observation level to do passive research and report back findings to your C-Suite, the view is often unobstructed from the top. As the saying goes, the lead sleigh dog has the best view. This may be dubbed as a guerrilla strategy or dismissed / misconstrued as grey-hat but if you want to take it even more above board, sit with your CEO and explain the idea to them. Work together on this meta-tactic to target your top 25 dream accounts this quarter, map their power base and devise a strategy to 'get in.' She can send the outreach, and you can prep the strategy. Either way, it's an effective modus operandi to become more collaborative in the virtual world we all now live in and explode yourself ever so Battlestar Galactica into a supernova super-networker.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..." - William Gibson

Often the only people CXOs will add back are other CXOs. Navigator allows all salespeople the ability to passively track the content and activity stream of any senior executive and this is helpful. The true power-play is a hyper-targeted InMail, invite or 'neighborhood' technique - meeting request from the very important top officer (VITO).

I'm working on a controversial new book that will explore many of the extremes, grey areas and best practices of strategic social sellers. I've endeavored to see around corners, 10X the satire and see the world through the new eyes of 2020, with my smart contacts and Singularity squarely in 3D holodeck check.

Now it's your turn - What experiences have you had in ghostjacking? Have you heard of savvy reps powering executive profiles? Is this reality or myth, the stuff of urban legend? What's your stance on this as a standardized business practice? How far could the future of virtual reality in business to business sales really go?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image photo by: Sergey Galyonkin. Also added this photo below after suggestion by Avron Welgemoed.

Bias toward action, the number one trait of successful people!

Make no mistake, selling is an extreme sport. 80% of your workday is actually wasted. 20% is valuable. The Pareto Principle is an inexorable universal power distribution law to fight. Assuming you're lucky! The distribution is more likely 99 to 1 of waste to efficiency in your output. I don't care how aggressively you sell. Time will slay you before you slay the dragon.

"It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best." - W. Edwards Deming

But you're not a machine and it's very hard to Six Sigma your way into optimal productivity. You could call 50 prospects and get nothing from it - just going through the motions. You could spend the entire day commenting in LinkedIn groups and have a few other interesting narcissists poke you back. You could research the perfect business case to high heaven! If a Bear researches in the woods... You get my point!

Time is the enemy in sales. For many of us, selling truly is an exercise in futility.

We are all allotted the same cosmic clock, so why then do some optimize this time for better results? This has been dogging management consultants, thinkers like W. Edwards Deming and Peter F. Drucker, throughout the ages since the days of Aristotle and Plato.

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. - Aristotle

How does one solve for this, really? Is it virtue as per Aristotle above?

I mean, you can have the perfect Domo dashboard pulling your Salesforce CRM data in. You can use Predictive Intelligence to suss out whom you should prospect next with your auto-dialer featuring local presence (area codes for the area) and optimal time of day. You can use Marketo lead scoring to see which prospect is hot based on rules. It's truly a mystery sandwich actually what to do tomorrow that's most effective. C-Levels are getting to Emperor's New Clothes levels with this cosmic puzzle:

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. - Peter F. Drucker

So here are some areas where I would look to find the answer:

1. Leading vs. Lagging Indicators. Very little has been written about proactive sales management but it's an important science to understand from rep level all the way to the corner office. There are myriad KPIs to measure but precious few smart actions that actually move the needle on revenue. Revenue itself is a lagging, "rearview" metric, and not one that can be moved by the SVP of Sales barking at the team to walk through the pipeline strategy again each week. (Check out Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan to go deeper into this idea.)
2. WIGS (Wildly Important Goals). These are literally daily goals you set that are massive. By focusing in on them, they gradually lever the boulder forward toward overarching objectives. "4 Disciplines of Execution" by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling is a stellar book that looks at Execution as a management science for confronting the "whirlwind" of our day. For most sellers, just handling their email and getting to Inbox Zero is unfathomable.
3. Pick a major action that scares you to do before lunch. Look at your pipe and think from the gut, who is the one person you could call today to truly move the needle. Who can sign? Who can say, "yes?" Who can only say, "no?" Who do you really need to phone in that account who you're petrified of calling? Board member? Time to go to the CEO? CTO? CIO? Are you scared to get too technical?
4. Make strategic "warm calls," InMails and text. These are simply smart actions that no-one is taking. Literally, most of the 3 million sellers on planet Earth are either not contacting net new prospects at all, or just blasting templates in email. Sad state of affairs!
5. Dial and touch better data. Use sales data intelligence services like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg and Data.com to make sure you're building lists of prospects that are "similar to your best customers." - Mike Weinberg.
6. Prioritize "Interactivity" as the highest leading indicator of success. Who is returning your call, could be with an email, responding on LinkedIn, interfacing with your LinkedIn Publisher post, willing to have subsequent calls with you, inviting you on-site and asking provocative questions? "Interactivity" is the litmus test for prioritizing a book of business. When the prospect starts to drive the sales cycle from the front, you know it's going to close. Prodding with carrots and sticks as the conductor of the symphony injects unnecessary margin of error into your closing probability.

A few interesting quotes to share with you on this topic you may find valuable:

The number one trait of successful people is a bias toward action. - Dan Forbes

Have a bias toward action - let's see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away. - Indira Gandhi

“ Today I will do what others won't, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can't." - Jerry Rice

The bottom line is few people are going to furiously protect their calendar to make 30 targeted prospecting calls happen in a 2-hour block, followed by VMail, InMail, Text or Email in Executive ADD shattering, rapid combos.

The bottom line is most salespeople enjoy the coffee klatch and like to check email and their Facebook. Most salespeople have less than 3 on-site meetings in their territory per week.

If you're willing to take 30-50 smart actions per day, every day, you'll kill it. This is like a commitment to brushing and flossing. If you have a beautiful smile and no cavities late in life, you get it!

To paraphrase the Rock, "It's simple. I just worked out 6 hours a day for 20 years."

Make a commitment to A/B test everything: email length, message delivery medium, script, UVP, subject line, time of day, cadence, length, message style, downtones, up tones, relevant clients, social, SlideShare, networking events, even how you dress in meetings: you'll crush it.

Fortune favors the bold and iteration is bliss.

Start testing a ton of combinations. The strongest triple I've ever found is Direct Dial, Voicemail, Email (in 90 seconds flat!)

Action is like a muscle and you can build it. To get going, shut down distractions. Get to inbox zero in the afternoon. Get a blank sheet of paper out and write down the Wildly Important Goals or WIGs when you arrive to work... or even better, before you leave work each day have the next lined-up with crystal clear clarity... stick the list on your computer screen.

Mike Weinberg has a pretty phenomenal rule of splitting the day. You hit 33.3% of the pipe top funnel, 33.3% mid and 33.3% lower. This is quality food for thought because the biggest action you'll ever take, per Cardone is: "follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!"

I can't make you stop being a two or three toed sloth. I can't tell you that you can do what you did today and start to exceed quota. It will take a commitment to understanding what the smart actions are that lever deals forward and truly produce leading indicators.

You've got to drive progression rather than accept continuation.

Let me give you a pro tip: Next time management jubilantly dumps a carcass of an RFP on your desk, push back with gusto! Even flat out reject it. As Lee Bartlett mentions in his fabulous book, No. 1 Best Seller, "Furiously protect revenue-generating activities." This means you have to be willing to check out of the glad-handing and internal corporate politics of your sales organization. Let the other yes men and women go get coffee with your GM. Trust me, you're better off getting one more discovery or on-site in that week. Commissions are worlds better than backslapping and a hangover.

These tactics won't make you well liked, they'll make you successful. Once you're incredibly successful, well then you're untouchable. Your actions protect you and so does your revenue. But rest assured, Sub-KPIs matter - pipeline cures all ills.

To pull off all the above will take a tremendous amount of focus. Commit to three cups of coffee per day or simply shut out the noise of all the social networks, mobile phone blips and beeps, and intra-office spam email.

Execute. Act. Get addicted to the hustle, flow and grind! You've got to move from wasting 80% of the day or 20% of the day driving 80% of the output to a reverse Power Curve. Make 80% percent of the day drives 80% percent of output. You will thank me!

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.  

Flickr: Action: Qrodo Photos, Aristotle Lion: BK, Felix Baumgartner: Benoit DUCHATELET, Action: Justien Van Zele

Top 40 Luckiest LinkedIn Growth Hacks - Extreme Edition

The harder I work, the luckier I get. Call me Edison or Casey Kasem, as controversial as some of these ninjitsu tactics may be, here are my top 40 wacky, wild and a bit wooly ways to get lucky on LinkedIn. Forgive me as I lift the proverbial kimono but I was inspired after speaking for Oracle in New Zealand today and reviewing for their Melbourne event tomorrow on Social Selling 3.0:

