The Future of CRM Is Not CRM - It's A Mashup

Depending on which statistics you choose to believe, up to 70% of CRM implementations fail. I wrote a post titled 'Simplify sales before we reimagine it' and in it I discusses the need to simplify all we do including CRM. The days of monolithic legacy architectures for most software systems are coming to an end.

Yes, we need a single source of the truth about customers and a large enterprise has no chance of being trusted and customer centric without a well conceived CRM strategy underpinned with the right technology. But the term ‘Customer Relationship Management’ has been hijacked by software companies.

Without doubt we are entering the era of mash-ups as savvy leaders obsessively focus on creating compelling customer experience, both on-line, mobile and in the physical world with real human selling and service. I asked some people I respect about what’s wrong with CRM today and where the future is going. I received some interesting opinions. Buckle-up and then let me know what you think.

Grace Schroeder is CEO of idea2 and she’s an expert in working with Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to bring systems together for awesome user experience. Here are her thoughts on what’s broken with the way people decide and buy, as well with the current approach of CRM solutions.

Technology decision-making is broken. All over the world, IT executives are making poor decisions wrapped in comfortable RFP processes, consensus, and default thinking. Unknown to themselves and their CEO’s, they are signing away their companies' souls by locking them into legacy technologies that will not support the changing business dynamics already underway and locking them OUT of technology innovations that could accelerate and transform them.

Kill the Traditional Software Deployment Model. Technology innovation is creating a wake of capital destruction with the power to capsize entire markets. Established software companies, sense that something strange is happening, and too many of them are reacting instead of acting. They are playing it safe. They are forgetting how to take the risks that brought them their power in the first place, and their best hope is that they regain some courage before their revenues run straight over a cliff.

Naturally aggregating the cloud. Cloud services are like potato chips. No one eats just one. Since it became possible to log into a software solution, decision making has gradually transitioned from IT to (mostly departmental) users. A group of people decide amongst themselves that certain online subscription services make work lives easier and deliver better results to the company. This is great. However, in order to see the results of these efforts, people need a login. No login - no access to the brilliance that is enjoyed by the users. Someone is making reports, someone is asking for reports, things stop being real time. If people could only KNOW the glory of what is happening in these silos, sales would happen faster, better customer profiles would exist, decisions would be made around real time facts and customer interactions.

A sane approach to software decision making. There’s a better way, an adaptive team-based model that brings stakeholders together as partners. Together, we will study the problems you need to solve and work with you to form a technology vision to support the knowns, unknowns, and even the unknown unknowns of your business. The sane approach solves problems quickly, iteratively, with minimal disruption. It doesn’t just “control risks” - it turns problems into possibilities, in real time. Your product will be better. Your costs will be lower. Your grandchildren will admire you.

The sane approach involves deep, clear discussions about trade-offs to make sure that short term and long term objectives are prioritized against business impact. You’ll understand when and why requirements change. You’ll disentangle yourself. Decisions should be ongoing and ever-evolving discussions – not a list of assumptions made by someone who doesn’t know your users, long-term business goals, competitors, or technical competency.

Consider these executive personas and how they drive the dysfunction.

Chief Suspicion Officer. Despite respectable financial results, they feel the gap between their leadership using the right words and the existence of a rational technology strategy. They see the same processes, the same vendors, and the same contracts sprinkled with cloud words. They don’t have the words to challenge it. They keep hearing that their company needs an integration strategy, but they don’t know what that means.

Canary in the Coal Mine. You’re working in a company of great people. The business is growing. You have not been getting support from internal IT, because your projects aren’t deemed core to the business, and IT is too busy for you. Luckily, being a cloud guru, you have organized your department with some great technologies that your people have found. You are making it all work together. Problem is, you can’t get the data to others in the organization without adding a new role: Captain of the Swivel Chair Department. Now, you’re right popular – everyone wants to know what you know. So the company decides that it needs a comprehensive cloud strategy. They gave a guy in another department the title, and he’s going to figure it out for the entire company. He’s been going to conferences for a year, and submitting white papers till hell won’t have it any more. Meanwhile, you’re getting more and more steeped in the tools that you are using, and you’re afraid that you will be forced to rip them out and start over.

The Ostrich. ‘It will all go away – security is a problem and we have spreadsheets’. They ask lots of red herring questions to fend-off discussions about cloud:

• ‘My mentor told me to always buy out of the box and that’s the rule I follow’.

• ‘My guys tell me we have all that covered’.

• ‘Do you know where we can get a Microsoft Access developer do you?’

• ‘Have you heard of FoxPro?’

• ‘Do you have something I can read?’

The Hero: He wants to save the day but he doesn’t know how. Who will listen anyway? Who should be the cloud decider? This is a major dilemma in many companies. There are people with titles to suggest that they are the deciders. However, the very nature of the word decision is challenged when it comes to working with differing technology solutions. Almost every business process in the company (including the RFP process) leads to poor decision-making.

The truth of the matter is the perfect human(s) to make these decisions do not exist in every company. The proliferation of solutions has done a great thing – there are point solutions for many more business functions, and they’re easier to use than ever. The nature of the solutions add transparency, visibility and accountability into results, and should guide people toward more effective work products.

That said, how do you take an organization that isn’t technologically savvy, and begin to introduce solutions in a way that can be easily consumed? If not easily, at least in a way that does not cause people to stick a fork in their leg when they log into their new platform.

Customers have needed trusted advisors more; to help them navigate the conflicting messages and complexity of technology. But customers must themselves also appoint leaders who can bring it all together internally when designing the customer experience they’re seeking to create. These people must care the most about success and possess technical curiosity and skills and to enable them to understand the world of the possible. Finally, they must help the best people in their teams be part of the decision process and implementation.

Certainly Grace sees CRM is part of the answer but not the panacea. She is very much all about integration and knows that the best customer experience is created by bringing data and systems together. This approach uses the right tool for the right job and is agile in its approach. Technology today offers low cost web services and modern Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to bring mash-ups to life in an affordable way.

Michael Bonner from Pipeline Manager is someone I respect enormously. He is one of the smartest people I’ve met and has many years of CRM experience in making systems both usable and valuable in enabling process efficiently and effectively.

First I asked Michael: “What’s wrong with CRM?” CRM was designed by IT people. Sales never took a leadership role in designing CRM. Then Marketing and Inside Selling got thrown into the mix – again by a department that was never trained in those professions and with no accountability for outcomes. We see years of research pointing to customers engaging with sales later and later in the cycle. And yet we see no improvements from CRM offering ways to understand that big-picture cycle, let alone view it or proactively control it or the customer’s journey. Instead, department silos are reinforced.

Next I asked: “Where do you see the future for CRM?” “First we have to ask: Why would this situation change any time soon? Improved sales has no effect on IT compensation or reviews. Whether a rep takes a minute or quarter of an hour filling out a CRM form, IT has no real reason to care. This problem plays out in countless minor inconveniences, overloaded forms and counterintuitive workflows. The problem compounds itself across inefficiencies throughout the lead-to-repeat-business sales cycle.”

The easy way to fix this: put IT/CRM admins as well as everyone involved in generating business on a strict, generous commission. That will keep all the silos laser-focused on coordinated activities that speed up a sale. The entire organization will get very smart about how a rep uses his/her 2000 hours per year. Long IT projects will become a lot shorter. Admins will be anxious to know every best practice out there and will then align CRM to support those practices. Marketing will add to the CRM only those things that are truly critical to driving revenue.

CRM of the future could look like a single source of information that tracks the entire lifecycle of the customer, with emphasis on the processes that make a sale, rather than petabytes of low-value forensic data. The hard truth is that technology can support almost anything that sales can imagine.

Looking at the future of CRM I see a big disconnect between all that CRM could be and the more likely outcome of people protecting turf, undermining change and training, passive resistance to anything that says that people could be doing better.

Despite the phenomenal payoff that any organization would have with a CRM that actually helped them make more money, there may be too many entrenched shibboleths to allow that change to happen. The bigger the organization the more entrenched the old silos and blame games seem to be.

So - CRM as an industry can keep growing at double-digit rates without having to fix any of its systemic nightmares. IT can stay in control of tools that they never have to use while ensuring that user confusion translates to greater job security. Until top management starts feeling some pain, there’s no reason to expect a shift that results in a change in the culture, the silos or the software that supports them.

Michael Bonner has delivered many CRM implementations in the real world to transform sales execution but now it's your turn: What’s the future of CRM in your eyes. Are mash-ups the future for user experience with CRM the underlying database?

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 Photo by Hosein Emrani on Unsplash.

4 Fiercely Ferocious Pay It Forward Principles

It requires strength and self-assurance to help others. You can't be insecure because you're instead choosing to take yourself out of competition with everyone. To do that, you have to believe and know that you've already succeeded. Ultimately, it's one unified team, not a feeding frenzy. Paying it forward is the ultimate expression of self-esteem because you're placing yourself on a different plane. It's very challenging to be kind to people that you feel are infringing on your territory.

If you're helping to build people up even when thy operate in the same space, you clearly feel confident that you own the space that you're in. Here are some ways to help 'pay it forward' in your marketplace:

1. Teaching your success principles to other people. Not only do you learn them better, it cements your own knowledge and it's a nice thing to do. If I'm buying something and I notice the person selling it to me says they're new at their job – if they ask for my help – I always enjoy helping them. After I get the deal that I want, it only takes a few moments of my time to tell them some of the things that have helped me along the way. It's wonderful to know that I can leave a transaction with what I want and they got something positive out of it as well. Too frequently in beginning sales jobs, nobody is teaching you, so every bit of advice is useful. Good advice is incredibly rare. Trying to be thoughtful about the advice you give is a very kind thing to do. It shouldn't be all sales people against each other. It should be all sales people building each other up – professional selling is a tough game. Why would you want to climb over each other when you can just walk next to each other? If everyone is elevated, it doesn't mean that the pyramid's getting smaller. And if it is, you might be in a pyramid scheme...
2. Trusting other people enough to delegate to them. If you're not micromanaging someone, you're showing that you believe in them and you're giving them a chance to succeed on their own. This allows you to believe in your own leadership enough to believe in them. You have to be an excellent communicator to tell someone something once and be able to get that thing done. Not only is it draining for you to ride someone, it doesn't inspire anyone to be their best if you're assuming they're being their worst. John W. Nordstrom only has one rule in the employee handbook: 'Use good judgment in all situations.' You don't want to be the one person who's judgment doesn't fit into that category. Having such a broad sweeping rule encourages people to be their best.
3. Praise other people randomly and genuinely - This practice is nice and good for morale. It helps build self-esteem and that feeds on itself energetically; something highly undervalued that doesn't happen very often in modern society. Acknowledge others without expectation of return. If you notice someone putting out a lot of effort on a project that isn't being acknowledged, praise their effort. It doesn't have to be a huge sale to have been a ton of work. How about a co-worker who is wonderful to her family? Colleagues take time to make their desk space look nice, with pictures and flair. People have weird hobbies, so never hesitate to ask, especially in interviews when they ask if you have any final questions: "What do you do for fun?" Take the time to be genuinely interested in others. Everyone is so accustomed to having no one be interested – it's a treat when someone really cares. A lot of people are lonely, so genuinely caring about their well-being is a kind thing to do. You might be the only one that is interested. There's so much rejection in sales that just being generally kind to those around you might be the one light in their day. Kindness is very important. If you can be that for one person, wouldn't it be nice if that happened for you as well. I think eventually if you do that enough, being thoughtful toward other people can feel as good as people being thoughtful toward you. You can generate this any time. The Dalai Lama can sit in front of a vast audience and still take an active interest in every single person. His listeners truly feel that he cares about them as human beings... because he does!
4. Genuinely care for the success of people that are frequently overlooked. To empower people who are disenfranchised breathes new life into situations that have grown old and stale. You're all of a sudden able to see something that you've only seen from one perspective in an entirely new one. Take the CEO interacting with people at all levels of her organization which allows her to see things that she may have overlooked from the top. Rather than be frustrated with team members who aren't winning sales awards, why not help them find their area where they'll shine within the organization? Especially if they're genuinely trying to contribute. Someone who cares about the success of your business is extremely hard to find, so working to place them in the optimal role in your organization will ultimately bring your team more value.

One of the most important things is that you're wholeheartedly enjoying helping others. If it doesn't come from a pure place, it just feels like mandatory community service. No one wants to feel like they're participating in forced charity on either end. The purity of your heart makes it kind and tolerant. You could do something very small and if it means a lot to you and that person, it can be much bigger than an empty grand gesture.

