In sales we often use words like territory and segmentation, but we don’t often use the term "community".
Community often conjures up a hippy view of the world, where we all live in peace and harmony; and as we all know, the business world is not like that.
So Why is Community Important to the Modern Salesperson?
What if in the digital world, if we need new terms to use and need new tactics in the connected economy?
Let’s look at what we have done in the analogue world.
When I first started selling I was given a telephone book and was told "start calling that". From that list I got meetings, and worked through sales cycles and finally turn prospects into customers. Not sure about you, but there always seemed to be a lack of references, so I worked with the implementation people to make sure my customers became references. Then using these references to help create more sales. Hard work, but when I think about the holidays I’ve been on that were paid for by the commission, worth it.
In the world of digital and social there is an easier way to do this and it's the next step once salespeople have a personal brand need to go. Community Building.
Owning your Territory and Community Building!
Remember a Sales Leader saying to me, you must own your Territory ; the same is true in the world of Social Selling.
Personal Branding is all about building your personal brand online, so that if prospects are searching or researching for your products and services they find you. Then hopefully through a cleverly written LinkedIn profile they make contact with you and you close them before they go to the competition.
To be honest, highly unlikely.
When I teach Social Selling to people I always ask the question “ what is it that you stand for? ” This is all about enabling salespeople to focus in on the subjects they will tweet and post about.
But how about if we take this one step further? How about if you own the market place and Territory (and this applies to brands and sales people) it would be natural for prospects to come to you. Maybe we should say, “Social inbound, killed cold calling”. If you own digitally, the network, know all the influencers, are the person that naturally people will gravitate to, then you have locked out the competition. A Digital Community is purely lifting your rolodex and putting it onto Social. You can then manage your Territory through social, trust me, it's actually quicker and easier do it that way.
In my book “Social Selling” I explain from a practical standpoint how salespeople can create community and use this to generate leads, progress sales through the funnel right through to closing sales.
"Tim, I Don't Have Time for this"
"OK, But What if your Competition use it against you?"
One final point, you know that competitor, that you are up against, the one that you are always in head to head fight with. The one that has to drop its prices just to win, they may have already started this and are using community as a competitive strategy against you. Just think of the power if you do this at the company as a sales strategy and not just just at salesperson level.