1. Rewrite your profile optimized for keyword search but also rewrite it with Purple Cow Power of Wow content. Differentiate!
2. Change your headline to something action based that differentiates you, stands out and is value creation focused.
3. Launch your own LinkedIn group and host it curating it with great articles and posting provocative questions. Make sure it's a catch name like LinkedIn B2B Mastermind Social Thai Chi Practitioners!
4. Use 100% of your InMails. You get 25, write them all. That's less than 1 a day. Not using InMail is just like not exercising or learning. It's the path of least resistance. InMails are a literal gold mine. InMail should be called GoldMail or PlatinumPings!
5. Join 50 groups and actively participate in all of them as much as possible with relevant questions to foster engagement. Keep rotating out 2 to 5 of them to make sure every group is packing a power punch.
6. Set your settings so that every update you post is visible to “everyone’s network.” You've gotta be visible if you're going to build the Hyatt Platform.
7. Block visibility of your connections from the Settings tab to prevent competitors from poaching clients. You may be in an industry where it's better to be open but in highly contested disruptive startup waters - lock it down!
8. Add an email address you're open to sharing in your about section to allow others to freely connect - especially pertinent as an author. Write it as 'tony at RSVPselling' if you're worried about getting scraped! My bio message immediately encourages topics to be sent to me and/or any questions or feedback.
9. Publish wild articles in LinkedIn Publisher and push yourself to reach the 1,700 word (7 minute read mark). Think steak and sizzle. Iterate on thousands of topics, pull from that grab bag. Be a student of how-tos, extremes and hyperbole. You'll be told that 200-400 words is ideal for building followers but don't be afraid to polarize your audience... if it's good, keep going. Just be sure to respect your audience; they're smart and don't need you to them what they already now!
10. Reverse look-up up valid B2B email addresses leveraging Rapportive. LinkedIn owns this company which pulls from the RapLeaf database. It's not always accurate but it's a good way to at least get a quick read on prospects from inside Gmail.
11. Get a subscription to LinkedIn Sales Navigator and launch aLinkedIn War Room. The secrets of Navigator include passive lead tracking, lead serving daily, shares, company updates and TeamLink. In a bigger company TeamLink is a massive edge. You can map how your seat licenses map out to the greater organization and 3 degrees to the target.
12. Connect with key influencers in your sector, they’re often more open to connecting. Thought leaders are often very open to mingling in social but make it count. Customize and personalize. Add them to a Twitter List and invite them to your personal LinkedIn Group. Follow every thought leader's blog with the Feedly app. RIP Google Reader, how we loved you so, I can't even count the ways!
13. Build a custom Twitter list just off your top LinkedIn connections to make sure you’re listening to them in TweetDeck or HootSuite.
14. Block your visibility when you view people for deep R&D or if you’re wanting to be seen, open it up – two very different strategic objectives.
15. Build a private mastermind group!
16. Find a reverse-mentor to teach you all the cutting edge Social 3.0 techniques. If you're under 35, desperately seek out a mentor to teach you how to actually do SPIN selling, TAS, Solution, Strategic, Consultative, Power Base and BattlePlan. These technologies close million dollar deals and mixed with social are lethal!
17. Hit the plus sign on everyone's skills - everyone who deserves it - yes! Hold an endorse-a-thon! I know, it's annoying getting told how great we all are, all day, but so many of us are guilty of it. If you can't beat them join them on this one. LinkedIn is fundamentally sticky for this reason. Buzz the smartphone in pocket.
18. Write personalized invite requests from mobile LI and LinkedIn. Get creative and be original. Remember that being likable for likability's sake doesn't always make you stand out. Be yourself and be real. Authenticity and candor are rarer than diamonds on here.
19. Sort your feed by Recent Updates versus All so you can retrain LinkedIn's machine learning algorithm to populate ever more interesting stuff. Train your content dragon!
20. Publish on Publisher 3 times per day for 3 months at 1,900 words.Super challenging but rewarding! Grew my followers 3X. Secret? Stop watching TV. I pushed myself to the limit and drove 300,000 views and followers to 3X in 60 days: 1,500 to 5,500... even while I was on family vacation in Vietnam... thank you family!
21. Go out of your way to actually meeting people in real life - coffee and tea are the best for this especially before and after standard work hours. Never eat alone!
22. 99% of just people hit the like button so leave meaningful comments everywhere calling out specifics. Actually read the articles. Get to the end. Mention something from the end. It floors people when you read every word. Most stuff on here is snackable. Go like the materials in the gallery. I'm shocked when top thought leaders gallery section of SlideShares and YouTube speeches is about as crowded as a graveyard. Get in there and make a joyful noise!
23. Use the @mention feature to promote people discovering new connections from within your comments. Just hit the @ button anywhere you comment: you'll discover the secret of how this works. Always do it! Discipline yourself to leave a hyper-personalized reply comment on every comment you get. Comments are gold, go add those profiles; study those people and interact meaningfully.
24. If you apply for jobs, try to apply to dozens or hundreds just to expand your horizons through weak ties. You'll be amazed the treasures that flow back. Remember your resume is in a pile deeper than the administration's revised tax and expenses backlog.
25. Ask your entire network for recommendations.
26. You thought you got me and I knew some of you grimaced at that one. 'Don't spam me Tony!' Before you do #25, do the good ol' deleting party so everyone in your network matters.
27. Interact with other geographies, fields, cultures and age ranges.You'll grow so much more by embracing a global outlook on the business world. Agism is so passé!
28. Keep LinkedIn open 60 to 90 hours per week on mobile LI and in a browser tab to study patterns and improve your content pattern recognition.
29. Watch the trending keywords of "most searched" in Top 25 Pulselike Big Ideas 2015 and your write titles based on them. Follow all the thought leaders on a Channel, link in with them on LI and Twitter. If some CEO posts some link bait like: "I'll never hire a salesperson again" take a stand and counter act the post with one directly calling it out. LinkedIn take-downs are like fireworks. Remember debate class and Parliament. Make sure to respect your adversaries. You could start the post with: "Will the right honorable gentleman please hire some sales people."
30. Share pictures of great quotes; images get huge interaction. Build-out your own selfie YouTube channel like Tibor Shanto; talking to the camera. Real, gritty and raw is world's more powerful than the 'slick.' I need to get going on video blogging... next phase for me.
31. Build an international Twitter & LinkedIn Sharing network where you thunderclap out other people's stuff. It's not some secret cabal conspiring for clandestine Illuminati domination. Instead, it's really just sound business. The law of fellowship and affiliation prevails. Your people retweet and re-share your stuff in social and you return the favor. Make sure to add comments to pass back the Google Juice by making it non-duplicative.
32. Newsjack and Ghost-Drive (aka GhostJack). Ghostdriving is the real-time concept of driving other peoples' profiles to see the world from new eyes. I call this pulling a Marcel Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Newsjacking is posting content in response to Google and Twitter trending topics. Hashtag cloud back into Twitter by linking your LinkedIn and Twitter. Remember, mentioning Kim Kardashian in anything defies all logic and reason and outranks everything on the internet instantly. Mash it up! Top 10 Things Kim Kardashian Would Do As A Sales Manager... LOL!!!!
33. Create the longest, most over the top, profile ever created. Never worry about being too unique. The extra mile is a lonely road on social. Put every charity, award, society, interest you've ever had out there in full force. Why? Search engines crawl it and eat it up!
34. Hub & Spokes - My signature social selling 3.0 strategy - break the mold and move your blog to LinkedIn [hub] - Leverage Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and Instagram as the spokes. Become the garden that attracts the butterflies. Stop building bionic nets! I just received 7 friend requests in the past hour. Pull the industry to your doorstep! #attractionmarketing
35. Whenever anyone interesting views you, add them back with a personal message. Inbox them when they like your content or comment. Max-out referrals and personalize them all.
36. Mash-ups - Fuse the old and the new, the Luddite and the Advanced, the shocking and the mundane. This is akin to Digital Power Clashing, wearing many shades of plaid and argyle to stand out.
37. Leverage heaps of humor and satire - B2B is dry and dull, you need to take it up a notch and crack wise. I often blast out satirical political commentary and get awesome engagement. Always, always make fun and lampoon yourself! Share funny YouTubes and use GIFs and mashed up pics. Tweet right at other authors to urge response. Tweet at the media, they'll seldom respond!
38. Tell true stories or build B2B Fiction - Get your statistics right so you don't mislead. Extrapolate the future and push the envelope. Build characters in your mind to create allegory.
39. Make wild predictions about the future!
40. Open source everything. Share every last secret openly. Give software companies and third parties permission (with authorship) to repurpose and remix your content. Remember Seth Godin gave away the biggest eBook of all time. He's still relatively unknown because of it. [NOT!]
41. Bonuses...You know me. Tap into alumni networks. Adding alums gets a 95% accept rate when you call it out. Always ask Why when someone disagrees with you??!! Draw it out. Haters are gonna hate so develop a thick skin. If someone attacks you ad hominem do what Tibor Shanto did and eviscerate it, line by line with the precision of a Rhodes Scholar. He warned his frenemy the following: contains facts.

When you accept someone's connection invitation send them a message thanking them for inviting you to connect and ASK them if you can help them in any way. It's amazing how many times it pays off. They then 'really' look at your profile and you get to both start a conversation. - Sonja Firth

Finally, make sure you understand LinkedIn's SSI because those who score well have 50% more likelihood of making their sales target.

I hope you're laughing and also scratching your head! Now it's your turn: What did I miss? What LinkedIn hack works for you? How are you pushing the envelope on here or in social? What has resonated with you the most? Were you offended or did you laugh out loud? Did you hit share? So curious...you remember what happened to the cat. If you've lived 9 lives and are ready for more, count Curiosity as numero uno on this bizarre listicle data dump.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Dita Margarita

Secret For Success – Feed A Starving Crowd

If you were in the business of selling fast food, what would be the single biggest factor that could drive massive success? We all know about product, price, promotion, position... and these are all important but what you want is a starving crowd. This is at the heart of an insight delivered by Robert Coorey at an event I was part of today. It is especially relevant for sellers because the biggest competitor we face today is buyer apathy or the status quo that often results in the delaying or abandoning a purchasing initiative.

Obviously you need to have a viable market and offer a product, service or solution that addresses a legitimate need but the X-factor in success is highly motivated buyers. Robert mentioned Blue Ocean Strategy. If you haven't read it, you need to and go apply it to your sales process and product innovation lifecycle. It has applications for commanding a united front with your sales and marketing strategy. It contains the tea leaves on how to outflank your competitors by opening up new greenfield opportunities and totally outshining the competition by doing something that's Monty Python meets Steve Jobs, "And now for something completely different..."

I got to thinking about the above graph as it relates to Cirque Du Soleil, YellowTail wine, Apple, Southwest airlines and many other strategic movers and shakers that maximized profit and market share seeming to arise out of nowhere and go straight to the top in a rapid period of time. What exactly was their Blue Ocean Strategy to optimize their value curve and unique value creation elements? I then related it to sales processes themselves and a great deal of the sameness in the strategy of today's incumbents and the disruptors who seek to challenge them, quite frankly, evidenced itself.

“Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers & themselves” W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy

To drive growth effectively in 2016, we must think outside the box to create a passionate audience hungry for what we offer. An essential part of achieving this to differentiate ourselves by how we sell, not just with what we sell, and this demands that we start to attract and engage rather than interrupt and push.

Here is Robert Coorey's nine point checklist for being ready to 'feed a starving crowd' and accelerate your success . He uses this checklist to screen his own potential clients:

1. You must already have market momentum with and be beyond the pioneering and education phase. Reference customers and success stories are essential.
2. You have credibility in your market. People buy from those they like and trust so personal brand reputation is essential. [Here is how to create your personal brand].
3. You have a marketing database with people who do not regard your outreach as spam. The best way to create a database is to provide high quality content and this is important because is enables you you create pipeline without having to pay for advertising.
4. Social media commitment with a strong. The best platforms are LinkedIn for B2B and Facebook for B2C. Social platforms are the modern way to listen, research and engage.
5. Have a market offering that leads to a higher price products. Selling low price or free versions of your product, service or solution just does not fund what is needed to drive long-term success.
6. A fundamental understanding of selling and internet marketing. [I highly recommend the book, The New Rules of Marketing And PR by David Meerman Scott].
7. An established market with consistent demand over a long period of time.
8. The competition is not particularly technology savvy and has not yet modernized the way they attract audience and create 'buyer experience'. [Think about what Uber is doing to the taxi industry].
9. The business can scale with technology

Robert Coorey is the best selling author of Feed A Starving Crowd and has been rated by Huffington Post as one of the most influential online marketers globally. If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image: Flickr: Ahd Photography West Oak Lane Jazz Festival 2010

What Does It Take To Succeed In Sales?