I began that 'pay it forward' became trendy a long time ago and people want to feel like the kid in the movie but don't actually care about what they're doing. It's a paradox. If you don't care about someone you're helping, you're not helping them. It takes a lot of maturity to care about someone you might not know very well. If you really allow yourself to care about others, then they're not random acts of kindness, it's just about how you live your life.

You shouldn't be patting yourself on the back because you're helping someone less fortunate. You should just want to be kind to everyone who's around you. Rather than seeing people around you as less fortunate, just see that they are in a different situation than you are, because nobody wants to be looked down on. In the words of Ian MacLaren: "Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden."

If your world-view is healthy; you won't judge people's stations in life, you won't walk around feeling better than others but you also won't walk around feeling worse than others. It will allow you to interact with everyone that you meet more purely which is something people really appreciate when it happens to them. In this day and age, there's so much tooting of each others horns but rarely done with sincerity.

The idea of only calling back the important people is very belittling to pretty much everyone. How do you really know who's important when you barely know them? When you take everyone's perspective in, you can learn a great deal more. When you're trying to do a deal, taking in feedback from someone on a lower organizational level can still help you. No one knows more or less than anyone else; they just know different things. Everyone's wise in their own way. Education and 'station in life' don't dictate knowledge or value.

If you treat everyone with authentic kindness, not only will it be returned to you ten fold but you'll have a much better perspective on the world around you. When most get into power, they're suddenly around people that kiss-up to them and it's so easy to lose perspective on the world that way. If you value everyone's opinion, you won't get stuck in a glass house with the people you love outside wanting to throw rocks at you. It's better to build the house together with all those rocks into a nice, sturdy stone castle.

The technology industry has such a reputation of being soulless. It would be nice to change that. Wouldn't it be nice if it was computers and humans not just humans trying to be like computers? They are both part of the equation. The main thing that humans have that computers don't is empathy; why try and lose that? Why not embrace how we're different than computers?

Social media has such a reputation for being tragically soulless. Why not spend that time and our brain power encouraging each other? It takes less energy to do something positive than to do something negative. Stating this the opposite is a cop out. I personally think that refueling to build-up those around you rather than to tear them down is less exhausting. If you have the option to feel better or worse by using the internet, why not choose to feel better? Sometimes it can be easier to participate in slanderous gossip but it's never going to make you actually feel like a better person. Do you really want to be following everyone that's jumping off the gossip cliff? Lemmings don't generally have the best life expectancy.

When Tony Hsieh would interview new hires, he'd keep in touch with the driver that picked them up at the airport in Vegas. He would ask the driver how he was treated by the candidate. I think the message is: It doesn't matter how you act when you think you're being watched. It matters who you are all the time. Everyone's well behaved when they think that their livelihood is on the line. If how you treat those around you matters enough to dictate hiring, it clearly should be valued as much as how you appear on paper in your curriculum vitae. Needless to say that Tony Hsieh did not hire anyone who was arrogant or rude to the driver.

No matter how well you think you're presenting yourself, if your whole life is self involved, you'll never truly succeed. The thing that shows through and wins in the end is that you care a lot about yourself and others. Let's face it, Mother Teresa is probably much more likely to get hired anywhere over Kim Kardashian. The wicked queen in Snow White probably didn't have a lot of Twitter followers.

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: Mikael Tigerström

Top 25 Incendiary Social Selling Secrets

Can you close million dollar deals with social selling fully inside? Yes. Here are the top 25 ways how you can actually do it. It's being done right now in the field by a sales team near you [perhaps a competitor], it's remarkable and it's not for the faint of heart. Get a good night of sleep and unleash your inner advanced strategic social selling 'beast mode' tomorrow. I'm sure the naysayers will come out in full force over this content but I can attest, a new era of selling is upon us. It's a pastiche of panache par excellence, a mashup of the highest order.

To win in 2015 you're going to have to go so old school and new school at the same time, applying a dizzying array of multi-disciplinary principles that will give you an invincible edge. Just reading Jonathan Farrington's statistic that, 'the average quota attainment in B2B sales is below 60%,' prompts me to lay out a blueprint on how to fix it. If you're a sales person, sales manager or CEO that aspires to greatness this year and leveraging the new channels to book major revenue, remember that it's not just about social selling – it's about advanced strategic social selling! Tactics without strategy are a fool's errand. Don't heed those spam emails you get promising you impossible results on LinkedIn. There is no quick fix in social selling just like there never was in analog enterprise selling and never will be. It's a strong supplement not substitute and it's all about daily heavy lifting. The right strategies and tactics applied consistently will help you break through. The devil's in the details so you will win or lose in the execution phase. These 25 solutions form the bedrock to proven sustainable results with advanced social selling injected as a force multiplier:

1. Move from push to pull marketing. While the whole world is blasting out white noise, start to leverage 'attraction' marketing and pull your dream customers to you. Launching your own LinkedIn Group below is 'pull.' Publishing edgy subject matter expertise content driven by insight with a strong polarizing opinion stands out: it's 'pull.' The name of the game is to create a garden for the butterflies to land on you rather than relying on bigger, better, faster nets. Trillions of dollars are spent annually on interruption-based push marketing. Flip the script. Be an expert and start to radiate out insights, solutions and your personality from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, an Infographic Pinterest board (design the infographics yourself), get quoted in the media via deft press releases, speak at conferences and become omnipresent everywhere a customer in your industry would go on LinkedIn. This mind shift of mind share alone will work wonders for your personal brand, company brand and make the biggest impact on filling your funnel with qualified opportunities. Remember, you're now creating demand upstream prior to "trigger events" leveraging this strategy. This is pre-Challenger, before they've gone into RFP mode, before they've hit up the first page of Google to run the reverse auction on you and your closest 5 competitors. May the 'first in' win! Entice, beguile, enchant and extoll...
2. Challenger Sales marketing and sales alignment. You're going to need to get your Sales and Marketing teams in the same room every week. Build one-pagers, white papers, brand collateral and an array of enticing sales material. Step one: study your competitors. Do not release the same exact material as them. If there's a magic quadrant report, figure out a way to package those statistics in Domo to inject some dashboard beauty and bring it to life uniquely before you go to market. Build out concise case studies with testimonials from your happiest reference customers. Build out a YouTube channel of customer testimonials. Bring a camera crew to the next conference your company hosts and interview the participants. Interview one hundred clients and prospects about the challenges they face in the sector where your solutions [be they product or services] are most relevant. Turning the camera on to the customers to garner their insight is a great way to align sales and marketing. Everyone in marketing should get trained on Challenger Sales and everyone in sales should study The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Understand each others' pain and come to the center with insight generation which leads to demand generation rather than reactive servicing of demand. You'll quantum leapfrog right past competitors with a few white boarding sessions here to build synergy.
3. Go ballistic in LinkedIn Groups. You can join a maximum of 50 groups and consistently drop groups and add others. You never want to sell or link-bomb in groups. Don't spam, don't shamelessly self promote: at all, ever. The top group ninjas drop into dozens off groups every day and interact provocatively in the comment sections. Take Fresh Sales Strategies or Strategic Selling in the sales world. There are amazing threads in here that stretch to hundreds of comments. Why not put in your authentic two cents on every single one that grabs you? Chances are these topics are grabbing others by the lapels too. There are dozens of CXO groups and Marketing groups, some with hundreds of thousand of members. Yes, you can try to send a bunch of LinkedIn invites until your profile locks up into 'LinkedIn jail,' or perhaps try to start intriguing conversation in there. That's a limited strategy that could get your LinkedIn shut off. The strongest 'unlimited' strategy is to take interest in what your customers and the industry insiders are posting in there. You'll be amazed how many people add you based on awesome commentary you provide. Again, you're moving to 'pull.' Put thought into what you say but 'foster' discussion by asking open ended questions. Remember this is a 10X strategy. I recommend interacting with 25 to 50 comments every day in relevant groups where you have expertise and where your customers live. You'll be amazed at how this trail of bread crumbs can lead to a juggernaut of visibility in just a short time.
4. Launch your own LinkedIn Group. If you're selling software and there are already twenty five groups on mobile marketing applications, still launch your own group. Seek to make the topics you share interesting. Take the time to thoroughly explain the nature of the group and why you've launched it. Invite in your entire network as painstaking as clicking that button over two thousand times is, it's worth it. When you post a question in your group, push that link to your stream and push it out to Twitter. This will help you massively expand the group. Be stringent about pushing articles and spam to the promotions tab. I would say, open source the group. Less rules are better but curate based on relevance so that clients, prospects and colleagues get a bunch out of it. To grow it faster, make all your inner circle admins on it. Your colleagues or sales team can add major value by posting relevant articles to it, questions and commenting in it daily. I've argued consistently every top seller should host their own group and every company that is serious about social selling should not only create a company page but also host their own conferences, executive dinners, thought leader lunches or Google Hangouts / webinars.
5. Use up all your InMails every month. I can't tell you how rare this is that I've even advocated incentivizing sales people who do this as a KPI. In premium accounts or Navigator there are 25 InMails per month. Imagine, your sales people can reach whomever they please 25 times and they aren't using it? It boggles my mind. But change is hard and change management can take time and aligning incentives is a must. These are not spam template blasts, these are researched touches with the understanding that the ones that get responded to, now open up additional credits. When you succeed, LinkedIn gives you more so that's definitely incenting the right behaviors! What are the best messages? Reference a shared connection, a provocative insight, a compelling business case or a time you met someone at their company at a conference. Include multiple bullet points on your solutions and how they moved the needle, either make or save money for which similar companies. Leverage social proof or mash up all of the above factors. Short and sweet but as an acid test, send the message to a colleague and ask them if they'd honestly respond. One cool technique is to go talk to your own CEO's EA and see if he would respond. [They get dozens of these every day and have great insights. EA's are your best friend!]
6. Leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator for better segmenting and targeting. There's a ton of buzz building on this super-premium sales module for LinkedIn. I'm a proponent of it because it allows for passive tracking of executive prospect's streams. Again, this is 'pull' selling because you're not awkwardly collecting business cards at conferences and power adding. You're not risking going to 'LinkedIn Jail.' Start to build out accounts and lead lists in here and then become the sales analyst of the mega-stream that Navigator serves up. You'll see job changes, company news, news from your key leads, trigger events galore and just start to become a sponge for what's happening in the world of your prospects. When you have a valid reason to hop into the conversation, you now can and tailor a LinkedIn invite like never before possible. The biggest reason to use Navigator is efficiency! This software will save you hours of clicks based on daily lead recommendations from key accounts that it serves up to you on a silver platter. It's an efficiency machine! You need to drive deeper into the right accounts. Less accounts, far higher engagement is the name of the game.
7. Track and harness trigger events. Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto wrote the bible on trigger events. Inside sales hunters are constantly calling the companies that get funding. In the book Shift, they posit that 'changes and transitions' are the strongest trigger event. CXOs in the first 90 days are change agents and frequently spend millions of dollars on new solutions disrupting the status quo and displacing legacy incumbents. With Sales Navigator, you can track these moves easier and interject yourself and your solution prior to the trigger event which is the most powerful thing you can do, in my honest opinion. There's never been more data on your customers readily available in social channels. Build lists in Twitter, listen closely to what your customer's care about and start to build out insight-driven marketing materials around those issues. Engage with them meaningfully in a pay it forward capacity. Be watchful of what really matters to them.
8. Get warm referrals. I get generic referral requests constantly from people I don't even know on LinkedIn. Prune your network from your 9,000+ LION profile down to only the people you actually know. 1,000 connections that you've actually met or would know who you are is drastically more potent. Let me explain...As you reach out for a referral, if they've never even heard your name, that's never going to get forwarded. Refine your network with a 'deleting party' and start to rebuild with warm referrals from folks that will help you. It's reciprocal and you can help them too by offering to refer in return. Always help anyone you believe in reach their targets. I am constantly writing recommendations, facilitating warm referrals and asking for them successfully on here daily.
9. Ghost drive your C-Levels profiles to connect. In fast moving startups, the C-Suite will often allow top sellers to power their profiles or if you email them to send a message to the key VITO contact in a target prospect on your behalf, they'll often acquiesce. A CEO reaching out to a CEO is the only way to get in on many occasions. If you're breaking disruptive technology in a new market, C-Level outreach can be mission critical. Leverage LinkedIn to 'neighborhood' your way into an on-site meeting or set an executive meeting request to give a demo. Your goal is visibility, so work on the key insight to bring to that outreach. You get five seconds to make the point on why she should be talking with your company so make them count. I know a company where the Chief Financial Officer has a Social Selling Index score of over 70 (out of 100) and even has a seat in LinkedIn Sales Navigator because he is such a super networker. He's constantly bringing in warm introductions for the sales execs. Very cutting edge!
10. Publish SME B2B content daily. What does it mean to you to be a subject matter expert? Are you ready? You'd be amazed because you are. If you've been selling in a vertical for five to ten years, you absolutely have a combination of stories, real world experience and tribal knowledge that renders you an expert in some aspect of the business. What if you're just starting out? Well you're probably an expert in some facet of your life so mash-up insights based on that in your posting? I recently did a post oncycling and sales leadership on here that was well received. The goal is to break out of your comfort zone, apply some elbow grease and business acumen, roll up your sleeves and dive headlong into the deep end of massive action. Every strategy in this post is yours for the taking. Inaction can paralyze forward momentum and stunt your sales growth. Build a list of a hundred topics you know the most about. Build those topics into Publisher posts, tweets and questions to pose for your LinkedIn group. Remember, interactivity is the One Key Metric (OKM) of it all. Interactivity leads to sales, plain and simple. Remix other post topics that are trending in Publisher. A great example is a CEO who had sworn off ever hiring a salesperson again (gaining 500K views in three days of glorious link bat), so I crafted a series of patriotic responses as I feel selling is the backbone of the free market system and even our economic engine of democracy itself.
11. Combine LinkedIn with top flight selling modules. TAS Dealmaker, Pipeline Manager, HootSuite, Marketo, InsideView, Avention, HubSpot. The sky's the limit in the Salesforce AppExchange. Turbo-charge your Salesforce instance with leading third party plug-ins such as Pipeline Manager, TAS Dealmaker, Pipeliner CRM or others to dominate Account Planning and Opportunity Management. Invest in front of funnel marketing automation to fill your pipeline with qualified prospects 24/7. There is an inside sales and social selling, front-end technology stack emerging that definitely includes auto-dialers and calling optimization technologies like InsideSales.com to provide advanced analytics. Engaging with your inbound leads in any channel in the first five minutes is everything. Real time selling is something both David Meerman Scott and Andy Paul expand on their seminal work. You need to be listening to respond and engage. There are still longer sales cycles for closing six and seven figure deals fully inside in social. The accelerator is going to be leveraging a suite of technologies to streamline the pipeline, be ultra-responsive and get upstream, past the gatekeeper to be the preferred vendor going into the crucible of the decision. You want to have driven the key insight for change in order to win if the deal goes to RFP stages.
12. Multi-step email and outreach campaigns. The biggest mistake I see even seasoned sales people making, is a lack of persistence. Calls, emails, InMails, Likes, Shares and Retweets are useless when done one to three times. You need to create a calendar or set alerts in Salesforce so that you have a cadence of outreach. As a gifted sales manager, you rise and fall based on the cadence of accountability that you set as a baseline benchmark for these behaviors. Focus your organization on the daily sales activities that are leading measures and will actually move the needle on sales results. Marketing automation and drip programs can be effective but they need to be tuned and A/B tested. Reduce your target list to just a couple dozen dream clients. Figure out where they interact the most: which social networks are they most active in? What is the highest value use of your sales team's time? Build calendar alerts for strategically reaching out to them. Go deeper not wider. Personalize and be consultative even in content generation. Unlock the pain points that will drive demand rather than servicing the obvious initial pain with a point solution. Ultimately, you'll close the most business by crafting a complex solution comprised of multiple products and services you sell rather than getting commoditized. Single solution social selling squeezes out the margin your disruptive business model so badly needs to grow and secure investment. Your competitors are spam blasting and boiling the ocean. Don't you be the one. Customize, tailor and drive to the target in a variety of media with contextually relevant outreach driven by key insights.
13. The rule of 5 to 12 touches. Think social cross-training. Treat LinkedIn just like any other communications medium: telephone, face-to-face or otherwise. 80% of sales close on the fifth to twelfth interaction. Add value every single time: an article, white paper, screen shot of a tweet, retweet, comment on their blog, reflect thoughtfully on their annual report, a speech they gave and provide sound advice based on pattern recognition as you scour the landscape for trends and new ideas that work.
14. Sell the meeting not your product or service. The holy grail is the opportunity to present on-site. It is possible to close a million dollar deal without ever seeing a customer but why not meet them with that much on the line? You can make this presentation effectively over Skype GoTo, Join.me or Webex especially if you operate intercontinentally. The sleeper hit is that this presentation is going to be a 10,000 foot Challenger insight opener and then an active listening session where your prospect is doing almost all the talking. As Neil Rackham loves to say, the more you're listening the more their propensity to buy increases. Show up and throw up presentations are fatally flawed in person and in social. "Look at me, look at me, now what do you think about me?" Snore, delete, yawn... Next! The word presentation should really connote prospect therapy. Peel the onion, get to the underlying problems under the symptoms, back out to 10,000 feet so your prospects are taking a hard look at the systemic problems affecting their divisions. Change management is hard. The risk of any initial call is getting too far into the weeds. The devil's in the details but detail orientation can stall a deal forever into a quagmire of inaction and "do nothing." What happens if they don't change? What are the outcomes and risks that decision makers seek? Focus there, air out the grievances.
15. Curate over 200 items per day on LinkedIn and leverage TweetDeck or Hootsuite to filter the Twitter fire hose. Read ten to twenty publisher posts and authentically comment. Follow pertinent channels and add / follow thought leaders. OK, so you're thinking this is a ton of work. Well you'll flare up. Watch Timothy Hughes in the UK or Jill Konrath. The level of sharing, interacting and posting with some of the top social sellers is astounding. They are hyper focused on what matters most to their clients and the quality and quantity is staggering. You can preference quality over quality but with automated tools like InfusionSoft and Buffer, ubiquitous outreach is possible. Still take time to hand curate and respond personally. Turn the knobs up and down until you find the sweet spot of interactivity. It's not always bad when people complain you're sharing too much. I've turned up my content generation to 11 but kept the insight level very high, and received an overwhelmingly positive response. The demands of a bestselling author promoting a book versus a seasoned sales rep going to market are very similar, actually. Your enemy is obscurity. Your competitors are legion.
16. Purple cow "Power of Wow" content. You're driving along the road and you see a bright purple cow. You stop the car and take pictures! So much of B2B content is hum drum, flat and boring. Spice it up with stories, humor, pop cultural references and hyperbole. Catchy, cinematic and over the top subject lines, post titles, tweet quotes or cartoons keep it light and fun and get noticed. Do something bold and original! Seth Godin only blogs, he doesn't even have a Twitter but his fans are so ardent they repost everything for him. Tell amazing true war stories. Remember that time when... Share the challenges of your customers and how you've solved them in the context of mashups, YouTube videos, Pinterest boards, infographics and data visualizations. Be as creative as possible to get multiple 'aha' moments and reactions in your presentations. Light up your social media streams!
17. Polarize your audience by taking an authentic extreme stance. The truth is that you probably do have an extreme opinion that is still HR compliant and fully in bounds, wherever you work. If you're in virtualization of private clouds you've taken the stance that hardware for hardware's sake is a dinosaur. If you're selling high technology CRM systems, you're probably of the mind that CRM may be broken and the sector must innovate. Whatever massive problem you're solving in your industry, there's a polarizing stance. Shock and awe campaigning is just insight driven or challenger driven sales and marketing on steroids. Sometimes we need to shout a bit in social to be heard but this can be done artfully. It's a bit unusual to see corporations allowing their top sales people to share authentic opinions but I actually see this evolving in LinkedIn and Twitter in 2015. Don't be afraid to make a splash and express how you really feel. When I lecture, I talk about how corporations are lower and lower in the top 100 Twitter profile totem pole. Sales people need to become B2B micro-marketers. The vast majority of the top Twitter profiles in Australia now are the personal brands, it's the faces and names. It's real people, the faces of the corporation. The advantage is this humanizes brands. The risk is brand reputation so it's critical to train globally on social selling best practices and get the sales team trained on the advanced meta-strategies and strategic techniques. As a seller you have a responsibility to be a thought leader, a subject matter expert and open hearts, minds and eventually wallets. Bland, safe and cliched content won't get you to the finish line of exceeding quota. You can absolutely implement this strategy and maintain 100% integrity.
18. Newsjacking. David Meerman Scott coined this term in his brilliant books. When you're building out Publisher content on LinkedIn, tweet it out at reporters covering a current event. Watch the Google Trends and Twitter Trending Topics. Watch the Pulse top searched keywords. Study the titles of what the highest ranking Pulse 25 are posting about. Integrate in a real-time newsjacking aspect of your social media strategy at least weekly. If it's the World Cup, write an article on how soccer relates to marketing. Newsjacking and mashups together are an unstoppable cocktail of awesome. You've gotta think of hashtags as landing pads and pepper your posts with them. Tweet at people who have written similar material or share your viewpoints. Tweet at people that disagree with you. Boldly go forth and just tweet! Showing up is 90% of the battle in social selling.
19. Ghostjacking. Ghost-jacking is this idea of the LinkedIn War Room where you take a team approach driving each other's LinkedIn profiles to gain intel and turbo charge LinkedIn due diligence, outreach and referrals. It's also the concept of leveraging your own internal C-Suites social profiles to land key meetings and deals. The reason this is authentic is that many C-Level executives are now having their social profiles powered by an Executive Assistant. LinkedIn is the new cold call. And referrals without follow through die on the vine. If you know someone who knows someone one step from the target, start to message around them triangulating your way in, leverage your internal networks with TeamLink. Make your way in and do everything it takes to garner a meaningful introduction. It only takes one yes to succeed!
20. Thunderclapping. This needs to be optional but is a huge part of a go-to-market strategy. Let's say you have hundreds even thousands of sales reps out in the field. Your CMO and marketing team should be distributing collateral in the form of suggested tweets, infographics and white papers, one-pagers, customer testimonials, sound bites and YouTube videos. Create an internal email distribution, Chatter feed or Yammer list daily or weekly with suggested tweets, shares and always, always, always ensure anyone who shares injects there own opinion. Hundreds of people sharing the same exact piece of content is a thunderclap but hundreds of people all putting an authentic spin on why it matters for them and their dream customers, is world's more powerful. This has an exponential ripple effect; tens of thousands of people will see it and you'll 10X your brand exposure in the marketplace.
21. Endorsements at scale. I know we all love to hate it, those insincere endorsements we get. It seems like everybody is hitting the plus sign. It's a genius tactic on LinkedIn's part for increasing stickiness and adoption. Great job LinkedIn, we're bombarded by somewhat meaningless notifications from people we really don't know endorsing our skills all day every day. I am constantly endorsed by people who may only know me in a very specific 'weak ties' way. Hey, I'll take the endorsements, no complaints. You know what's more powerful than clicking those plus signs all day? Go through your LinkedIn connections list and write five authentic recommendations every day this year about people you've actually interacted with and worked with: could be direct customers, colleagues, channel partners, managers or speakers at a conference. They'll reciprocate! Don't be afraid to ask your entire network to recommend you. See earlier, where we 'pruned' the network to make every connection count.
22. Provocative comment interaction. After you've published a blog or published to LinkedIn there are two ways to engage. Just hit the like button when people comment. Or, take the time to backlink to their name, write an authentic gratitude-based comment and ask more questions or tell more stories. Foment deep discussions. Debate and put yourself out there. Comment boards are for massive interactivity. Some of my threads have hundreds of comments and I do my best to engage in every one within 24 hours. I've gotten a slew of inbound LinkedIn invites this way and built my Publisher follower base from 1,600 to over 5,500 followers in under three months. Interactivity, authentically, consistently and daily. Any questions? BE fully there and enter the fray. LinkedIn and Twitter are the platform, all the world is a stage and they are the greatest modern pulpit of all. It's a bit of a soapbox here but I try to get off the high horse, humble myself, make fun of myself and genuinely seek outside opinions. I want to learn from dozens of disparate viewpoints and expand my horizons.
23. Integrated YouTube strategies. YouTube is the second biggest search engine on Earth. Of course it is, it was acquired by Google. Take all your posts and repurpose them as YouTube videos behind a green screen. Interview a bunch of best selling authors on there. You can always take the risk of asking them to be interviewed. Launch your own mini Selling Power TV concept if you're a seller but focus on customer challenges and strategic objectives. Be like the CNET for your industry trends. This is time consuming but affordable investing in some basic equipment. Jamie Shanks and Sales for Life do a ton of selfie style 60 seconds of selling clips which is very effective. It drives Google Juice, super high SEO value and these videos are powerfully shared back into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and blogs. YouTube is typically the biggest gap in the strategy for advanced social sellers. How do I do it? Grab a cell phone camera and start getting on there real and raw talking about how you're helping your best customers solve their biggest challenges. A thriving company that is selling the lights out should have a YouTube channel pumping out dozens of videos every month. There are a ton of formats to release them in. The star of this channel? Your satisfied customers!
24. Hub and spokes - Metcalfe's law. The fishing is the best where the most fish are. Social selling is not rocket science. B2B prospects are living in LinkedIn. Take your LinkedIn activity levels and put them on 10X in here. Anything you are doing that is working, literally multiply by 10. Pick one or two social networks and spend all your time there; cut out the rest. Your fans will ensure you are amplified, trust them to do this well. I stopped blogging all together at my traditional website and moved my core blog focus here. As a result, I've had deeper levels of engagement, more lucrative speaking opportunities, am working on a new book [networked with a bunch of new editors and publisher executives] and have literally opened the flood gates of opportunity. I got that idea from Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin. You can do this too but make it authentic for you. Make one network the hub and the rest the spokes. When you share out to the others, don't just duplicate the exact post: pull quotes. When you tweet the posts out, pull 4 or 5 quotes to re-share it throughout the ensuing days in under 140 characters and link out with a bitly. I remember when I started on here, I was averaging two to three posts per day and I literally got warnings. Recently a top author was asked about cadence of posting in LinkedIn Publisher and they responded "daily!" It's a sea change and the tide is turning. The most is not the best but if you build the topic lists, mashup the content and share all of your intellectual property freely, lo and behold! – more connections, more book sales, more interest, more speaking gigs, more sales and more pipeline. That sounds pretty good to me, so I thank each and every one of you for joining me in this magical, bizarre journey down this rabbit hole in the last 90 days. You've put up with a Jackson Pollacking of my best extemporaneous and evergreen content.
25. Old school meets new school techniques = Advanced Strategic Social Selling 3.0. It takes courage to reach for the top. Go find mentors in here and study the old school. Read the pantheon on SPIN, Solution Selling, New Power Base, Insight Selling, Consultative Selling. Study it all and become a student of sales. I'm coming out with a book on advance social selling with content I haven't seen anywhere. Make sure you have a stable of Millennials in your corner teaching you how they sell, too. Reverse mentorship will give you tidal waves of new social media game. I'll end this post with the strongest possible insight I could bring you. The most powerful social sellers are applying timeless strategic selling principles in an amalgamation or hybrid synergy with new school techniques and tactics. Selling in 2015 is more noisy and ultra competitive than ever before. This is because customers have near unlimited options. Point solutions are growing like Gremlins eroding marketshare from the market makers of yore. But understanding strategy, mapping political power bases, 18 month sales cycles on million dollar opportunities transposed into social selling environs for acceleration, the impact of trigger events and the concepts of Challenger Sale mixed with my battle tested framework RSVP, have made a massive difference to the sales executives that I coach and the global companies that I train. I have people I'm mentoring that have reduced their sales teams to just a few who get these concepts. They're leveraging full blown marketing automation to do the work of 3 years in 3 months. Their pipelines are full. They're closing consistent six and seven figure deals, many inside without ever meeting with their customer. I've seen a short cycled seven figure opportunity now close in one quarter with pure social selling leveraging the methods in this post. It can be done. The mythical strategic social selling beast has breached the surface. Check out this post I wrote on the mostAdvanced Enterprise Social Selling methods, as I hadn't seen much content on enterprise roll-out or how to do this at scale with a team of 25 or 100 account executives. It's a whole new era and it's alive and well. Please let me know if you have questions or I can help you in any capacity. I'm traveling now consistently to present on this subject matter and can train / enable your people: tony@rsvpselling.com