Selling is not about our own success… it’s about our commitment to helping customers achieve a far better life and more successful business. Real sales leadership is helping someone achieve a far better state of affairs; and doing it with the belief of an evangelist, the passion of a lover, the courage of a warrior, the rigor of an engineer, the thoroughness of a forensic accountant, the diplomacy of a politician, the mindset of a marathon runner, and the discipline and determination a world champion martial artist. Here's the bottom line in what it takes to succeed in professional sales today.

If you've got the right mindset you then need the right 'narrative' and provide value in the initial conversation rather than seek to sell them your product or service. This is at the heart of 'insight selling' and 'value selling' becuase you provide something of value well before asking them to consider becoming your customer. Next, you must embrace technology by using LinkedIn for personal brand, Sales Navigator for building sales pipeline, CRM such as Salesforce for managing the sales process, and AI sales intelligence for changing the rules with research and personal productivity.

The people we are trying to reach and help are themselves facing a barrage of messages every day they come to work. Their inbox is clogged, their calendar is packed, everyone wants their time and their boss wants results without excuses.

An average buyer receives 100+ emails a day, opens just 23%, and clicks on just 2% of them [source: Tellwise]. LinkedIn InMails are increasingly regarded as spam. Office phones usually go to voicemail as people race from one meeting to another. 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting [source: The B2B Lead]. A team of 50 salespeople leave about 1,277 hours of voicemails per month [source: RingDNA]. 40% of emails are opened on mobile first where the average mobile screen can only fit 4-7 words max [source: ContactMonkey]. Subject lines with more than 3 words experience a drop in open rate by over 60% [source: ContactMonkey].

This is why it is esential to find the right channels to gain buyer attention and secure engagement. But there is a strange inertia to being human. Most fear public speaking, probably a bit more than death. Somehow, somewhere along the track, cold calling became high up on the list of loathing. Let's review general fears in descending order of magnitude: Cold calling, public speaking, disappointing your lover, being fired, death, falling.

I know that falling is #6 because so many skydivers hate cold calling, public speaking and disappointing their lover! The latter drives trillions of dollars of the global economy!

The phone is important because it's an act of courage that inertia is battling or assisting. The more you do it, the warmer it gets, the faster the pre-call research, and the more confident in every area of your life; not just sales. Automated sales engagement dialers hold salespeople accountable to the action of calling. The best ones deliver news and insights about the target account and individual at the moment of dialing. The best dialers are also systems that enable emailing and social outreach. The call with a local area code can increase ‘call to connect’ by 21% according to a study conducted by SalesLoft measuring the performance of 1 million calls. SalesLoft is a market leader for capturing sentiment and disposition during calls but most importantly, automated dialers build courage by shoving you into the fight cage and locking the door from the outside.

Facing your fears is a beautiful thing. Overcoming your fears and your ego is the biggest breakthrough you need to make if you are to truly succeed in sales. There is an amazing liberation that comes from not caring anymore about what people think.

Nevertheless, rejection sucks and so ‘inbound selling systems’ have become a panacea for the sensitive new masses. I'm here to tell you that you want to be a bit extreme as a seller. You want to embrace not just a high volume of activity, but activities that are heavily fear-based that you can turn into an unlimited sword of power.

Be the extreme person on your team that is breaking ice, opening conversations, and doing what's uncomfortable. You can leverage social platforms in this way also, by sticking to the value and going beyond the fluff. Never blast and spam your network with sales messages or publish anything that is inconsistent with your employer’s brand.

If you’re not in a state of fear when you go sell today, you’re not pushing hard enough or taking the actions that will enable you to truly excel and exceed quota. Make no mistake, everything you are doing is to avoid being fired.

Friending everyone and seeking to be a people-pleaser will not make you a trusted advisor. Nor should you grasp your way up the ladder via politics because it just makes you a lesser person. You can instead earn credibility by doing what's assertive, hard, and courageous. Fortune will literally always favor the bold. As Lee Bartlett says: "If you can pick the phone up to 10 C-level execs and chew the fat, nobody is firing you and everyone wants to hire you."

Only the strong will survive and only those who give their all, benefit from the law of reciprocity. I'm encouraging you to hunt. You can't feed the tribe without bringing back the kill and putting the pelts on the wall. You cannot harvest a crop without laboring in the soil and sowing the seed. You cannot achieve greatness with vapor. You must be committed to the hard things. So many salespeople are half-assing and managers are even worse, literally unwilling to do prospecting. Are you a CEO or GM or SVP? Yes, I'm encouraging you to prospect by phone after doing some research and preparing with the right narrative. The best ones do because they lead by example.

How do you overcome your biggest fears in selling?

Special thanks to Bernadette McClelland for the interview and to Salesforce for a brilliant event. If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image: Salesforce World Tour - Sydney March 2017

50 Shades Of Social Power

“The woman who does not require validationfrom anyone is the most feared individual on the planet.” - Mohadesa Najumi

Love, lust, closing massive business deals. What do they all have in common? The desire to close; the desire to be desired. The human condition... desire and fear pushing against each other... mucking up the lot!

As aspirational sales leaders, we can't deny we play in a world where a powerful, select group of people make or break us. Buyers. We rise and fall over a commission based on our ability to persuade, align, and collaborate with a power-base of masters of the universe in hard-to-get corner offices, chased by everyone.

We feel the sting of lost love, the sting of cutting rejection when we're dismissed after working so painfully hard for so long to seek the affections of the men and women who can, with the flick of a pen, set us free. But maybe we're working too hard, perhaps going about it all wrong, because we're not understanding what they're seeking. What do you get for the one who already has everything?

The most powerful people in the world are desperate to have their power stripped away.

The dynamics of power are a zero sum game. Whether you'll acknowledge it or not, someone always has the upper hand. In my career, domination and aggression have seemed like a red herring and those that employ that tactic may win temporarily, only to see scorched Earth on the back-end of the deal.

I prefer to be cunning and wily like a fox. Not in a negative way but you've always got to be scheming to defeat the competition and apathy of the customer. So it's no secret that Jim Holden talked about the habits of a fox that will play dead to throw off its prey and even cover it's own tracks or walk into the water so fire ants will crawl off its back.

But this article is somewhat about the New Power Base Selling by the great Jim Holden which was originally entitled, "Confessions of an Ivy League Street Fighter," a title I like even better.

To gain power, you must take it away. To take it away, you first must make them think they've taken it from you.

Behold: 50 Shades of Social Power

Let's walk through this scenario. We talked about how closing enterprise accounts is a lot like hitting on the hottest one at the bar. It's a game that few can win because they have to reverse the polarity to attract a butterfly but everyone is building a bigger, better, faster net to go after their targets. That's exactly why Marketing needs to move from PUSH to PULL and Seth Godin made world history by breaking through the Marketing Industrial Complex with permission-based marketing.

There is a dance that happens (in multiple dimensions and with surprising players) when you're in the throes of a heated, highly contested deal; when your competitors will make near fatal mistakes and you can swoop in and take the prize right our from under their nose.

“ Never interfere with  your enemy when he is making a mistake.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

And what is that mistake? They are going to get lazy mainly about one thing... showing far too much interest in closing - sealing the deal. As they show weakness, they acknowledge the power of the prospective buyer and thus have run the sequence backward pushing them away. Although they expertly displayed power to open the deal, most sellers then display weakness, hunger, and repel the client, snapping the line only to free the prized Marlin prey.

The correct approach is a confident, disinterested, consultative path where perhaps you look like the fox, innocuous, playing dead... at first! But then when they let you into the meeting on the premise of purely consultative, that's when you craftily engineer your own influence and ultimately seize power.

Remember the cardinal rule, Vampires have to be let in.

Call the baby ugly, grimace at the annual report, have a no BS policy, brass tacks chat about that 800 lb Gorilla lurking in the corner of the room. Transparency and truth delivered respectfully and powerfully unlock the keys to the kingdom of powerful hearts and mind. There is a paradox in the Challenger approach. You looked weak, they amused you and thought they could take your power - but psyche - you took there's. Clinch. Hilarious videos here.... George Costanza Meets Don Draper!

The powerful want to be set free by NOT being in control for once. Enter the trusted advisor and the customer is alas, in good hands.

So that is the true anatomy of the close. There are many undertones and overtones to this article. You've gotta be willing to be the wolf in sheep's clothing. If they show interest, pull back - play hard to get. If they pull back, display detachment - again they will become interested.

But here's the deeper way to win. Actually decide that you're okay to lose, fine not to make the commission check, happy to say, "next." Literally, in your deepest heart of hearts, make peace. Strip line the Marlin, let it run, let them think it's all going to be okay. From this vantage point, you want for nothing, need for nothing - you'll become infinitely interesting.

Make them chase you, they'll close on you. Until the prospect is pulling from the front, moving urgently to the next meeting, asking for paperwork, you're not dancing together. The foreplay of a close is this power struggle. Just like Salsa, the synchronized rhythm of the feet in counterpart is everything. One partner must lead but that leadership can switch.

Power dancing back and forth: such is enterprise sales.

This is what vendors who will never be partners don't get. Beating their chests in arrogance doesn't close deals. Self-assuredness will not get you there. This is a cryptic set of advice but it's just like dating, again.

There is a fundamental reason unattractive people often land stunning mates. Hint: it's not money. It's understanding the power dynamics: how to give power, how to take it away, how to dance the forbidden dance. That, my friends, is a very grey area indeed. Do I have your attention?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

90 Days Of Social Media Mania. What Were The Real Results?

Back in 2014 I decided to get serious about social to build my global brand by publishing unique quality content on a daily basis on LinkedIn but I did something no-one else has dared to do and stopped blogging on my website and went 100% all-in on LinkedIn. It was risky and LinkedIn has indeed changed the way the Publisher platform works and it's more difficult to build following there today.

Please note that all of these screenshots (above and below) with my stats were before the 90 day mark. Actual numbers are within text of this article.