Now it's your turn. Did I miss any? How are you nurturing and closing massive deals leverage social selling platforms like LinkedIn? I want to hear from you to complete the brainstorm. I've seen these methods working in the field all over the world. How do you tie this all together? What's driving the highest degree of results for you?

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: NEC Corporation of America

Whale Hunting Part II - Anchoring The Deal

Budget. Timeline. Compelling Event. Success Criteria. Together these form the basis of anchoring a deal so that it does not drift away from you. The stem is success criteria. An enterprise deal cannot be anchored without these four points.

Psychologically, numerous studies show that when we present a client with the unit economics in a deal, we risk self-commoditization. In protracted negotiations, starting high and making limited concessions is the strongest approach. Mark Hunter and Chester Karass have written extensively on this. So anchoring the deal is also setting an expectation around deal size and volume required.

It's paramount to think and express only in terms of annual commitments, minimum thresholds and visionary partnerships. Assess these four factors in the crucible of high interest preceding decay rate and thereby accelerate the propensity to close. This combination in its simplicity 'anchors the sale.' It is just that simple.

Qualifying the pipeline is where most sales organizations shipwreck on the rocks of missed expectation. This is why their pipe is chalk full of barnacles and detritus. If you use the anchor above effectively, it's very hard to let garbage float into the ecosystem and miss your targets. If you get these questions handled up front, you'll psychologically anchor the prospect and the deal. Notwithstanding deft application of SPIN, TAS, RSVP tried-and-true frameworks / methodologies, a boat without its anchor is listless and susceptible to the fickle tides. You can easily lose control of deals without knowing these points and inserting them carefully into your sales process. Selling to the customer in their own words requires them explaining these to you.

In an effective discovery call, these four elements are ascertained but only in a ratio of 25% seller speaking to 75% customer revealing pain. I'm a staunch proponent of peeling the onion with Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-Payoff lines of questioning. The greatest wisdom shared with me early in my career, is that often the pain is seldom the true pain. We often diagnose mere symptoms to underlying problems. Great sellers get to the root. Great sellers dive 10,000 feet deep to the bottom of the ocean to understand their customer's business as well, if not even better, than their own in order to truly begin to solve the 'real' underlying problem(s). What is the risk of not adopting the new solution? Economically? Politically? Quantify the risk of inaction.

We have the ability to literally transform our customers' business, make them look like heroes and help them get promoted. That's how powerful a strategic seller's role is. So 'the anchor' benefits both parties, buyers and sellers. It's transparent and creates efficiency. No more circumlocution, equivocation and cluttered pipe. No more 'happy ears.' I will get push back that this is an old school tactic but the ocean is wide and deep, so boiling it is imprudent.

Never present without proper discovery and due diligence performed first. All presentations should be interactive with the customer fully engaged. This is a vast challenge in that studies revealed 92% of those listening in on a virtual meeting are disengaged: checking blackberry, calendar, doing email or simply drifting off. Since the entire world is moving virtual [inside] and pundits are prognosticating that the end of field selling draws nigh, here are the critical success factors for mastering virtual meetings.

Before you look at a customer's plans, data or roadmap, get a mutual non-disclosure agreement in place. Inspire clients to pile everything they can on you. Encourage them to drown you in data from their email, Dropbox or FTP. Why? Because that's how interested you must be in them and scouring 25 files which include marketing calendars, technical specifications, requirements or notes will allow you to tailor your meeting agendas, presentations and navigate how you'll chart your course to the stars. The compass is truth, the north star is value creation. The momentum of mutually executing an NDA triggers the reciprocity, the give and take and back and forth. You want to consistently add value with every email, call, follow-up and outreach.

The Earth is flat for many software companies. They sell seats and licenses and don't care much for customisation. They've frequently grown so large the presentation is mistakenly about their size and omnipotence: there is little need to fully understand the customer's specific challenges because they've provided 50 case studies of customers 'just like them.' Huge mistake, yes? Not only do we all love to feel like we are different but companies are indeed much like snowflakes. There is no one-size fits all solution-set, especially at the level of a six, seven - even eight figure deal. You must transcend the requirements, meet with various stakeholders in the account and map the political power base. Understanding the forces moving in the account, is like predicting currents. Wade out with your wits about you, always cognizant of the rip tides: competitive threats, status quo, 'do nothing,' point solutions and the homegrown, 'we'll just build it ourselves' approach.

I'm often amused by the number of books on Amazon still touting one-call closing or even two call. I'm afraid the 80s are gone and this isn't a door-to-door steak knife or vacuum cleaner route. The height of folly is to deliver a generic proposal. Being consultative and tailoring your deck will make the biggest impact. I know a CEO who approaches every possible opportunity as if the entire funding and future of her company rose and fell on whether this single deal went through. The result is a relentless focus on strategy, listening, seeking first to understand and then be understood and a pristine, crystalline proposal that's so well developed and nurtured, it's essentially written in the prospect's own words. She never crafts the proposal after the second call. A sequence of calls with various teams over weeks occurs as the customisations are refined. By the time the contracts are drafted up, there are no surprises. No more waiting on pins and needles and endlessly checking in or touching base...

When you present a complex solution to the client, paint the entire picture of transformation. If it requires presenting a million dollar suite of solutions in order to break off the first $250,000, have you not succeeded in closing that handsome piece of business in, as the relationship will grow? Contrast this with endless requests for pilots if you attempt to close solely the $250K? Always close 'sell the dream' with a valid, full menu of application. Prioritize together – land and expand.

The world has become enamored with the social selling craze and so I am releasing an eccentric book on this subject shortly. I have recognized a global gap in training and enablement. Old school folks like me who have sold for 30 years in the field, blend strategic selling with social selling. Thus I have dubbed this Strategic Social Selling or potentially Social Selling 3.0. My thesis is that social selling will be relegated to an oversimplified transactional 'slam and jam' medium, if we do not return to the fundamentals that govern the psychology of influence and the timeless principles that govern value exchange. A deal is a deal is a deal... And an enterprise deal is a wild and wooly animal, unwieldy and untamable.

We buy when we feel the solution has value. It's human nature. We seek out the premium and we actually are loathe not to feel 'exclusive.' Apple captures this ethos as does BMW. Even Starbucks is selling coffee at a premium. Virgin is an experience. Qantas in a safe flight. Ultimately, there are value differentiators that cause elasticity of demand, allowing us to defend price and margin. I recently debated with a junior sales rep, that all vendor solutions being exactly equal, I could sell at a higher price. His argument was that the way to win the deal would be to lower the price to be competitive. Our customers understand healthy profit margins as they too seek them. I created a program to sell that service based on the intangibles: value creation, service levels and by being the differentiator my self in how it was sold as a trusted advisor as opposed to features, functions, advantages and benefits that placed him into a commoditization downward spiral.

Beyond all other elements of anchoring a large enterprise deal is the chain of the anchor itself: Confidence. Believe in your solution. Be fully sold yourself. Communicate with your shoulders back, stand upright in a confident loud tone and speak in full sentences. End those sentences. I was recently listening to a candidate be interviewed for a client I was consulting and we had a "rattler" on the phone. He hemmed and hawed, droned and prattled on. Confidence will always sell and this is another achilles heel of social. How can a computer sound confident? Will AI ever convey true confidence won by experience imputed from inflection? Artificial Intelligence will always be logical indeed although ever confident in a synthetic way. The flaw of computers is they're only ever as smart as the humans that programmed them...

So that's a collection of my thoughts on the anchor. You've got the technology to be first in. You've 'opened' in social and you've generated the deal with your dream prospect. But now you must move faster than the decay rate before the status quo overtakes everyone involved. Anchor the deal! Be honest, forthright and confidently express what this will take. Align your incentives so that the strategic outcomes are a mutual win-win. Reduce the risk right out of the equation. Fear or pleasure may drive the close so take the temperature of your stakeholders early on. Which of the following will be your litmus test? Focus on the outcomes and management of risk. You will be delegated down to who you sound like. Have you ever seen a CEO's email? She rarely includes a salutation or signature. She communicates tersely, in economy of movement and time. She's powerful in what she does not do. Learn the language of strategy and carry this counterweight.

• Do they have a budget sufficient enough for this exclusive opportunity? Yes, it's exclusive. Not every company has the need, solution fit or will innovate to the degree to apply the disruptive technology you extoll.
• What is the precise timeline? Is this a realistic priority or something to be left for Q4 or 2016? Entire industries can come and go in the time it takes for a company that's 'just looking.' Remember the finish line is not the signature, it's the go-live date of production when your solution is adding value.
• Is there a bonafide compelling event? What is the 500 lb. Gorilla of a reason to do this now? Mutually define a compelling business case. Uncover demand or create it. If there is any ambivalence in this regard, it's wasted time to continue.
• What is their success criteria? How will your prospect measure their success? Are there systems in place, analytics and reporting to measure the ROI? How are they currently solving the problem with their existing team or vendor(s)? Remember a great way to land and expand in these accounts is to encourage multi-vendor approach for diversification.