No click bait to take people away, just a pay it forward content strategy to launch myself on the global stage. Every day I posted at least one article and then amplified using Twitter. It’s been a simple strategy and rather than seek to drag prospective clients to my website, I decided to be where they are – inside LinkedIn. Why did I go against the advice of David Meerman Scott when LinkedIn is a semi-closed platform? Let me answer that by sharing some breathtaking facts about LinkedIn:

• There are 540,000,000 members and 40% use it daily. 2 people join LinkedIn per second.
• There are more than 400 million unique page views of content every day and more than 35 billion page views in an average quarter.
• Every person I want to reach on the face of the planet is in LinkedIn. 90% of business decision-makers in Australia are members which is the 2nd highest penetration for LinkedIn worldwide behind Netherlands.

In just 90 days back in 2014 I blasted past almost all of my peers who had been building their follower-base over many years. Here are some of my numbers from just 90 days of social media commitment:

• Increased LinkedIn followers from 1,600 to almost 6,600
• 4,500 views of my LinkedIn profile in 90 days
• 346,000 unique page views of my virgin LinkedIn blog in 90 days
• Twitter followers up by 80% and I improved the quality of the base
• Ranked in Top 100 Globally in Social Selling (Onalytica research)

• Secured 5 paid speaking engagements with tier-one multinationals, and exceeded my 2014 speaking revenue in just the first 6 weeks of 2015
• Invited by LinkedIn to author for them (see badge below and here is the post the comment relates to. Note that I always add positive spice wherever possible.. controversy is your publishing friend)

• Invited by 3 companies to guest blog for them
• Invited by Kelly Riggs for interview on The Business LockerRoom radio show (scheduled for Monday March 30th)
• Initiated discussion with major publisher for USA book deal
• Reached #1 in my peer LinkedIn network and #5 in my total LinkedIn network (currently #7) among my 3,000 connections.
• The quality of my network went through the roof.
• I launched a brand new hashtag called #strategicsocialselling to fuse the old school and new school and launched an official 100+ unicorn list of my own purely based on empirical sentiment analysis.
• Executives from LinkedIn wrote in to encourage me to shorten the posts whilst I paradoxically began to get higher traffic in relation to best practices. I pulled my research from and analysis of Dave Kerpen's corpus, OKDork 3,000 and Buffer Blog - Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post. (Hence the 1,700 to 1,900 word sweet spot of steak to the typical short form sizzle / flash in the pan. I A/B tested like crazy!)
• My friends and close family thought I was nuts and yelled at me to get off LinkedIn at dinner parties.
• But...I received the following humbling comment dozens of times or some version of it, 'This is the best post I've ever read on LinkedIn.' 'I'm printing this out and sharing it with my sales team.'
• Multiple adherents to my unorthodox methods cropped up and they started to publish on LinkedIn sending me their own success stories of lead generation.

My LinkedIn Social Selling Index score went through the roof and according toMatt Loop at LinkedIn Australia, I am one of the highest ranking members in the country – maybe the highest who is not on a Sales Navigator subscription. In case you ever get access to your Social Selling Index (SSI) score from LinkedIn, here are the current benchmarks from LinkedIn:

• Average: 49
• Leader: 61
• Best in class: 65

Australia has the highest penetration for LinkedIn globally and the average score in November, 2014 was just under 24 across all industries. My current SSI score is 87. If you're not a Sales Navigator subscriber and have a better score than 87, let me know out I'll hat-tip you to the world ;-)

Many of my posts achieved well over 1,000 reads and many were also featured in LinkedIn Pulse feeds. Here are two examples.

Imagine the cost for all these results if you went to a traditional PR firm 10 years ago! Their advice would be to work with a journalist to have a thought leadership piece published in a magazine. They would have charged at least $5k per month for a 6 months retainer contract and delivered a nice folder with clippings of the press mentions achieved. Now I'm embarking on YouTube videos. $2k for the equipment and I'm all set-up with my own studio in my office so I can now upload for free on my global channel... it's staggering. There are 1 billion views of YouTube videos every month in the world.

But how does all this monetize you ask? Being in the top 1% in LinkedIn has yielded incredible results. I'm #1 in my peer connections (professionals like me) and currently # 7 among my more than 3,000 overall connections.

Business is coming to me and the conversations revolve around my availability and what I charge, rather than why I should be considered… Like CEB says, 'they are on average 57% through the buying process but with my rich sticky, open source content where I share every secret to closing million dollar deals from 30 years in the field and a 90 day deep dive in social – prospects are 90 to 100% through the buying process. They literally hire me on the spot. It's magical! It’s almost as if I don't have to sell myself when I’m having a conversation. People read my content, review my credentials, decide they want me to help them with their team, and then they contact me. I’m engaged in conversations for keynote speaking engagements in Europe, America and Asia-Pacific. Tier-one vendors are paying me to attract audiences at their events.

I'm a grey haired dude from the old guard. If there's one lesson you can learn, if you excel at sales, marketing or writing you can do this too. You can most likely have even more success than me! Find a Millennial and beg her to train you.

Leads come to me, self-qualified and well advanced through my sales funnel… it’s unbelievable. In a recent post about CRM a person said he needed to buy a CRM for his company and put his phone number in the comments thread. I called him and then passed the lead on to someone I trust to look after him. No referral fee; just 'pay it forward'. Click the link and see for yourself.

I prioritized ideation over creation and creation over curation. I newsjacked, I mashed-up and I went big in long form. I gained hundreds of supporters for every detractor and had many a detractor write me back declaring me an 'innovator' in this medium. It has been exhausting, humbling and rewarding. Parkinson's Law was my guiding light, 'work expands to fill the time allotted' and I was able to write a 4 hour long post in under 2 hours and then a first draft down to under 1. I shut-off the TV, cracked open my reference library and built a YouTube channel. Here is a screenshot of a LinkedIn report showing my network characteristics.

My ultimate goal in building a publishing platform within LinkedIn is to create a following for my new book. My strategy has been largely based on the excellent writings of David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing and PR) and Michael Hyatt's book, Platform.

While you’re wondering about social selling, your competitors are attracting and engaging your customers and prospects.

Do what I did 90 days ago; take massive 10X action and embrace LinkedIn Publisher for content marketing. You will educate yourself, attract a quality network, build your personal brand, and reap commercial rewards.

I double dare you to take the 90-day LinkedIn Publisher Challenge?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: B Rosen

Women Sell Better Than Men

Women are the more evolved sex in every way. If they lead every country on the planet, there would be peace. When they're given a shot at the C-Suite, they turn companies around. Here's why?

• Greater empathy
• Better multi-taskers
• Higher EQ
• Neurologically superior brains (more connected synapses)
• Better conflict resolution as managers
• Better emotional resonance through story telling
• More caring and nurturing for the actual helping of the solution
• Deeper intuition, gut instinct and sixth sense on the deal and reading people
• Let's be honest, they're 50 moves ahead of men
• Women handle stress better than men
• Better memory (remember the nitty gritty details and names)
• Higher pain tolerance (hint, they don't take rejection as hard)

Well, there are no secrets here, folks. Women have been running this planet for quite some time. If a world leader is a man, it's really the woman running the show behind the scenes. We all know that!

One thing is clear, we need more than 4% of leaders in elite systems to be women; down from 5% in the previous survey. How do we fix this in male-dominated worldwide sales? The thousands of men who will read this disproportionally to women mainly because of the controversial title and provocative picture, if you'd like to change this system - hit like and share this with your network.

Women, please comment and give me even more reasons and article link outs and I'll keep updating the article.

Managers: I believe in meritocracy and hiring the best candidate for the job. If you have the ability to practice equality and eliminate bias in your organization, make a conscious effort.

I was struck by a story I heard about Mike Derezin from LinkedIn who was asked to join a panel of male speakers but waited until they included women before he agreed to join. I know I've touched the third rail of gender equality in this post and will be accused of reverse sexism.

Personally, I'd prefer to work for a woman, wouldn't you?

Resources:

The Women In Sales Awards

5 Tips for Women in Sales: Get Ready to Change the Game (Joanne Black)

Girl Power—Men with Daughters Get It (Joanne Black)

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image: Flickr

Pricing Insanity - Epic Sales Blunders

I recently read an amazing book, Sales Insanity by Cannon Thomas, and it's a mind blowing compilation of actual sales blunders made by real people in real businesses being real stupid. Every salesperson and business leader must read this excerpt but who is Cannon Thomas... really? It's not his real name and I managed to uncover his identity and then obtain his permission to share some of the insanity in this post. He is one of the best sales consultants on the planet. Enjoy gobsmacking true story and if you think you know who he really is, send me an InMail and I'll confirm.

An industrial distributor hired me along with a team of consultants to help identify ways to increase its profitability. The company was eking out the slightest profit, but it was headed toward losses that it could not endure. Its executive team knew that there was profitability hiding somewhere in the company, because its similarly structured competitors were performing much better in the same economic environment. They were confident that the operations side of their business was running efficiently and that their missing profits could be found in the sales force. We subsequently sent our search party into the field to test their hypothesis.

We began by interviewing the company’s salespeople. Among other things, we asked each seller, “Who are your very best customers?” Not surprisingly, the salespeople immediately responded with a list of their very biggest customers—the customers that generated the most revenue for the company. And from their perspective, these were their best customers, because they yielded the most money in commissions. The incentives of the sellers were based on achieving revenue targets, not achieving profits. Therefore, bigger was better.

We also asked the salespeople who they thought were their most profitable customers. Again, they listed their biggest customers by revenue. We asked, “Don’t your big customers negotiate lower prices with you, because of the volume of products they buy?” “Of course the pricing with those customers is a little bit lower,” the sellers all responded, “but the absolute dollar amounts of the profits must be high despite the lower margins.” Except that they weren’t.

At the same time we were conducting the interviews, we were also busy calculating the actual profitability for each of the company’s customers. It turned out that in addition to negotiating lower prices, the sellers’ biggest customers were also the slowest to pay their invoices. And they returned a lot of products. And they demanded the most customer service. And they received volume rebates. When all of the costs to sell and service them were taken into account, the company was making a profit on just 14 of its 50 biggest customers. It was losing money on 72% of its ‘best’ customers. That’s where the company’s profits were hiding.

In itself, this didn’t shock me. The salespeople had no knowledge of the actual profitability of the products they were selling, and their financial incentives clearly inspired them to close any deal no matter how low the price. What did surprising to me, though, was the vehemence with which they defended their price discounting practices.

Every salesperson in the company had large customers that were sucking money out from this company. We pointed out that they were essentially paying these customers for the privilege of selling them products, and if they were to stop selling to 36 of their 50 biggest-volume customers, their company would actually be more profitable. We suggested that they needed to raise their prices to these profit-sucking customers, or else we would be forced to fire them—their customers, not the salespeople.

But to a person, they defended their pricing tactics as what they had to do in order to ‘get the business.’ In fact, they claimed that getting this business was the privilege they had earned over decades by developing great personal friendships with their customers. These customers were generous enough to give them the ‘last look’ at each potential deal, so they could beat the lowest price that their competitors had to offer.

Again, we pointed out that this was a bad strategy, but the salespeople were steadfast that they were simply meeting the ‘market price’ established by their competition. If they didn’t sell the products to the customer at the ‘market price,’ then their competitors would win the business. To which we responded, “Great. Let your competitors win the business. Let them pay the customers to buy their products. Then your competitors will be the first to go bankrupt, not you.”

Alas, no amount of reasoning could convince these salespeople that selling products at a loss was a losing proposition. They were convinced that they should continue to ‘get the business’ at the ‘market price’ by leveraging their ‘friendships’ to get the ‘last look’ at every deal. No wonder their competition was performing more profitably than they were. The competitors’ salespeople were smart enough to say no to the worst deals.

Gratefully, this story had a happy ending. The executives realized that the sales force’s financial incentives were not aligned with the company’s. They cleverly redesigned the compensation plans to reward profitable customer relationships, not just big ones. Within a year, the distributor’s profits were on the rise, and they continued to grow substantially for several more years.

As these changes were taking place, I liked to imagine the amazed reactions of the competitors’ sellers as my client’s salespeople began to walk away from bad deals. The competitors must have marveled at their good fortune. Suddenly they were getting the last look at all the deals they’d previously lost to my client. They were able to win the business, and win it at the market price. Their revenues were surely on the way up. But their profitability was on the way down.

The Good Ideas

Good Idea 1: Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better

There is an intuitive appeal to bigger customers. And all things being equal, they tend to be better for you, too. But not always. Sometimes your biggest customers might also be your worst, because they’re either less profitable, less strategic, or just more annoying. Be sure to understand the type of customers you want, and then do what you can to attract and retain those. You don’t need every customer, just the ones that are good for your company.

Good Idea 2: Beware the ‘Market Price’

The ‘market price’ is a customer euphemism for the lowest price that anyone has ever spoken aloud. Don’t lead a race to the bottom just because someone tells you a lower price exists. You shouldn’t have to give away your products—they deserve a price that reflects the true value you provide to your customers. If your customers won’t buy at a price that you want to sell, then politely walk away. Let ‘the market’ have the business instead.

Good Idea 3: You Might Have to Fire a Customer

Salespeople spend most of their energy trying to acquire and grow customers, so it’s almost unthinkable to purposefully end an active customer relationship. But like any relationship, some customers who start out as a dream will end up a nightmare. If they’re a bad customer to you, hopefully they’ll be an even worse customer to your competitor. Let them be just that.

Thanks Cannon Thomas... who ever you are! Priceless. You can buy the book on Amazon here. Over to you the reader. What pricing blunders have you witnessed? Let me know in the comments. Who do you think Cannon Thomas is... really? Could he be Anthony Iannarino or maybe Mike Weinberg? Maybe Jeb Blount or Lee Bartlett? Let me know your guess by sending me an InMail.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image: Google Images, source unknown

Infiltrating The Social Selling Mafia

The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.

Ladies and gentlemen, I've recently been accused of being inducted into the Social Selling Mafia as a 'made man.'

I assure you, this is patently untrue but even if it were true, I really couldn't admit – could I? Live by the social media, die by the social media. I have no intention of 'sleeping with the fishes.' I prefer my shoes to be Italian leather rather than lead.

But seriously; I've been pushing like crazy in LinkedIn for 90 days and it really does work. You can leverage it more effectively than a telephone. What case study am I referencing? My own success in the channel and that of those whom I mentor. I think it's because I approached it with an open mind and little experience.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." - Socrates, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Instead I decided to use RSVP, TAS, Battle Plan, Challenger, Strategic, Solution, Power Base, Miller Heiman and especially SPIN in the channel. Since I couldn't find it anywhere, I coined what I'm doing as #strategicsocialselling and launched a new hashtag. That's not to say that many of the #socialselling elite are not strategic. Many are and I'm meeting them along the way, as they agree it's about fusing old and new school methods together. I called many out in a Strategic Social Selling Unicorns Post.

I was writing a post about the power of 'Pay It Forward' and that being 'interested versus interesting' is the great hidden secret to all social selling hiding in plain sight in order to generate profitable new business via LinkedIn when a thought leader responded that 'Social Selling is a Myth' and he does not agree with the tenets of the ruling families of the Social Selling Mafia. I thought it would be amusing to write a retort as a post. Also, I don't really see myself as part of any mafia of any kind. As Groucho Marx stated facetiously, "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER." [Rimshot!]

I've blazed a trail as a pioneer out on my own in social selling endeavoring to make it more strategic and writing about ways to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, InsideView, Avention, Trigger Event Selling and stealth B2B technologies akin to Carb.io or FrontLine Selling. I've tried to just go out and produce results via massive action rather than buy into any of the prevailing theories out there. Thus I've posited various paradoxes I see in social selling as well as ways to leverage it in every aspect of the traditional prospecting engagement funnel. I'm pleased to hear that thought-leaders are reading and thinking about my work. Rest assured, I serve no master but the truth and am looking for ways to tangibly help those that I coach achieve cut-through leveraging the new tools.

Unbeknownst to me, by promoting LinkedIn so heavily, I inadvertently got hazed into the amorphous mob of the social mafia. I ended-up on a Top 100 Social Sellers list from Onalytica, within a few months at #87. I started to newsjack and leverage David Meerman Scott principles which, blended together with my RSVPselling Methodology, gave me what I've calculated to be one of the highest read blogs in my network. Humbled and grateful to be there; thanks for your support!

The truth is, that everyone who's taken the deep dive into Social Selling 1.0 and 2.0 are the trailblazers. They've laid a foundation for a brave new world. They've gotten in the covered wagons and gone West toward their manifest destiny (or in Australia where I am, East – over the great dividing range). LinkedIn is so much more than a yellow pages or CRM of contact records. It's so much more than noise and hype. It's everywhere that you want to be. It's where all your prospects are and with Navigator, you can now passively monitor your prospects' streams. At long last, by leveraging that one relevant insight to crowbar in a 'warm introduction,' you are 500% more likely to secure a meeting.

So in many ways leveraging LinkedIn for B2B upstream engagement is exponentially more successful than a traditional phone. You move from servicing demand to creating it. You move from prospecting to uncovering latent demand pre-trigger events. You're upstream to Challenger. You're upstream to the 57% of the decision making process. You're serving them insights and new solutions to problems they may not even know they actually have.

Only 2% of attempts on a phone get through for a result and it's just not high enough. I've made 100 calls in one day – I won't settle for second prize or a set of steak knives! I want to be the CEO in charge of my own life. I want to win. To sell I need to make contact. I need someone that I can sell to. What I will say, is that seeking to get in without a compelling insight, without speaking CXO, without ideation in your go-to-market strategy that aligns sales and marketing and challenges the sector's status quo: that's high risk. You will fail. So social selling just to 'open' faster, is transactional whiz-bang. Strategic insight applied to social 'opening' as a conduit to meaningful value exchange [the V in RSVP = value creation], landing the coffee meeting, on-site and then hopping on the airplane – that's the tour-de-force trifecta or four-fecta! Fuggedabouit!

I come to social media with a completely open mind. I'm on a clandestine operation of old school strategic selling, a cunning fox in wolf's clothing. I approach every day like a rookie would. I ask why? I explore every possibility and I read the #socialselling hashtag like mad. But I also watch all the top sellers on Amazon, read the consultants' white papers, research any credible data I can get my hands on and follow many blogs of the contrarians who believe social selling is a myth.

The argument that is accurate in my opinion is that any communications channel mistakenly leveraged for cram and jam, slam selling and push button gratification is inherently fatally flawed. Agreed. Can you use social media and elevate it into sending the language of outcomes and risk over the wires to the right executives to break through in dream accounts? Yes. Can you build the right target network and engage with them in Groups, InMails and respond to their Publish, Blog and Updates on LinkedIn? Yes. Proof? I receive e-mails and invites from CXOs constantly in response to what I write. The proof is in the commentary arguing against Social Selling. If you're not using social selling to engage, how are you reading all of my articles and leaving long meaningful comments? Your existence as an executive in the channel is empirical proof of its very success.

So thus: WE ARE ALL IN THE SOCIAL SELLING MAFIA or perhaps we are just selling. 330+ million on LinkedIn strong are getting a spectrum of results every day based on their ability to wield the technology by making meaning in their message. It's communications 101 or maybe 202. Sellers are as powerful as the quality of their insight – in any channel – and that's the way it will always be. So what's really changed? The medium but not the message, dare I say. A Twitter with 200,000 followers cannot hold a candle to the right 1,000 connects [thousand true fans] on LinkedIn that are hyper-targeted and segmented to match to your solution fit.

Ultimately, if we study Metcalfe's law and the history of network effects we find that there is always a network with nodes. It's all a human communications systems grid. Text messaging surpassed voice calls for Millennials. Snapchat and WhatsApp exceeded Facebook. Ultimately, it's all just network communications with changing media. Wherever the majority of customers communicate will always be the penultimate channel for business success. Penetrating a social based ecosystem with a telephone is in violation of the basic laws and science of network effects. There's a basic scientific argument that would support the efficacy of social networks, the internet and Web 3.0. Wherever the fish spend the most of there time is where the fishermen go. They even risk their lives for the deadliest catch! The bait is quality insight-driven or Challenger content. Call it what you will! It's factual and empirical. Just like early phone sellers who didn't master a strategic approach, the phone was rendered worthless. Because of the way LinkedIn notifications hook into mobile, you're literally buzzing their smartphone in pocket.