Now it's your turn: How do you anchor your deals? What elements of influence are most effective for you during the sales cycle? How do you prevent junk from clogging your funnel?

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: Christian Jensen and Mario Antonio Pena Zapatería

Whale Hunting Part I - The Rate of Decay

What do complex sales and the radioactive decay rate of atoms have in common? "The rate at which these unstable isotopes [deals] undergo decay varies greatly between the different isotopes [customers]. The process is random for each atom [customer]. However there is a fixed probability that an atom [deal] will disintegrate over a fixed time scale [quarter(s)].The time it takes for the radiation to decay to half of what it was previously is constant and is called the half life [closed lost]."

Believe it or not, I always think of these decay rate charts, a phenomenon occurring in many natural systems, when I'm looking at enterprise selling. What is the said radiation? It's the emotion of senior decision makers and their propensity to overcome the status quo and make a change. It's the heat of the moment and the inspiration to take risk. Draw a graph like this on the white board and map Deal Size and Propensity to Close on the Y axis and time on the X axis. Then draw another horizontal line or watermark halfway up the Y axis to express the status quo. When a customer gets excited about the possibility of change, you've touched a nerve or uncovered pain; emotion flares up and just like a whale tail breaches the water line of the status quo. The fear of not changing outweighs the fear of changing for only a very short amount of time. If you do not get on site, Skype or meaningfully connect in that timeframe (actively listening) to help them make the case with the appropriate deciding stakeholders in the account, the deal will fall back down into the water and decay rapidly to the half life of 'close lost.' Ask yourself this question, how many opportunities have hit the "half life" and are hiding, decaying in your pipeline? It's time to Spring clean out your customer relationship management closet, observe the following universal truths and start to win.

Although enterprise deals ($250K+) on average can often take anywhere from 6 to 16 months to close, if you haven't made a major impact in a quarter or two, you're talking about a massive pull of inertia catapulting deals with whales back down into the dark ocean of "do nothing." Your likelihood of closing the deal is exponentially smaller with every month that goes buy from the original point of high interest. Customers buy on emotion and close on pure logic. Many call this striking while the iron is hot when opportunity knocks, before dying on the vine. Andy Paul has taken this to an even further level of real-time selling or zero-time selling as others like Craig Elias have dubbed the concept as 'first in.' This is a tricky expression and I'll uncover a new way to look at time and engagement in this post as well as a follow-up. There are nuances here that I feel could be more thoroughly explored. I wanted to share some of my unique thoughts about this concept as it relates to the natural world and how I see the ramifications of decay rates and how they're impacting enterprise deals and influencing sales cycle stagnation, or acceleration. It seems like a big mystery until you just look at any system in nature.

Simplicity emerges...

First off, are you currently even hunting whales? With all due respect to these beautiful, mysterious and regal creatures of the undersea kingdom which I do seek to protect, in sales, as a metaphor whale hunting is defined as going full bore after your largest dream clients. Why relegate your team to mediocrity and tire-kickers? I would argue it takes an equal amount of time, money and resources to go after bad deals as it does to target the right ones. Time is money and you're in business to produce dramatic results for clients that are a key fit for your solution. Think as big as you can, then think bigger. Imagine the most incredible deal you could put together with the biggest client with the most complete suite of your solutions. Write this down on paper to memorialize it. What truly constitutes an ideal prospect? Understand every facet of the whale almost like a marine biologist. You are Jacques Cousteau! Which company could your firm foster a strategic partnership with and completely transform their business as well as yours? That's step one: defining the whale and not limiting yourself to that definition. If you can't spot it, how can you hunt it? OK, you may not feel ready but I guarantee you're more ready than you think.

So that leads to the next major question? How do I combat that rate of decay? How can I reconcile enterprise sales cycles with my lack of time, capacity or resources? I need to go raise a round of funding... I need to close in business now. My startup company is at risk... or, as an account executive, I have to make my number, right?

Check out this second graph. Now I can go find thousands of these charts but what we see here is a similarity of diametric motions in competing energy systems. There's the downward pressure of decay and then the acceleration up and to the right of growth and the confluence or crossroads of both. You have a chance to literally insert yourself into deal cycles other competitors have started for you. You can come in out of nowhere (or below from the depths if we stick to this analogy) with more power, force, insight and passion and completely disrupt another decay rate already in play causing your deal to accelerate back up to growth. I would relate this to a block in the game of billiards when you knock the opponents ball off course or position your ball to block the target.

This is why social selling and social networks are so powerful. You can literally generate demand rather than servicing it. The whole traditional idea of web leads, inbound phone calls and the reactive nature of whales coming to you is a recipe for RFP, stalls and low average deal size. Generally, CXO whales deploy and delegate to have several vendors spelunked at once. So waiting for the sector to come to you is a red herring. I've opined ad nauseam about the power of content marketing to create an octopus's garden to attract whales and that's an ongoing Challenge endeavor that Marketing and B2B salespeople should undertake together but that does not forego, the proactive whale hunting mentality each day. The boulder versus the sand is going after at least five whales per day before doing anything else. Don't answer your email, construct an RFP response, work the web leads or build that 55 slide presentation with your NASCAR slide. Don't do anything until you've identified, targeted, followed up with, cold-called or connected with on LinkedIn – at least 5 dream customers before lunch. Every single day. After all, you still have the name "sales" in your title. And if that title disappears industry-wide someone is still going to be responsible for bringing in the revenue of the company. I'd challenge any robot to close a six or seven figure deal. If we get there in my lifetime, I'll eat my shoe. Please hold me to it!

Recently, a CEO argued for the end of selling and how customer service agents could handle it all. He whined about how unfortunate commission plans are. Even if all that were true, somebody in the companies of the future will understand this post and hop on a plane, even go door to door again, and do all this old school analog hunting completely eclipsing the techy folks waiting around for $250,000 self-serve orders to come into the website. I don't know about you but I've never been more suspicious in my life in making a major purchase than right now. In 2015 everything including Ferraris can be purchased on a mobile phone with one click and how on Earth do I know it's not a scam? Is the engine full of sawdust? Am I sending a money order to Dubai? How do I get into the car and test drive it... I'd be shocked to hear of one Fortune 2,000 CEO spending $1MM without face time and even walking the facilities of the vendor. If you're a CXO reading this or you know one that has purchased million dollar enterprise software sight unseen, please comment. I would love a case study, perhaps I'm wrong (but I doubt it.)

You can set off the chain reactions in both charts and be there first, early. I think the thing that Corporate Executive Board research misses and Challenger Sale for that matter, is the goal of insight selling in a real-time ecosystem is to bypass the entire decision making process all together. The entire buyer's decision journey is reactive: they've already started and you're inserting yourself anywhere between 57% to 90%. So it's all focused on engaging early upstream. But who is teaching, don't even compete in an existing buying cycle that has a decay rate. What about the novel idea of triggering the buying cycle yourself? Right, the entire cacophony of "it's not a sales cycle," it's a "buying cycle" is juxtaposed to the sales people I coach actually closing six and seven figure deals with LinkedIn. They're generating demand not servicing it. I would counteract this with the Jobsian thought, "What customer ever knew what they want? We need to show them what they never knew they always wanted." Paraphrasing...

On Monday, hold a meeting with your sales team. Write down the top 10 companies you need to close and what exact deal you want to do: size, solution, stakeholders, etc. Who are you not closing you need to be? I'm sure it's on the tip of your tongue or in the back of your mind. What are the solutions you'll sell and the problems you'll solve? Chances are, you're no longer up periscope searching for whales; you're reactively dealing with a school of fish of smaller accounts - just as high touch, high maintenance - and they're reactively consuming all your time. Have you given up? Recalibrate! Now that you've pinpointed these whales it's time to share your team's knowledge of everything in the accounts: what were the past attempts, do you have paper with any of them, were there past proposals? Have stakeholders you've sold to from other accounts moved into them? Where are the people that signed the POs or SOWs now? All of this is very much a group trigger event tracking exercise and will serve as the wind in your sails to build momentum in this quarter and the next. You are simply getting to know the whales, identifying them before you go after them again.

Reinvigorated by this article? I certainly am. I do this every day and train groups and CXOs to look at their book of business and territory mapping in this novel way. So what now? Go look at the graphs again. Nobody is ever satisfied with what they're using, especially in software. Most people have creeping doubts. Ask someone if they're happy? 99% will mention they could be happier in this area of that. So essentially the flare of change, the breach of the surface of the ocean, the whale tail's rise if you will is happening right as we speak all over the ocean of our sector and customer base. You only need to get out a pair of binoculars, open your eyes from your CRM spreadsheet jockey repose and get out the S.S. Minnow. All you have to do is intercept the decay rate or better yet, CREATE IT! Waves, ebbs and flows - watch them. If you live by a major body of water, go study right now... It holds thousands of years of secrets in its movements. Enterprise sales cycles ebb and flow the exact same way. It's all right there!

When I call on a major customer and I have a cutting edge solution that is superior in many ways I focus on the outcomes and risk. I keep the conversation strategic with the business folks to win the business sale and technical/tactical with the operational technical folks to win the technical sale in tandem. I make a compelling and provocative business case that my competitor is not using. It's unique and data driven. I'm not parroting the magic quadrant report: I tell the story in my own way to deeply engage. It's about them, their quote in the annual report, the media, the blog, the conference. I also realize there's a 3% chance they're actively looking and 40% chance they're open to looking. That 40% is my ocean where I'll create the breach. Jumping dolphins are cool too, fast nimble high growth companies that I can sell into that will create the budget and still have the scaled need. The minute I get customers excited emotionally about improving the state of their business, the risk of change decreases, the system is frictionless and now I have a customer advocate and champion to go cause a Renaissance in the account. Value creation is easy. It's not a one time propositions. It's an upward spiral of how we're working together to either drive revenue or increase operational efficiency on an ongoing basis. Then the decay rate begins...

Let me simplify this for you: If you've got deals over $250,000 in your pipe and you are not actively engaging and moving them through your funnel with enough velocity they will [I repeat]: drown into the status quo of the Doldroms. No doubt about it. The minute something goes white hot in your pipe, you have mere weeks, maybe a quarter to accelerate it so you can be that red sine wave graph up and to the right. You must catch the egg of interest and intent or it will break. These are simple diagrams pulled right out of isotope and atomic decay rate research. But all these decay rates look eerily similar against infinite human systems, as they are fractal. The expenditure of emotion, energy and enthusiasm like echoes into a canyon, is guided by the limitation of Earth time. We all know the greatest enemy of quota is time. That's why we must ferociously protect our calendars against the forces of evil in our own companies masquerading as good. Endless admin, enablement and days of internal meetings does not a top seller make. It's just a law. Companies exist to block their sellers. That may be the greatest paradox of all. Often in an early stage startup I consult, the first step is to pinpoint the sellers who are literally "blocking revenue." Once a shift is made and the able folks are in the right location, a team of 2 can drive more revenue than 10. I've seen it happen too many times it's like some parable in Greek myth. Deal Blockers Anonymous. The anti-sellers reckoning!

Time is of the essence. Identify the whales. Think bigger. Build a sustainable, repeatable [demand gen] mechanism to engage them early before they "die on the vine" and decay and when you see the tail flare up, realize they're most likely engaged with all your competitors. In the enterprise, this is definitely always the case. To prove it, think of your own behaviour? When's the last time you bought a pricey piece of software? Did you not go to Google, submit to multiple web forms and request demos from at least three companies. I recently did this with GoToMeeting, Join.Me and WebEx and had reps from all three selling me, slide-decking me and romancing me for a few months. But if you're first, if you're the one to cause the flare up with a key insight, by helping them see their business or business model in a dramatically new way, you then have this shining moment to accelerate the deal. Is it audacious to think you can revolutionize someone's business who may be very senior to you? Not if you build enough industry expertise by assessing what the leading edge companies are doing you interface with. You generate insight by living it, being out in the field, walking the halls of dream clients and reading like a fiend.