My prediction from 2015 toward 2020, is that social sellers will become increasingly strategic by fusing the old and the new. The universal methodologies and frameworks that have always won enterprise business will fuse with the new technologies that enable sales acceleration and omniscience. The role of big data, predictive analytics and smart AI algorithms cannot be overstated. The Social Selling Mafia stigma will fall away. This is just like I argued the future of CRM is not CRM although I'm sure that's what it will still be called. Everything will solely become 'selling' once again and I doubt there will even be mobile phones. It will all be about wearables, smart contacts, Google Glass II Designer Edition and we'll have heads up (HUD) displays giving us readouts from managers hooked into the cloud, seeing what we see in a virtual space. Can you imagine? Live sales coaching in real-time?

You may think I watched Minority Report one too many times. The keys to unlocking the riddles of the future of selling are hidden in our deepest past. It's the alchemist – the answer is hiding at the beginning of the journey, buried treasure right beneath us, hiding in plain site. Communication is the most powerful thing we do as humans, much of it is even non-verbal. Communications networks follow the law of divergence, not convergence. They're extremely powerful leveraged in concert. When salespeople connected with prospects through GoToMeeting and turned on their webcam, they had a 34% higher closerate than when they connected through GoToMeeting without video. This is because 10,000 possible facial expressions speak volumes more in universal parlance to humanize our brands. We read people via Gladwellian thin slice, don't you? The majority of Top 100 Twitter profiles are swiftly becoming brands so personal branding and thought leadership via content strategy at scale becomes a profound trend we're seeing.

The future will belong to strategic social sellers 'opening' sales opportunities upstream with holographic and Skype-like means of first calls and demos. There will be stratospheric travel that shrinks the globe so that C-Levels can interact for on-sites to create partnerships in a single day trip. The phone will still exist of course but all the virtual conferencing innovations will be the method of choice. Just look at the explosion of FaceTime, Skype, Join.Me, WebEx and GoToMeeting!

I respect all the sellers out there pushing the envelope regardless of their moniker. Social selling is neither myth nor lie. There are very real case studies. Check out the LinkedIn Navigator success stories in the enterprise and testimonials at that link. There's your social proof on social selling and the data does not lie. Look at all the real world case studies these leading enterprises are touting. Multiple 300K+ deals, 40% pipeline growth and millions in net new revenue!

Shakira said it best, 'My hips don't lie!'

Huge increases in engagement lead to higher revenues. LinkedIn is clearly the new effective cold call if done strategically with relevant insight in context. We must challenge ourselves to approach the new tools strategically. Welcome to the brave new world. I never intended to take the 90-Day Social Selling Challenge on LinkedIn in order to join some 'mafia.' I was seeking to get on board the superhighway like Einstein riding the light beam. If good ideas that work are mafioso, then we're living in an upside-down world. I don't care much for tools or rules.

I do whatever it takes maintaining integrity, to get the deal over the line and I suggest you do too. The greatest strategy of all is the one that works in that moment on the field. 'Opportunities multiply as they are seized,' Sun Tzu. The mafia know who I am and have been encouraging so far, more proof perhaps there isn't mafia at all. More just luddites against the early adopters. I have seemed to upset a few people by putting myself out there to this degree. It was worth it to gain thousands of new connections to help us collectively figure this all out. Disruptive change is hard on everyone. People fear change and seek security and stability, something impossible in high technology markets. Let your results speak for themselves and boldly go where no one has gone before! Adaptation and agile learning are the key. Only the curious will survive.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Eneas De Troya

Return of the Dragon #strategicsocialselling - new hashtag, old twist

The dragon we've all been trying to slay is the strategic [up and to the right] aspect of this value quadrant. 'Up and to the right' is right: get the strategy right and you'll be a sales sensation. Strategic sellers make it rain but how? CEO's often explain it as he or she 'just makes the magic happen'. They've fumbled into the ecstasy of anthropomorphism in describing strategic sellers who effortlessly seem to become trusted as advisor eagles or lone wolves (if they're not housebroken) or even mythical beasts like Lewis Carroll's Gryphon. They've got a similar graph like this on the universal hot vs. crazy matrix (see YouTube sensation below). Aka; the Unicorn. The more you look, the less likely it is to be found. Typically, as humans we fear what we don't understand. Not with top sellers. The leadership may not understand them but they certainly love them. One word – revenue. Then how on Earth could you get more of them into your organization? Maybe you need a unicorn catcher consultant like Dana McLendon in the video below who explains to men the unicorn zone when seeking to find the right women in your life?

For your edification (and my own no doubt!), I took the time to generate THIS STRATEGIC SOCIAL SELLER UNICORN LIST after a few months of scouring the internet and continuing to lose sleep! This compilation is actually dead serious and devised to help us all identify who these folks are. I intend to keep revising and adding to it in contrast to many somber advanced analytics based ways of generating the top 100 social sellers. It's not easy to dominate social selling but it is easier to game algorithms than be strategically seasoned, applying real world methodology that actually produces concrete revenue results and factors in #social.

It's always cool to compare the size of our Klout rankings, Social Selling Index Scores (SSI) from LinkedIn or PageRank of our vlog. Ultimately, I'm simply looking for an insight into the strategic sales process, methodology and traditional frameworks that still work on massive enterprise deals whilst selling into big companies and government infused into the modern social selling methods.

What does it mean to be truly strategic in major deals? That really depends on how you define strategy; something almost any sales person I meet with struggles to define. To me, strategic selling is about engaging early at the highest levels with provocative insights that foster engagement. The quality of your insights will dictate the acceleration of your deals and commensurately, the velocity of your pipeline.

Pure Matter Blog released a list of the top 50 social selling experts it polled aboutthe biggest challenge social selling experts face. There are some wonderful answers here. Outside looking in, as I've only been pushing hard in social for under 90 days, I'm dead certain it's the following so please tweet these if you agree:

Social Selling must become strategic to be leveraged effectively and sustainably in closing repeat enterprise deals.

To achieve a strategic social selling plan for your company, the answer is simple: It's a mashup of what came before with the cutting edge of what's next.

Strategic Social Selling means fusing old world and new world selling methodologies to close enterprise deals and generate predictable revenue.

Who's leading the charge in this regard, especially writing about it?

• Mike Weinberg who wrote New Sales. Simplified. and riffs on it here.
• Tim Hughes at Oracle UK. Period.
• Jill Konrath has always innovated at the cusp. She's even broken this down into agile learning as a meta-skill for high value selling.
• Jill Rowley - I tweeted out she's a strategic social selling unicorn and she requested to be a bacon #socialselling unicorn. She gets the mashup! She's exceeded quota year after year so she understands the pressures in the enterprise on ACV and crushing the number. She speaks CXO here.

• David Brock whose Partners In Excellence blog sets a gold standard for prolific B2B writing. He's even more prolific than I've endeavored to become... I don't know how anyone could live on less sleep than me doing all the writing after days filled with clients.
• Mike Kunkle is a sage - a master of enterprise enablement, I can never stop learning from his posts that seem to presciently fuse everything great on enterprise selling together. He has encyclopedic knowledge of every facet of sales, coaching, enablement and the underlying tech. True gift to the industryLinkedIn Publisher ecosystem. I vote LinkedIn makes the Influencer Network open again and elects him into it.
• Koka Sexton - There's no secret why Koka is the face of content strategy for LinkedIn. He needs no introduction. Follow him religiously!

How do you prevent history from repeating? Simple. Study it. How do you take social selling and elevate it to a point where it can withstand the forces of procurement, buying committees, more decision makers involved in the buying process than ever before, complexity and commoditization?

It's crucial to have a rock solid strategic social sales process. Have you mapped the politics, power base, picked a military strategy and built a multi-channel plan of attack that includes social as a force multiplier, not the core? Insight is the core. You are the core, the differentiator and the why. People still buy from those they know, like and trust. But they won't let you waste their time, especially executive decision makers.

Sellers fall into hunters and farmers but that's a glass ceiling we've bought into. I'd argue hunting in named account is closer to the mark. And beyond that, moving 'up and to the right', becoming the mythical beast, slaying the dragon or becoming one is our moment-by-moment challenge. Without strategy you are blasting, spray-and-pray, in a house full of smoke and mirrors. Just like martial arts takes years of focused discipline, so does becoming great at strategic selling. Hope is not a strategy and thinking strategically is interdisciplinary in that it requires improving business acumen as well as selling and communications skills.

I love Bruce Lee. He said some incredibly profound things in his short time gracing the world with his gifts. He was a bright light gone to soon but he had a vision and he said the following which applies to strategic selling more than any other quote I could find; it's not what you're expecting! Bruce also believed in his ability to rise to the top, something you must do to stand out as signal in the noise in #strategicsocialselling against a backdrop of #socialselling.

“Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.”

For some, familiarity breeds contempt. The same old marketing pabulum certainly does. Let us strive to fall in love with our customers and help them to fall in love with good ideas that truly break new ground. Let us leverage social media to passively listen to them, which LinkedIn Sales Navigator at last allows us to do. We're no longer the 'awkward fast friend.' Let's engage with relevance, context and meaning. Let's understand where we came from as a global selling community. One of the ways we can protect our livelihoods and jobs is to become more strategic in everything that we do. It starts with you.

Strategy in advanced selling situations is a great deal like learning something as ephemeral and metaphysical as 'swing feel' in jazz. You must play it to feel it and feel it to play it. Experience is how we learn. The joy is in the doing, the magic is between the lines. The music is in the silence. Ride-alongs by a gifted mentor or sales manager are a good way to get a feel for this when interacting with intimidating executives one-on-one. Coaching your people to look for strategic factors is a great exercise. Strategy sessions where each team member takes turns strategizing about how they'll engineer the win, where are you blocked, who your competitors are, all yields residuals for quarters to come. Laying this all out in TAS Dealmaker or Pipeline Manager... I cannot overstate the level of high value activity this represents.

I've recently received requests to consult companies in setting up a Social Selling War Room. That link contains my blueprint on the LinkedIn War Room I debuted on LinkedIn Publisher featuring the most enterprise-focused application of LinkedIn.com I've ever seen. I've innovated on it with a social front-end technology stack. It's the way we combine LinkedIn Sales Navigator with CRM, automation and third party plug-ins that truly makes it game-changing. Here's how you can get the output of 20 inside sellers with a Tiger Team of 5 of your highest performing reps.

I'll be tweeting out insight at a new hashtag I believe I may have been the first in the industry to coin: #strategicsocialselling – Please join me in that stream... I would love your thoughts? How are you making social selling strategic? What is influencing that intention in execution? How are you mashing-up the new school and old school? As thought leaders, let's unite to move social selling from a fad back to just 'selling' - strategic, powerful and thoughtful. Let's make it matter more to our customer and customer's customer.