Is it possible to close deals without an inside sales team, field sales team and solely as a CEO founder leveraging marketing automation and LinkedIn alone? Yes. I know of several using stealth social gen technologies now. I know of companies having success with companies like Frontline Selling and Carb.io. There's an inside phalanx of Predictable Revenue sellers too applying the Henry Ford Silicon Valley specialization models. The sales people of the future will understand this and form a strategic alliance with their internal C-Suite. By leveraging stealth B2B social lead gen technology to set unlimited meetings, bonding and having a close knit relationship with the leadership of their own company, and being more proactive than ever, they can pick from a grab bag like bobbing for apples. It will be possible to steal deals right out of the hands of competitors.

We've all had this happen to us. All's fair in love, war and business. And when I say steal, it's like stealing the ball in sports; it's a fair play. If you outsmart your competitors by thinking more strategically, being quicker and more cunning as the fox, it's still counts when you bank it. Technology levels the playing field but technology mixed with strategy is unstoppable. Study military strategy, study the classic strategic selling books you think are collecting dust on the shelf. Don't get too enamored with the Social Selling craze because many of these principles lack the foundation of strategic selling in complex matrixed organizations. You need to garner a very thorough understanding of SPIN selling, TAS, Solution, Strategic, Insight and Power Base before you attempt to do this in social. You will walk right into a hornest nest as you trigger multiple land mines with out a complete and thorough training in the Pantheon.

After all, until they 'sign on the line that is dotted,' it's a free country, free market and the customer or "whale" is in charge. We'd never harpoon the whale, we'd let them harpoon us into a meaningful business relationship of trust that lasts and strengthens itself in an anti-fragile manner where we're providing so much recurring value creation that they'd never sever that tie in the chaos of high growth technology acceleration. We're out ahead innovating in permanent beta. Maybe this post should have been called Whale Rider because I've featured a picture of a photographer capturing the stately mysterious whale shark. You truly want to co-exist with your best customers and forge alliances of trust. It's a simbiotic give and take after all. That's why I love the book Go-Givers Sell More!

If you're limiting yourself on the size of deal you can close, speed you can close it and level of dream customer, you're wasting precious time in your career and taking commission money out of your family's pocket. Go big! Dream bigger and think bigger. There is a ton of great information on trigger events that Tibor Shanto and Craig Elias put out so I must tip my hat to that in this article. I'm going to write a follow up post to this all about "anchoring the sale." This will cover the psychological components and where Cialdini's influence factors in when you do get in "early" and chase the rainbow to find that mythical pot of gold. Don't get bitten by the procurement leprechaun!

Once you spot a prospect that is "whale size" and has embarked on the decay rate journey there are ways to anchor the deal before it falls off that are critical to bringing the revenue home and booking it. The role of social media, LinkedIn, Twitter and persistent cold-calling techniques coupled with them as well as how to leverage on-site and interactivity become key here. Look for Part II.

Happy hunting and closing! Once you catch the whale, psyche! realize they caught you and coexist with them. Admire their beauty. Go for a swim in the ocean of healthy profit margins, recurring revenue and a virtuous cycles of mutual growth!

Now it's your turn: What makes deals die? Why do some accelerate and others stall? How are you leveraging strategic selling systems, processes and technology to compete in big deals or accelerate your sales cycle? Curious...

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: Marcel Ekkel

17 Peculiar Paradoxes of Social Selling

Every area of our lives is rife with paradox. Social Selling has engendered many of its own but I've yet to see anyone take on the subject as the topic is so new. I began to write a post on business paradoxes. That opened my mind to somemind-boggling ones like this. The overarching takeaway that I can share is the best practices most commonly held and shared are often the ones hurting your strategy the most. Social Selling is about 'word of mouse.' Good is the enemy of great. When your writing transcends symbols on the page to becoming a Youtility that engenders rapid actionable results, you've matriculated into the realm of viral. When you're applying the exact same tactics as everyone else, you add to the white noise. The below will help you stand way out and be the signal. I learned these lessons over 125+ posts on LinkedIn Publisher in the last 90 days:

1. The more you try to sell in social, the less likely you are to close.There is a ladder of engagement that can honestly take dozens and dozens of touch points. Building connectivity from a simmer to a boil over months closes deals. You can't go after the immediate and anything you close that way is on shifty ground. Is it possible to show up in the middle of a decision and take the deal right out of the jaws of a competitor? Because of social? Yes. You can literally create demand before the customer even knows what she is looking for or goes to the search engine. With consistent awareness building, story telling and a focus on remarkable ways that you solve common pain points, you can move from servicing demand to generating it upstream. This is pre-trigger, pre-Challenger and taps into the 3% of people actively looking but more importantly that 40% who would be open to looking, according toVorsight.
2. The more social networks you utilize, the less powerful the amplification. Seth Godin only does short, pithy blog posts. He manages to be one of the most shared [if not the top blog] on the entire internet. His fan base handles the amplification and yours should too. In business to business, you need to think of LinkedIn as the hub for publishing because it's where the largest engaged audience lives. I literally received concerned emails when I shut my blog off on my RSVPselling site and started to solely blog in here. Several of my posts have received hundreds of retweets and my followers tripled within months. What is more exciting, is that I started to get a steady flow of friend requests so my network on Twitter and LinkedIn began to grow purely organically.
3. Consistent B+ content frequently performs better than sporadic A+ content but outrageously good content - off the richter scale - could perform better than anything, even posted just once. Ideationis the massive hurdle as a writer. How do you bring brand new content to the space that no one has heard of? Einstein said it best, 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Consistent strong content will start to rank in Google and you'll be seen as a trusted publisher source. If you push yourself to newsjack, share something from the heart that is a personal story or push the envelope with ideas no one has ever seen before: it flares up. Spend hours obsessing on the content and topic lists: push your ideation 10X. Unique ideas cause word of mouse and will be 'sneazed' [Godin] more than anything else. I loved Seth's book Unleashing the Ideavirus which addresses these themes. He was ahead of his time to freely release it rendering it the most downloaded eBook ever then. Coin new terms, invent ideas, leverage hybrid synergy, mash-up the old and the new and tell unusual stories. Creativity and imagination stick out like a sore thumb; they help people remember the underlying lessons and read between the lines.
4. You will be hated before you're loved no matter what you post.First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and thenyou win. Gandhi got this right. When you put yourself out there and express your truth, it's simply the nature of the human condition to walk through these flaming hoops to the promise land. When I first started to blog at high volume in here I was an early adopter [3 months ago]. LinkedIn had only opened up their Publisher capability to a limited group for long form posts, perhaps I got in because I'm an author. I received multiple letters of concern about the volume of my posts. Now I receive daily praise about the consistent quality. The majority of authors I'm connected to, even global sales thought leaders like Donal Daly are frequently blogging now, many even daily. It's my mandate to always dive in to new social mediums in order to bring those findings back to my reader base, fitting in how they could be useful in a strategic social selling context.
5. If you get big enough on LinkedIn, LinkedIn breaks. Luckily you can email them to get your profile turned back on. They literally can't handle the capacity of over 200 interactions per day. Some algorithmic gate shuts you off. This may not always be the case but the amount of clicks it requires to keep the pace of interactivity once you have thousands of friends in your stream at a 10 to 1 ratio [10 things about them, only 1 about you] causes capacity issues to rise. Apparently, there is a finite limit on the amount of clicks that you can make in a 24 hour period on here. So if you go on a writing tear or liking tear, watch out! Has anyone else experienced this? This is different than LinkedIn Jail for those that mass add. I'm talking about authentically managing your stream, liking, commenting and engaging and suddenly poof! down the profile goes and out comes the Customer Support Ticket...I will give the powers that be at LinkedIn a great deal of credit for policing the community so it doesn't become the endless commercial free for all that is Facebook. [Note I barely use FB, less then 10% of my followers see my updates there unless I'd like to pay for them to.]
6. The best connections and opportunities are still busier then you are so often what seeks you out first, is not trustworthy. When you break through the rainforest canopy of social prowess and start to soar with the eagles above, you become beautiful. Be careful, because the flood gates of people you'll never want to meet or talk to will immediately swarm you. Protect your calendar and be very selective of who you link in with. There are many spam profiles but there are also a million speakers, authors, strange publishing entities, spurious business dealers and just bizarre things occurring in social networks looking to take their pound of flesh.
7. If you take the 10X moonshot it's just as easy as mediocrity. The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits. Tim Ferriss believes this and has lived by it. Just look at the outrageous global success of the 4-Hour book series... I took my 3 year plan for social media and compressed it into 3 months. The result has been meeting all of you. I'm very grateful and humbled by the response. It forced me to encapsulate my thoughts, actions and push beyond creative boundaries. I have an entirely new idea for the most advanced strategic social selling [3.0] book ever written that I'll be releasing soon. Social media is the epitome ofParkinson's law which is best summed up by the adage that 'work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.' Set goals that scare you; big, bold, wild, hairy and audacious. Then take that time and compress it. You'll break the fourth wall and find new goals, summiting Everest only to find K2 laughing in your face. That's been my experience on power-using LinkedIn. The main thing to remember, is that social networks are quite useless in and of themselves. It's all about HOW you use them, that makes them powerful. Seek innovation in utilization.
8. Blogging only in LinkedIn is more effective within months than years of traditional blogging. Personally, I sold more books and had more (and higher quality) response in 3 months of blogging on here than 3 years of hosting a traditional web blog. Becoming a bestselling author in Australia happened by word of mouth but online, the front of my funnel is consistent interactivity with a brand new reader-base and as a byproduct, my eBooks and Audio books began to break loose.
9. Longer posts of 1,900 words outrank everything else (that's about a 9 minute read). Paradoxically, the world is starving for useful, meaty content; a little less sizzle and a lot more steak! I talk about executive ADD but that's because they're shining a bright light looking for one decent piece of useful content to immediately apply to their business for outstanding growth results. This is why Copyblogger crushes it, they build out in depth useful concept. I've realized that I must become a Jay Baer 'youtility' with myMichael Hyatt 'platform.' In essence, once the title is useful, each bullet is an action a sales person can take TODAY. The 1,900 word article is the full picture of this utility: every aspect of how sales people can apply that success principle. My longer articles on LinkedIn often get massively shared but sometimes they don't get much engagement online. Ironically, if the quality is A+ on youtility, I do get folks writing in who print them out and apply them in the field. If what you write in social media helps your base get tangible, real-world results, remarkable outcomes are possible. In sales blogging, if those results equate to concrete revenue: it's the holy grail of service-based thought leadership.
10. Pictures are not only worth a thousand words, they make or break posts. The human face; even in studies of indigenous people in the rainforests who have little to no exposure to the outside world, holds the same countenance. The human face can make over 10,000 expressions which unites everyone on the planet. Faces make an amazing impact so preference them over all other pictures. David Meerman Scott talked about having real and raw photographs leading your social posts in lieu of stock photography. I think that's true. I also like super vibrant, remarkable looking pictures that are just very well photographed. A/B test like crazy. I've found that non sequitur completely oblique or bizarre mixes of pictures and copy rank very well. The ultimate hilarious mash-ups in my mind are a 'a row of well dressed people walking intently,' anything involving 'babies or puppies' and 'executives looking perplexed.' Business writing can be fun if you see the humor in the mundane. I certainly do.
11. How To and List Titles outperform even the most outrageous shocking title as they give readers subconscious permission to "snack" some key takeaways in your content. Titles should still feature hyperbole. Take your content and turn it on 11. But the snacking factor is a real thing. Use bold headings and make it easy to skim. Be open to the fact that 80% of the people who like your posts on LinkedIn won't read the whole way through. 20% will read all of it and very few will comment. Likes are a strong leading indicator for success. Youtility content is huge. Imagine, someone can click a button, read a bullet and go make a sale. This is the magic of social selling 3.0 in the web of context.
12. The harder you try to convince major publishers and editors in the system to promote your content, the more you're repelled but it's relatively easy to attract them to you if you have the platform built.
13. You're better off with 1,000 of the right connections than 10,000 who seldom engage. Read and practice the axiom of the Thousand True Fan. There are needles in this haystack called social selling. There are million dollar dream customers looking for you, frantically. They're doing anything they can to find a trustworthy seller and truly cutting edge solution for their problem that actually works. There are so many empty promises, it's an uncontrollable ecosystem of hype and fluff. There are people on LinkedIn right now out of hundreds of millions that can mentor you, change your life and bring you that one key connection or insight that literally alters the future of your entire career. Seek out that Thousandth Man or Woman [Rudyard Kipling]
14. There is strength in weak ties. Your net worth is the size of your network. You're also most likely to advance your career via the weaker ties you don't know. That being said, I've made the case for an annual pruning of your friend list [Deleting Party!]. There are probably hundreds of completely superfluous connections that you have that are "feed clogging" your stream. Don't be afraid to press delete. The biggest thing I noticed in spending more time on LinkedIn than I'd like to admit [I stopped watching TV all together, could you imagine!!] is that the same constraints that govern analog human networks like the Dunbar Number as well as cliques and exclusivity are prevalent and govern LinkedIn. Here's an earth-shattering idea: reach out and touch someone right now. Go to your profile, pick a dream customer you're already connected to and write them an InMail. Find someone who is interesting you are connected to on LinkedIn that you've never interacted with and send them a message. Become interested! The basic coolest thing about LinkedIn has stopped happening. If I hear from a stranger, it's typically a spam blast form template selling me something useless or group they want me to join. It's serving their interests not mine. Be fully there, pick an intriguing person that is likable where you share something in common and ping them simply to admire them. Who does that anymore? Has LinkedIn become one of the least social, most transactional environs on the planet now? Yes. We can change that. If you want to blow someone's mind? Send an authentic DM on Twitter. When's the last time you actually received a message on there that wasn't an auto-responder?
15. Twitter will explode with retweets of your greatest content whether you participate in it at all. If you post a big, bold, controversial or brilliant enough idea anywhere on the internet, Twitter will erupt. It's just how it is. I posted about a courageous pilot that saved over four hundred lives with the leadership lessons translatable to business and it went on to garner 200,000 views. The harder you work in social selling, the luckier you will get. Within a few months, I was ranked 87 on Onalytica's report of top social sellers and in the top 5 of my network of over 2,000 professionals. I showed up every day and sought to inspire someone and make sure I was inspired, too. I sought to understand what was in my stream: like, comment, share and give authentic feedback prior to building the platform and looking for you to understand me. And I'm just getting started...
16. Play it safe with your content and risk being forgotten. Outrageous mashups get remembered where hard hitting insight driven 'dry' white paper content is often appreciated but forgotten. Dry content that is brochure-like is skimmed and low value.
17. The power of a brand is inversely proportionate to its scope. [Al Ries] Hyper-specialization is a content laser. Keep a very tight focus on subject matter expertise. For me, it's the evolution and adaptation of leadership and B2B strategic selling applied to social memes. What do you know the most about? In what areas do you have a bizarre amount of tribal knowledge? What are you most passionate about? What could you write a book about? Blog there, post there... go deeper there. Create there. Innovate there. Mash that up in new ways. Make that new by blending it, deconstructing it to first principles and rebuilding it. That's the rub!