There's the logistics, the tasks that you outline, that must be done to get you in front of the right people at the right time; and then there's the interpersonal skills... the charm, the charisma, the emotional quotient. I believe the logistics can be learned, but what about the interpersonal skills? Is that something you either have or you don't? Or can it be cultivated?" - Bob Leonard

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Kenny Louie

Top 10 Negotiation Hacks To Protect Price & Preserve Margin

Complexity and commoditization run rampant. There's an entire library of congress of books on this subject so I thought I'd list for you some practical, real-world life-hacks and techniques that actually work. You're going to have to completely differentiate your offering and get into deals early to knock out the competitors. Ultimately, savvy buyers will still bring in all your competitors even during the denouement (climax) of the deal so you have to be ready to have an edge to box them out.

First, David Brock of Partners in Excellence weighs in:

Tony, you've covered a huge amount. Here are some additional/supplementary thoughts: 

1. Too often, sales people work on negotiation positioning, protecting pricing or margin as the move into the closing stages of a deal. This is far too late. You need to begin establishing your positioning from your very first qualification meetings. 
2. It's impossible to preserve pricing and margin if your solution has negligible differentiation meaningful differentiation from the alternatives. There are a few key words here. The first is meaningful--it has to be critical and important to the customer. Just having more features, functions, better service, better quality, etc is meaningless unless the customer cares. If you aren't differentiated--if you haven't provided leadership in driving the customer to think what you have is the most important, you will never be able to defend price/margin. 
3. The customer has to find their current state is absolutely unacceptable. Doing nothing is not an alternative. Then combined with 1 and 2, having a strong business case positions you strongly to avoid discounting. 
4. Finally, making sure the customer understands the context. If arguing for a percent or two prevents them from Millions in profitability improvement, remind them the silliness of wasting time to achieve these goals.

At the very least, you want to engineer your win into their process, by establishing the requirements and exerting positive control over the deal at every step. By being the decision maker's 'emotional favorite' going in and co-creating the most compelling business case for mutual value creation and the New ROI, you've helped them advocate for your solution and build enough of a consensus internally to secure the win. Let's deconstruct a rather elaborate topic into 10 central hacks:

1. Anchoring & Threshold Gating – Anchoring the sale is both procedural and psychological and this fits right in with threshold gating. You need to set a minimum threshold for the deals you'll take on. Allowing for endless 'Seemore Sydrome' meetings, pilots and proof of concepts (POCs) could sink you. Many get romanced by the notion of 'land and expand' but $250K up front is an effective enterprise pilot, not zero or $5K. You can land and expand only if the client has enough skin in the game. We know you will with infrastructure costs and the investment you'll be making to ensure your customer is successful with your solution. Psychological anchoring is simply the concept of painting the larger vision of what a strategic partnership could look like economically and solution-wise. If you offer that full vision at $200K, they're going to look to get involved for 1/10th of that. If you factually state your typical annual deal size is $1MM, they're much more likely to transact with you in the realm of an acceptable enterprise size engagement. These are two concepts that are thousands of years old but they are alive and well in complex B2B selling so utilize them respectfully, artfully and with integrity. Be transparent with your pricing model. Be willing to 'fire' high maintenance tire kickers and set the tone for the partnership up-front. You will not scare off a great customer as exclusivity drives sales. Top companies want the best solution and are willing to invest if the ROI is there. They're not necessarily looking for a free trial. They seek Cialdini's social proof, case studies, reference clients they can call for 'proof of life', vis-a-vis: true testimonials. Many ask for retention information in RFPs because they're clamoring for stability in an overcrowded market place where many companies are not looking for the 100 year run; they're notoriously seeking a three year exit and vulture capitalists are pushing for that. Maximize customer value over shareholder value and build a relationship on the basis of longevity and trust.

2. Bucketing – The bucket technique works. This concept comes out of systems as disparate as charitable giving engines to models of lease tiers for European luxury cars whose finance departments operate similar to banks. I realize some pricing analysts will be reading this as I'm networked with you, so I'd love your thoughts in this sphere. Essentially, when presented with three options, human nature is to select the middle one. An even larger overarching concept, as you look to build out your pricing grid or SaaS tiers – you need to present your pricing in such a way as to land customers in the stratification you intend. Remember, this is in their interest as well as yours. To grossly oversimplify, if you're looking to sell deals at $500K, create tiers of $250K, $500K and $1MM. The Challenger Sale talked about creating constructive tension and discussing price early as two of the most powerful things that Challengers did naturally. My take on this is that it displays transparency and confidence. Cut through the placation and hot air. Get down to brass tacks. Pricing conversations must be delivered with finesse. If you present the matter too early, you can risk killing the deal. Invariably, if you are interacting at the most senior level in an organization, they will move toward the pricing discussion with force and great intensity rapidly. That's when being prepared with a bucket like, "Typically our engagements fall into the realm of $250K for a pilot and $500K to $1MM on an annual basis. We need to fully scope the project to understand the unit economics at play [professional services] or we need to understand exactly what modules you'll need [SaaS]. Which of these numbers speaks to you?" – I want to give some credit to Bryan Kreuzberger, the originator of Quad Emailing for some of the phrasing and verbiage here. You don't want to alienate buyers with this line of reasoning. If well timed and especially face-to-face, you're going to rapidly accelerate your ability to find out the available budget, the comfort level and merge this with a query into "success criteria" so as to understand what precise value they're looking to derive from their investment and how they intend to measure it. Maybe you can measure it together...

3. Elasticity of Demand: Suite of Solutions vs. Single Commodity –It's a mistake to sell single solutions into the enterprise even if you sell one thing. Let me explain. A single solution looks and smells like a commodity and so you'll be commoditized. Period. Point solution providers can pull this off because they've either gone Google and vastly undercut pricing to 'democratize' the industry, they've got way less overhead running fully lean in the cloud with limited Op-ex vs. Cap-ex, or they've figured out a more transactional way of offering one feature of a large enterprise solution to those 'looking for a deal.' Nobody got fired for buying IBM so over-simplification is actually an Achilles heal. Companies with a healthy bottom line are not looking for the 'low cost, loss leader.' If you're the incumbent, the argument is the little guy has vastly fewer resources and R&D to invest back into its suite of solutions that allows an end-to-end holistic approach. Often the incumbent is also vastly more secure with understanding the customer's business processes and people, so make sure you check that box if it's a competitive advantage. If you are David going against Goliath, perhaps you can provide a level of concierge service or place this dream client in Beta and that's very attractive to them to be this hands-on. Here is a Case Study.Perhaps they can even use both solutions at once, 'truly land and expand,' to multiply the effectiveness of what they're already using. Many amazing point solutions scale and providing a suite of solutions creates a situation of 'elasticity of demand.' You can also allow for consulting, setup and management fees which are standard practice and act as a mechanism to preserve margin.

4. Value Focus - We're all trying to sell value but value is not enough. Senior executives purchase based on delivering outcomes and managing risk. Leverage risk as a weapon and provide unexpected value by focusing on mutual collaboration and value creation over the life of the proposed partnership. Span your attention out and discuss what the potential growth curve looks like in the first, second and third year and some of the benchmarks other clients in a similar vertical are achieving at these levels. 'Just sell value' is a hard pill to swallow as this is the mantra in all the competitive companies for most sales managers. Sales executives must teach customers with new insight and provocative compelling business insight they've gleaned via industry expertise.

In a previous post, I highlight the physics idea that Elon Musk utilizes called First Principles thinking where you reduce a system down into its fundamental parts [Ferris Deconstruction: Deconstruct, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes] and then rebuild it in your mind or a brainstorm... from scratch. The battle royale is to be won with disruptive insight. Ideation is a big deal and precedes Challenger. The strategies and tactics will matter little if there's not a unique and compelling reason to buy from you. Ultimately, separate yourself from vendors and present instead as a partner and trusted advisor. Do this by sitting on the same side of the negotiating table and add so much value from inception that they: a) feel they'd pay you $500 just for the initial consultation and b) they feel they drove a huge bargain even investing $1MM because you're going to make or save them millions net net. Pretty simple but this gets incredibly muddied with thousands of books that tell you WHAT the outcome is without a blueprint of how to get there. I recommend any book or blog by Mark Hunter for a deep dive into these subjects of high profit selling.

5. Pre-Trigger Penetration - Craig Elias & Tibor Shanto extoll this revolutionary concept of 'first in'. Frankly, I believe that InsideView, Gagein, Avention and even components of LinkedIn Sales Navigator stem from seeds of ideas in the concepts of Trigger Event Selling in the clairvoyant book -Shift!. Pick this one up and start to study the 3 main trigger events: a) changes and transitions, b) awareness, and c) bad supplier. You'll need to get upstream pre-Challenger via a slew of techniques I've coined strategic social selling to do this effectively. If you're 'first in' you can set the tone, engineer in the requirements and continuously educate the customer. I've often stated, 'look, even if you don't choose our solution, I'm going to do everything that I can to help you to make the most educated decision.' Big enterprise sales teams talk about 'swagger' and how 'the swagger breeds.' It's this big machismo Glengarry Glen Ross target practice devaluing the industry into something less human.

To de-risk the head-to-head Running of The Bulls at Pamplona strategy with the competition, I would advocate listening and hunting for trigger events so that you can introduce yourself, provide value and edutain before the prospect even knows they need to look. You interject a disruptive way to execute on a major initiative already in play and bingo – major sale.

6. Offer Limited Concessions - Hard negotiating is about making limited concessions. If they ask for a discount, Mark Hunter will tell you to always hold firm on price but negotiation experts might advocate a very minor concession over a holdout time period. The bigger concessions you make earlier, the less chance you get to an effective win-win close. And don't forget, by the time you get to procurement they're going to ask, "Why is your solution 4X more expensive than the other 3 vendors I use for this offshore?" Or, 'Why's the license fee astronomical compared to these other three [point solutions] who are willing to take us on in a free trial?" That's when you may need to place a call to your executive sponsor in the account if you're getting blocked in procurement and shaved down. I've had situations where I reached an absolute stalemate with the purchasing team after daily half hour calls for weeks on end. Complete Groundhog Day! Be confident in your pricing model and stand firm. 'Friends and family' discounts are a slippery slope and training your customers to wait until New Year's Eve until your leadership is desperate to close, is a bad idea and sub-optimal business practice that pads numbers, to say the least.