Now it's your turn: What bizarre, quixotic or paradoxical phenomena have you witnessed in social selling? What seems to be a prevailing belief that actually doesn't work? Is there misinformation or conflicting information out there? What techniques work like magic for you that fly in the teeth of commonly held beliefs and best practices? Are you truly getting value out of social selling? Where are you stuck?

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: Omarukai

Top 7 Utopian & Dystopian Shocking Sales Predictions

It's the end of the sales world as we know it... and I feel fine? Gerhard, Huthwaite and many other sci-fi fans have prognosticated that sales itself may face an existential threat from artificial intelligence (AI) as we move further and further toward the COMPLETE buying cycle. "Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of interactions between businesses will be executed without human intervention. It is likely that of the 18 million salespeople in the United States, there will be only about 4 million left."

Could human-based selling disappear all together? Are we at war with the machines?

Tibor Shanto wasn't sold that the death of the salesman 2.0 could really be upon us: it may be an inherently flawed argument as sales people paradoxically could actually become more of a necessary 'evil' than ever before with increased sector complexity. Andreessen put it best: "Software is eating the world." Soon the capital of Earth will be Silicon Valley as no industry is immune: complete and utter global disruption of 'everything' is predicted! But what if sales peoples' ranks explode in line with the population and Moore's law meets Sensor-Driven Cambrian Explosion of solution complexity?

Technology acceleration creates massive confusion that only a hand held by human guidance can weather. Aren't we going to need guidance for installing the Internet of Everything into our homes and workplaces? Won't human intervention always be needed to simplify a path forward from current state to future state – ever so Jetson?

It's a brave new world. In honor of Miles Davis' 8th studio album 7 Steps to Heaven 'featuring the Miles Davis Quintet in transition - this is the last of Davis' studio albums with standards rather than band originals' which I listened to while I wrote this in an iconoclastic mood - here are my 7 top predictions of how sales could either undergo a Singularity-driven Renaissance or 7 steps to hell where it could plunge into Orwellian medieval darkness like Van Damme's Cyborg (yes, a truly bad B action movie, if you know about this, I seriously hope it produced a belly laugh!).

Which camp are you in? Pray tell!

The Case for Dystopia

1. Advances in Robotics allow for Android sales people in the field to deliver insights like Watson at Jeopardy.

2. Drones drop off customized white papers and contracts are signed by drone. Sales drones are an amusing but eerie concept to me. Robots could suddenly be everywhere eliminating field sales. Would they wear suits or have them spray painted on metallic? If you get sticker shock on that million dollar price tag could the defibrillator drone be close at hand?

3. Machine learning generates the key insights to help drive the self-serve funnel. Big data may at last become useful in selling if a technology allows a machine to become smarter than the human brain to parse it all. What paradigm shifting, curve jumping key insight could live in that big data meta-cloud to give your organization the razor's edge against the competition? If everyone is fed these insights won't there be an arms race for insight or insight parity reached to commoditize even the highest level of solutions at some dizzyingly outrageous higher level? Boggles my mind just thinking about it.

4. Search engines like Wolfram Alpha become so smart they can fully educate the prospect so they go 100% of the way through the sales process before ever needing to talk to a human. Again, the case for 100% decision and buying cycle complete. No humans needed???!!! But then again, who has the time? It's unclear if ERP firms even understand ERP and it's 2015.

5. Stealth B2B social lead-gen technologies chop off the top of the funnel so one able Chief Strategy Officer or Chief Customer Officer can automate all inbound marketing, traditional marketing and PR and move the entire sector in real time with a magic wand of DOMO-like beautiful #tech, uncovering and generating demand 24/7. With advanced stealth B2B technologies I'm aware of right now, essentially one person can do the work of an entire traditional inside sales team of 50 and the CEO can just fly in and seal the deal. No joke! Predictive analytics makes the sales process prescient and we can literally select our target in a Minority Report style dashboard that then triggers a proactive series of events. The perfect provocative insight is generated, deployed and brings her to us: convinced, converted and ready to collaborate.

6. Holography enables virtual reality walk-throughs and Go To Meetings on steroids where the executives float in the center of the conference room. This is very Minority Report meets Princess Leia! Help me Obiwan Kenobi You're my only hope.

7. Virtual reality allows for a company to solely operate remotely, a headquarters is not even needed. The entire technology stack front and back-end sits in the cloud elastically - burstable and on-demand, the entire team is distributed and all meetings are held in a virtual world. Security becomes a major concern as your competitors could be imposters impersonating clients to obtain secrets. Ooh goodie!

The Case for Utopia

1. The Singularity occurs fusing our brains with machines allowing us to divine what people need by being able to use a larger percentage of our brains. Maybe not quite the level of Scarlett Johansson schooling Morgan Freeman in Luc Besson's Lucy. [Definitely see this movie if you haven't already!] A new era in consultative sales emerges in which we are able to perform the most advanced aspects of technology diagnosis and well as understand the strategic business factors with access to all human knowledge from smart chips in our brains or an up-link to the web via the neocortex - #instantaneously.
2. Cambrian Explosion of specialized, qualified Sales People follows the exponential logarithmic curves of technology acceleration and Moore's Law to service new demand flying in the face of pundits. The law of divergence prevails over convergence. The complexity of solutions creates downward pressure on commodity and transactional selling below a certain dollar threshold of comfort and the anything over that watermark still requires meeting with sellers. Since these deals are less common, there is more competition for them which causes enterprise sales people to be even more valuable. Perhaps an Ender's Game like selling environment could train up the world's greatest sales people from birth. Will the Russians launch sales training schools like future ballerinas or Olympians? This leads me to my next outrageous prediction...
3. Accreditation and training programs at a University Level spring up so sales folks can get Master and PhDs in their craft. There is a universal code of conduct and standards drafted; could you imagine? The argument I get is that's why we all love sales – people with non-traditional backgrounds can thrive. We don't need a college degree! Fun but becoming a sales person requires an interdisciplinary skill-set including technical factors such as coding, agile development and project management as we move toward 2020.

As Jason Jordan predicts: "There needs to be a meaningful body of knowledge about the profession of sales. Obviously there is not. Neil Rackham and a handful of others have done amazingly insightful research into best practices and frameworks for selling, but not many. Mostly we get anecdotal sales books that contain faint research and contribute little to our understanding of how it all works. And unfortunately, it's a bit of the chicken-or-the-egg thing here with regard to credible research... University researchers don't do much work in this space, so sales doesn't appear to be an academic discipline... So there is very little research done in this space. Mercifully, the universities that do teach sales are discovering that their sales graduates get amazing jobs... And give back. Which is raising visibility within business schools." Check out his work with The Sales Education Foundation and he notes optimistically, "All in all, we are making progress on all of these fronts. We're seeing more specialization in sales forces, more universities are integrating sales into their curricula, and researchers are starting to push into the space with enthusiasm. It will be interesting to ask this question a generation from now."

4. Specialization of sales functions transformed it into a bonafide 'profession.' Again Jason Jordan from a lively discussion in Smibert's Strategic Selling group on LinkedIn, "First, a profession needs to have specializations. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and other 'professions' all have sub-specialties where they focus and hone their talents. For sales, there needs to be an acknowledgement that there are different types of sellers – inside salespeople, key account managers, territory salespeople, and other specialties that have unique skill sets. AND it's okay to remain in one role for an entire career. Inside sales doesn't have to be a career path to outside sales... Different skill sets, different professional paths." There are approximately 100 universities around the world now offering sales qualifications. Only about 80 of the 4,000 universities in the United States offer a dedicated sales curriculum.

5. Wearable technologies like smart contact lenses, HaloLens and Google Glass Part Deux [the fashion forward one!] simply make us that much more effective in the field. It's much like Terminator 2 with his heads-up display (HUD).

We could have readouts appearing in the distance with key vital signs on the account, LinkedIn profile identification and big data tying it all together to generate insights in real time - even as we're speaking with senior executives [sadly, the male brain can only do one thing at a time so this could drive a female domination of professional field selling]. The fusion of woman and machine even at a higher level of the Singularity could foster a renaissance in which real time big-data-driven insight is suddenly possible. This will allow for effortless translation of all languages [including code bases, Linux & GitHub] if both buyer and seller are hooked into the matrix. With stratospheric travel beyond the sound barrier or hyperloops, suddenly a small tiger team of sales reps could effortlessly cover an entire continent and correspond in 50 languages. I'm sure if Elon Musk gets his druthers we will have well-colonized Mars by then which will be the coolest territory to cover as Account Executives of 2030! The Sales Engineers could be replaced by virtual AI living in our ear, whispering the answer and the insight. CRM could at last penetrate every country in the world uprooting industries as technology adoption curves are kicked off simultaneously everywhere. With trillions of sensors in everything including your toothbrush, door locks, every system in a high-rise, who will service them, sell the configurations of them and tune them? Maybe the drone bot AI cyborg Watsons can pick that up too! Mobile phones will disappear as the clunky feaux-appendage that they are. Our chiropractors will thank us. Typing will not exist either as dictation occurs with SIRI-like impulses of the mind into word and picture concepts we can transmit over fiber optics.

6. Nostalgia itself could play a role almost like the vinyl LP of Miles playing that ascerbic bittersweet biting horn I'm listening to right now. I don't think a machine will ever produce that sound – even in the year 3,000! There could be a check-box on the site to have a romantic 'human experience' in the sales holodeck? A Sales Preservation Historical society might crop up almost like a museum with books from the 1980's and photographs of big hair and big deals! Slogans like, "Make a firm handshake" could wow visitors as they float in on hover boards...

7. Millennials decide to banish the machines and go old school like a tribe of Doomsday Preppers living like ewoks in tree houses. Will the young executives of 2020 insist on 10% machine time and hang out in the woods sipping Chai to have long philosophic discussions about strategy and present human centered solutions, waxing poetically into each others eyes about how it was better in the days of Willie Loman? Maybe the Eloctromagnetic Pulse will destroy all the circuits and suddenly Arthur Miller's classic will be discovered along with a screenplay of Glengarry Glen Ross and the madness will all start over again in the Mad Max (Road Warrior) of some faraway planet. Don't hold your breath!

Now it's your turn? What did I miss? What do you predict selling will look like in 2020? How 'bout 2050? Will the bots revolt and take our jobs? One CEO recently declared he'd never hire a sales person again? Is he Galileo or the inventor of Betamax?

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: Tomás Fano

What Air Crash Investigations Didn't Tell You About QF32 (Airbus A380)

This is an unlikely but true story about iconic brands being protected by an amazing airline captain, the power of social media, and how to create customer-centric culture. Every enterprise can learn much from this story as it exemplifies the incredible benefits of empowering and trusting employees to not only do their job but also represent the brand – in this case, also save lives. The QF32 incident occurred in November 4th, 2010. The ATSB (Australian Transport Safety Bureau) published their final report in June 2013, and Air Crash Investigations released their documentary in February 2014.

But before both of these, in late 2012 I was fortunate enough to interview Captain Richard de Crespigny in his home. As we discussed the incident, it became very apparent to me that Richard is not only a talented and seasoned pilot, in both military and commercial aviation, but also an exceptional leader. Richard de Crespigny is an example of what Jim Collins calls ‘Level 5 Leadership’. There is much to learn from the culture he imbues on any flight he commands. Richard is more than a professional pilot, he is committed to giving his passengers the best possible experience and being a positive representative of the Qantas, Airbus and Rolls-Royce brands.

On November 4th, 2010, Captain de Crespigny was in command of QF32 flying from Singapore to Sydney. I’ve been on this flight a number of times but not on this occasion. At 7,400 feet during climb-out there was a catastrophic failure of an inboard Rolls-Royce engine resulting in a very rare uncontained explosion. Shrapnel flew out at supersonic speed crippling control systems running along the Q380’s left wing leading edge, peppering the fuselage, invading the underbelly, puncturing two wing fuel tanks in at least ten locations and wreaking havoc with 21 of the 22 aircraft’s systems. In my opinion it was far more serious, and far closer to being a disaster, than anyone has been willing to acknowledge – there was a fire that fortunately self-extinguished in the wind. Jet aviation fuel is kerosene, not petrol, and it burns with low thermal properties.

Miraculously, no passengers were injured and, due to the low altitude, the passenger cabin was not compromised by decompression. But exploding shrapnel had penetrated the underbelly, slicing through both of the two main electrical trunk lines – the backbone of the aircraft’s central nervous system. There are many electrical wiring looms within the A380 for inbuilt redundancy but it was incredibly unlucky, and potentially fatal, for two primary looms to be taken out at the same time. Passengers heard several loud ‘bangs’ and could see obvious wing punctures and the fuel vapour trail, but there was far more damage than the eye could see. The largest passenger airliner in the world was severely degraded and had probably lost 50% of system networks and 65% of the aircraft’s roll control. It was set-up for catastrophic cascading events unless the flight deck had the right leadership culture.

On the ground in Indonesia, the engine cowling with the Qantas logo, along with other debris, had rained down over the populated town of Batam, including onto school grounds. No-one had been injured but the Twitter-sphere and Internet were abuzz. The Qantas CEO, Alan Joyce, was travelling in a car with his head of Corporate Communications when they received a phone call asking why Qantas’ share price was falling dramatically. For them this was the first sign of a problem and highlights the instant speed of social media and its power to impact a brand in real-time.

Back up at 7,400 feet there was calm on the flight deck as the world’s most experienced A380 flight crew [literally] dealt with the situation. Qantas has the well-deserved reputation of being the safest airline in the world – it is the oldest continually operating commercial airline globally and no passenger on a Qantas jet aircraft has ever been killed as a result of an incident. All pilots are hired to become captains and this means that they only hire the best. On top of this, Qantas invests heavily in training and every captain is checked-out seven times a year. Just as in the military, there are full and frank peer reviews any time there is an incident. Safety, transparency and accountability are dominant cultural elements for all Qantas pilots – not something that exists in all airlines.

On this particular flight, Captain de Crespigny was being checked by another senior pilot who was himself being trained as a checking captain. This meant that there were five on the flight deck instead of the normal three – the Second Officer (Mark Johnson), First Officer (Co-Pilot Matt Hicks) and three captains – but all had no doubt that there was only one person in command. Before take-off, Captain de Crespigny had ensured that there would be no confusion concerning the chain of command and that everyone’s roles were crystal clear. He discussed these issues at the pre-flight briefing, during the drive to the airport and again before the A380 pushed back from the aerobridge in Singapore.

During the incident everyone knew their roles, and every issue and task was dealt with calmly and professionally. The First Officer, Matt Hicks, dealt with well over one hundred alarms and checklists while Captain de Crespigny concentrated on flying the aircraft, monitoring his First Officer, keeping his situation awareness, weighing his options and laying strategies to complete the flight. The second officer visited the cabin to investigate the damage and to communicate with the Customer Service Manager, Michael von Reth.

Multiple failures had severely degraded the already leaking fuel system. They had lost all ability to transfer fuel between the eleven different tanks creating dangerous imbalances that became worse with time. They had also lost all the wing slats, which provide greater lift and enable the aircraft to fly slower for landing. Back in the passenger cabin, Michael von Reth and his team were calmly assuring passengers while watching for any signs of panic in individuals and then quietly addressing problems with empathy and reassurance.

Everyone on the flight deck and the cabin crew had trained for just this emergency and they instinctively knew what to do. The flight deck team trusted their leader to lead. The leader trusted his team to perform every standard operating procedure and delegated task. The A380 was the most technologically advanced and robust (redundant systems) passenger aircraft in history. They were flying safely and just had to figure out how to mitigate the extensive failures and to get down safely at Changi Airport back in Singapore. Captain de Crespigny knew that height gave them more time and options so he told the flight deck team he was initiating a climb. “No!” they all said in unison. It was the only time in the entire flight that there was any discord – teamwork in action. They were in stable level flight and they did not have all the information about what was wrong… leave everything as it is. No ego, just teamwork. Captain de Crespigny simply said, “okay."

With less than a 3% margin for error in landing airspeed to pull-up on the available runway they managed an incredibly difficult landing. Way faster than normal and with badly degraded brakes, no reverse thrusters, they came to halt with a mere 100 meters of runway left. But they were not out of danger – 3 tonnes of fuel poured onto the tarmac, pooling around white-hot brakes. The fire crew held back because the outboard engine on the damaged wing would not shut down. Eventually foam was sprayed all over the fuel and Captain de Crespigny decided that the passengers were safer on board than executing an emergency evacuation. Eventually the outboard engine was stopped and everyone walked away safely.

Captain de Crespigny led his team faultlessly and harnessed all the resources available to him. Despite all the damage caused by the Rolls-Royce engine explosion, and despite the potential problems with having too many cooks on the flight deck, Captain de Crespigny maintained a calm atmosphere where everyone knew and performed their roles. At one point in the crisis he re-set the flight deck team to focus on what systems were working rather being focussed on the endless alarms and lists of things that had failed. He communicated clearly and dealt with the realities but focused on the positives. He managed the risks by making sure they didn’t rush and that they triple-checked all calculations. He also quietly prepared for a glide landing (Armstrong Spiral) in the event that all engines failed. Most importantly, he didn’t make assumptions but instead tested the aircraft’s handling characteristics while he had the safety of height before the final approach. This is not standard operating procedure but was a master stroke on his part.

The QF32 incident made headlines around the world but beyond the airmanship, leadership and teamwork on the flight deck, Captain de Crespigny then instinctively continued to lead when back in the terminal with his passengers (customers). Despite his emotional and physical exhaustion from piloting and managing the crisis over four hours in the air and on the ground, he then assumed the role of customer service and Public Relations (PR) representative for Qantas, Airbus and Rolls-Royce.

He didn’t need to refer to a manual to do a masterful job because the culture within Qantas empowered him with shared values of transparency and service excellence. Rather than leave it to PR and customer service people, he took charge and when every passenger was safely in the terminal he went and spoke to them saying: “When you fly Qantas you’re flying with a premium airline and you have every right to expect more. An army of Qantas staff are right now finding you hotel rooms and working out how to get you to Sydney as soon as possible. But right now I want you to write down this number – it’s my personal mobile phone and I want you to call me if you think Qantas is not looking after you or if you think that Qantas does not care.” Then he explained what had happened, why, what would happen next and disclosed everything he knew. He answered every possible question in multiple passenger lounges for over two hours. He prepared everyone for the media circus that would ensue and stayed in the lounge with passengers until there were no more questions – eventually he was standing on his own.

Later, when the media shoved microphones in the faces of passengers asking: ‘Did you think you were going to die?’ – they responded: ‘No, the captain and crew were fantastic; they kept us fully informed at all times.’ When someone else in the press asked: ‘Did the crew or passengers panic?’ – they responded with: ‘Everyone was calm. The captain explained that the fire trucks sprayed water to cool the brakes, laid foam on the leaking fuel and tried to snuff an engine that wouldn’t shut down.’ Captain de Crespigny’s full and open disclosure and personal guarantee had transformed 440 passengers into the best PR and brand agents that Qantas management could have ever hoped for.

1,000 Qantas staff had leapt into action, looking after their customers by organising buses, finding hotel rooms, communicating and meeting individual needs until all 440 passengers were returned safely home. Everyone was deeply grateful to Captain de Crespigny, the flight crews and ground crews for keeping them safe.

None of the passengers ever called Captain de Crespigny’s mobile phone to complain or to ask for help. Richard explained to me that this is his audit process, proving that the entire Qantas organisation performed brilliantly during this extended crisis. Qantas, to their credit, never reprimanded him for overstepping the boundaries of his responsibilities on the ground in the terminal with passengers – they were grateful to have a leader step-up when needed, technically and commercially.

Captain de Crespigny is a shining example of the fact that the leader determines the culture … no, the leader is the culture. He believed that he was not just responsible for flying the aircraft safely but he represented his employer’s and suppliers’ (Airbus and Rolls-Royce) brands. In the days, months and years that followed he neutralized sensationalist media and highlighted that the safety and training culture within Qantas combined with the safety and robustness of the Airbus A380 were the reasons why the incident ended without loss of life.

Richard shies away from individual praise and continually states that it was a team effort – he is right. But make no mistake, had QF32 ended in disaster, and it very easily could have, then he would have accepted sole responsible for the loss of life. That’s the burden of leadership – you don’t get to blame others.

Captain de Crespigny is a classic example of a Jim Collins Level 5 leader and he continues to fly A380s for Qantas. Just as he’s done his entire career, he walks the cabin on long haul flights and talks with passengers. He believes that a good leader has to be seen and nothing reinforces a culture of friendly service more than leaders exposing themselves to customers. Richard de Crespigny’s also knows that no cabin crew want to see passengers complaining about service to the Captain. He has behaved this way his entire career because he is committed to giving passengers their best possible experience. He even built an online community for all the passengers to connect and help deal with their fears or need for additional information.

After reading the book QF32 and also after interviewing him for several hours, I formed the view that Captain de Crespigny embodies the following philosophies to which every leader should aspire:

• Be an unrivalled expert and passionate about what you do. Richard’s intimate knowledge of the A380 helped him manage its systems in a crisis and lead the team with clarity.
• The job is to provide a great experience for customers [passengers], not fulfill the role technically [fly the plane safely].
• Avoid complacency and don’t make assumptions. It is the things you do not know that can get you. Be positively paranoid and manage every conceivable risk.
• Teamwork is everything. Communicate clearly and ensure that everyone knows their role and is empowered to perform it.

The Qantas A380, Nancy-Bird Walton, which was operating as QF32 on November 4th, 2010 is now back in the air after what was reportedly the longest and most expensive aircraft repair in aviation history. Fly with Airbus, Qantas and Rolls-Royce with confidence – companies that have great cultures.

My advice for every business is to build a great customer-centric culture and empower your people to passionately represent your brand in all channels, especially social.

While I’m on the topic of aviation, here’s what I learned from my own plane crash when flying an aerobatic biplane many years ago.

Below is a keynote I did in 2012 talking about QF32. I have since been converted by Richard to now be a huge fan of Airbus! Also, not all Qantas pilots prefer Boeing – certainly not Richard. Both are brilliant designers and impeccable manufacturers but the philosophy of flight control software laws are different.

Follow-up post by me here with additional commentary. Follow the QF32 community blog here. Buy and read Richard’s book, QF32, here. See Air Crash Investigations documentary here. Read the Transport Safety Bureau report here. Link to my full white paper: Everyone Represents the Brand - How to Create a Customer Centric Culture.

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 Cover to ATSB report.

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