7. Don't Be Afraid to Walk Away - Hit pause on the negotiation and grab dinner. Be willing to walk away from the negotiation table and even the entire deal if they've got you over a barrel with an offensive counter-offer. Call their bluff of posturing over you for pennies on the dollar. The power-base knows your price and knows the market. You're not alone in this deal. It's quite common they're going to find 3 other suppliers just to run a reverse auction and wave the lowest pricing schema in your face as a bargaining chip. Top executives drive a truly hard bargain. Don't you? I'm stunned when haggling breaks out but I'm never shocked when I get low-balled. Enterprise tiers are non-negotiables and when you're trying to grow revenue scalably and predictably, you cannot stoop to slashing pricing. The margin and even the entire business can suffer. If somebody keeps low-balling you and puffs their chest out like a peacocking lion, hold firm and take the high road. If they keep going there, be willing to walk out of the casino. Realize that a) They're doing this because they want your solution that bad and you've already clearly differentiated and won the value war, and b) It's very much posturing. You need to apply the principle of non-hunger, set the tone that you have many enterprise deals in the queue and batten down the hatches until this perfect storm blows over. Motivational speaker Tony Gaskins says "You teach people how to treat you by what you allow, what you stop, and what you reinforce."

This applies 100% to customers. Walking away from procurement for a while (while still remaining engaged wit the power base) could be the last strategic card to play and a better strategy than dropping price to lower a deal. You begin a relationship in weakness or strength – that choice is always yours. If you train the client they can simply apply pressure to your jugular at any point to get their way you'll erode any virtuous cycle to up-spiral a relationship. Deals that are won at the end of quarter with price drops are the same ones that renew with the customer shopping you to every competitor under the sun and coming back to demand 'lower fees' or else they're going to the competition. Even if you are the most innovative, market leader and integral to their core business! You could be the engine of their entire growth plan and you've still opened yourself up to the susceptibility of hostile negotiations. What's uncanny about this, is that I've seen the same customer treat one vendor like gold that didn't buckle on price and another like dirt who did. Think hard on that point.

8. ROI Calculation & Co-Creation [Drive Revenue] – Many methodologies speak to building a value hypothesis that's both qualitative and quantitative [Jeff Thull] and co-creating to prove it out with the customer. Some cautions here: Calculating a 3,000 percent increase is disingenuous. Pragmatism and realism are essential when communicating with CFOs and CIOs. Don't attempt to apply lipstick to a pig or present a pie in the sky 'push-button' fix even if your solution is completely transformational. We all know the devil's in the details and our success will rise and fall on delivery - the execution phase - when the rubber meets the rode and we look to bring about lasting change. There's an entire sector of consultants who can help with building out ROI Calculators. I think benchmarking by polling or surveying existing customer data is a very effective strategy. 'On average, our customers are realizing anywhere from a 3 to 5% revenue lift.' Remember that metrics that matter vary wildly so giving some study into the one key metric powering the buyer's purchasing decision and how you can influence it, is a worthwhile endeavor indeed.

9. Engineer in the Requirements – Build a document which prepares a client for RFP. Even provide them with a template RFP to make their job easier... I've done it with incredible results selling to government. Make sure to include all the questions that help them to assess how your solution better fits their requirements. Chances are, most competitors will not have the forethought and preparation to build a RFP checklist to share with clients. But if they have one too it can become a situation of a requirements stand off. Too many bells, whistles and features can work against you, presenting fear of scope or feature creep. It can interject implementation risk unnecessarily. Compatibility, extensibility and interoperability are ubiquitous buzz words but at the end of the day, are your people committed to getting the solution live and doing whatever it takes to make the client successful.

10. Venn Diagrams, Opportunity & Relative Costs [Create Cost Efficiency] – What's the impact of not making the change? What's the sunk costs of just holding the dozen meetings you already have? [Government] If there are four main factors that a decision can be made on, what's the Venn Diagram of the most important two? Map that out on a white board. It's often impossible to reconcile all the demands a customer is looking for. If they're painting a utopian reality, we know for a fact going in that no vendor is going to be able to satisfy them. At this point, it's worth building out an opportunity cost calculation or presenting a diagram that highlights these paradoxes and contradictory forces. Here's a humorous one to trump up the point!

And finally, an amusing story about competition in enterprise deals to share with you which will highlight just the level of psychological warfare actually involved in all of this which I'm sure many of you are far too intimately familiar with already... There was a point solution that presented itself as more advanced and sophisticated as the competitor. They had invested nowhere near the R&D and resources into improving the product and their system was legendary for going down at peak times. But every prospect that called in was given this song and dance: 'We're the leading enterprise solution. We're exclusive. Let us know when you're ready to make a real investment." Incredibly with a product that was nowhere near as good as other direct competitors, they cornered the enterprise market with the power of exclusivity alone. That's a hard argument to punch a hole into. Beware of this tactic if you are the leader or disrupting one. 'Oh, and call me back when you're ready to get into the elite version...'

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by: U.S. Army

The Era Of Personal Brands Is Now. Are You Ready?

We're living in the age of the rise of personal brands, and I recently sought some advice from one of the world’s experts. You may not know his name but you’ll recognize his clients. Two of them changed my world, expanded my mind, disrupted my thinking. Both of these luminaries have been instrumental in shaping my own business and marketing strategies.

The first is Simon Sinek: Start With Why. He helped create clarity for me in my professional purpose and pushed me down the road where you make a difference.

The second is David Meerman Scott and his book, The new Rules of Marketing and PR is mind boggling and answers the questions around sales and marketing convergence in the digital era. He convinced me to give my content away for free.

So who is the man who has helped these luminaries? His name is Mark Levy and I sought him out to ask him for some thoughts and advice on personal branding. Strap yourself in because like Morpheus, he offers us the red pill. Are you brave enough to swallow it see how far the rabbit hole goes?

I was and I’m embracing it all. I’ve never worked harder in my life but the results have been truly staggering. Whether you’re seeking to implement Challenger or to inject yourself upstream, early at senior levels with target customers; all of this is highly valuable. Mark Levy made a few important points with me and here they are:

“Don’t feel confident unless you have reason to feel confident.” Mark told me the story of a businessperson whose stated problem was a lack of confidence. The businessperson was about to attend a high-powered conference, packed with top prospects, and he didn’t feel confident about his ability to grab and hold people’s attention. When he heard the man’s elevator pitch, Mark said: “Lack of confidence is not your problem. You have every reason to lack confidence. Your pitch is unfocused, and all your claims are based on your opinion. Instead of working on your confidence, let’s work on your elevator speech and pitch."

“You don’t need phony confidence. You need an elevator speech that's so brutally honest and relevant to your audience that you’ll stop people in their tracks. When you feel confident in your material, confidence in yourself comes naturally.”

“Pull them in with facts.” For four hours, Mark interviewed the businessperson about the company he founded. In particular, Mark was looking for facts. What kind? Facts about how the company began, who exactly it helped, and concrete evidence of the approach the businessman took in his projects.

“I was looking for tangible things,” says Mark. “Things a camera would see. Sometimes that camera would be shooting a close-up: 'Tell me about how you helped one company.’ Other times it would pull back for a wide-angle shot: ‘Tell me about one commonality among the hundreds of companies you’ve helped'. Big picture and relevant granular details are both important."

Soon, Mark uncovered ten factual statements that formed the basis of a powerful pitch. Remarkably, the person was able to use one of those facts to demonstrate that his firm was, in a specific yet important category, the #1 firm in his industry. This was a position the businessman had not realized he could own until he had invested the time with Mark.

“When it comes to finding a big sexy idea and a strong marketplace position,” says Mark, “philosophy, opinion, and point-of-view are critically important. But when you look at the facts, at the telling details, you see things in a whole new way. Looking at the facts takes the pressure off. You escape the demands of your mind, and you’re more clearly able to see all the ways you’ve helped people.”

“Start with where your audience is.” Mark and I discussed how best to pitch an idea (or, what he calls “a big sexy idea”). He says that a problem some people have is that when they share the idea with others, they jump into explaining their solution too quickly. “If you jump to your solution,” he says, “you’ll do one of two things: both bad.

“First, the person you’re pitching to won’t know that you truly understand who they are, what they’re facing, and what they want to accomplish in the world. Before you tell them how you’re unique, they want to know you recognize how they’re unique.

“Second, if you jump to your solution, you’re forcing the other person to make sense of it and how it fits into their life. You’re asking them to do too much work. That’s work, by the way, they won’t do. They’ll ignore you or they’ll put on a false smiling face while they think of reasons to leave."

“When pitching an idea, start with where your audience is. They haven’t lived your life. They’ve lived theirs. Make it easy on them. Talk about things important to them. Talk about situations pulled right from their daily work. Show them that you know what they’re experiencing in ways that they themselves may not have even articulated. Then, and only then, should you talk about solutions and what you have that’s different.”

“To find your big sexy idea, look at your business as if it’s a book.”Clients come to Mark to find their marketplace position, or get help in writing a book. Mark, in fact, has a long history in the world of books. He’s worked in publishing, book wholesaling, and book retail. He’s written books, ghost-written books, coached people on writing books, and taught writing at Rutgers University.

“It’s no wonder, then,” says Mark, “that when I look at positioning your business, I look at it as if it’s a book. See, whether you realize it or not, like a book your business has a main idea. It’s ‘about’ something. That main idea may be sharp and distinct, or it may be general and commoditized. It may be easy for people to talk about, or it may be fighting with other ideas, so talking about it is hard."

“I look at your business and think, ‘Right now, what’s the main idea here? What’s the idea, and what are all the things substantiating that idea? What are the facts, stories, pieces of philosophy, exercises, frames, endorsements, and so on."

“While I’m examining things, I look for story-lines that might be buried, or that the business owner hadn’t thought about before, and I ask myself: ‘If this storyline were brought to the fore, how would that change everything? What would the business’s new focus be? Who would be its customers? How would it make a difference in their lives? What would they be buying? How would they be talking about it?’

“It’s really about trying new story-lines that are honest, but unused. It’s searching for a way to make a book into a page-turner. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – a little change can make a commoditized idea into a big sexy idea. It can make a good book into a blockbuster. “

I asked Mark about how his ideas on positioning and branding applied specifically to personal brands. He told me: “It all applies. Everything I’ve been saying works for big businesses and brands of one. “Your brand, no matter what the size, always needs to be about an idea. Right? It’s not about you. It’s how you make a particular audience’s life better. It’s what you stand for and what you symbolize.

Mark's parting wisdom: “You’re never selling your humanity. You’ll always be selling an idea.”

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flicker: Sir Richard Branson by Jarle Naustvik