Online Marketing Vs Offline Marketing

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7 Ways to Set Your Twitter Feed on Fire

Twitter has become an essential tool for entrepreneurs. A 2010 study done by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies showed that 67 percent of some 1,000 adults surveyed were more likely to buy from a company whose brand they followed on Twitter. Plus 79 percent of the respondents were more likely to recommend a brand whose handle they followed on Twitter.

Most entrepreneurs aren’t experts on Twitter, but all entrepreneurs can improve their engagement with a few minor adjustments. The following are seven ways to set your Twitter feed on fire:

1. Grow your following.

Increasing your follower count is the most effective way to boost your influence on Twitter. Look at the followers of your competitors. If their followers are ideal clients for you, begin by following these handles. Many of these users will follow you back.

To keep track of the Twitter accounts you follow and figure out which ones don't follow you back, use free tool like Manageflitter to identify those who don’t follow you back. Manageflitter gives you the ability to unfollow the Twitter users who have not followed you back right.

Using a strategy of following a few hundred targeted followers a week will result in your adding scores of new and ideal followers within a month. Continuing this strategy consistently could result your gain of thousands of new followers in a relatively short time period.

2. Be clear about your message.

The main question potential Twitter followers want answered is "How do I benefit from following this person?” To have ideal clients follow you, answer this question immediately.

The first place customers look is your descriptive bio. They don’t care if you're a father of two and a husband. Your favorite quote won't prompt them to follow you. Telling them what’s in it for them is all they care about.

Author Brendon Burchard offers the best way to communicate this concisely. At his live Experts Academy event, he suggested saying, "I help [blank] do [blank] so they can [blank]."  

3. Ask for retweets.

The ability to have your followers share your tweets is imperative to the growth of your social-media presence. Salesforce.com found that when followers are specifically asked to “retweet” with the shortcut reference “RT,” they are 10 times as likely to retweet a message.

The research also showed that asking followers to “retweet” (using the whole word spelled out), boosted the retweet rate 23 times more than average.

4. Share during the best times.

You can have the best and most engaging content in the world, but if it's not tweeted at the correct time, then it likely won't be seen. According to Bitly, the best time to reach people on Twitter is Monday to Thursday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. The worst times are after 3 p.m. on Fridays and any evening after 8 p.m.

5. Schedule tweets.

Set uptweets ahead of time. Free sites like Buffer and HootSuite grant you the ability to schedule tweets. This helps you be present on Twitter when your followers are more likely to be online. One hour of scheduling work might deliver a month’s worth of prescheduled Twitter content for your feed.

6. Use hashtags to boost retweets.

According to a study by Buddy Media/Salesforce at the end of 2011 and early 2012, tweets with hashtags receive twice the engagement as those without. The same study found that tweets incorporating more than two hashtags experienced a 17 percent decline in engagement. So be careful not to overuse hashtags.

Using hashtag websites like Hashtagifyme or Ritetag can assist you in identifying the most engaging hashtags for posts.

7. Use the @ properly.

Never start a tweet with @whoever. When you do, the only people who will see the tweet are your followers and @whoever.

Start the tweet with words and then insert @whoever later in the phrase like this: "Thanks @whoever for your great review about our service at ABC Company." This will ensure that all your followers will see this tweet in their feeds. And @whoever will be notified as well.

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"How To" Internet Marketing

A useful watch!

Facebook Updates For Sale Groups, Simplifies Selling Online

Social marketing is one thing, but what if you could make a sale directly through Facebook? A new update to the platform's For Sale Groups feature makes it all possible.

Not familiar with For Sale Groups? Unlike Facebook pages, where you focus on marketing your business, building your brand and connecting with viewers and customers, For Sale Groups are Facebook communities where people can buy, sell and trade items. Some of these groups have become incredibly popular over the years — many have tens of thousands of active members.

Facebook users can join these communities, post about their items, view and comment on others' posts and ask questions or seek advice relevant to their industry. These groups are excellent resources for local artisans just getting started in the business world, and can even be a great way to drive visits to users' Etsy stores. 

latest addition, a new feature simply called "Sell," takes these For Sale Groups to the next level. So how does it work?

To use the feature, users can simply click "Sell" instead of "Post" when they're in the group. Sell allows users to create special posts that include item descriptions, prices and even a pick-up or delivery location. Posts can be marked "Available" or "Sold" so that potential buyers can see when an item is no longer for sale. And sellers can easily keep track of their inventory by viewing a list of all of their posts.

The Sell feature launched Feb. 10, and Facebook plans to roll out more features to For Sale Groups in the coming months, according to the Facebook newsroom. These features will make it easier for the creators and members of For Sale Groups to browse, search and connect with one another.

Sell is available on the Web, and can also be accessed via Android and iOS devices.

If you currently run a Facebook For Sale Group, you can submit your request to start using the Sell feature (and upcoming new features) by filling out this form.

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New Tool Combines Facebook Ads and Print Marketing

Ready to expand your marketing strategy beyond the world of business cards and fliers? There's no better way to market your brand than by using social media. It's free to sign up, fairly simple to use and can expose your business to millions of people worldwide. And now, thanks to Vistaprint, going from print to digital just got easier.

Social Postcards — a new marketing tool from Vistaprint, a global provider of professional marketing products and services — launches today. The tool — which was created, in part, by Vistaprint's digital services business, Webs, along with help from Facebook — is designed to take small businesses' omnichannel marketing efforts to the next level.

With Social Postcards, small business owners can easily convert their print marketing materials into Facebook ad campaigns — and Facebook ads may be more important to your marketing strategy than you realize.

Sixty-five percent of small businesses are currently using, or are willing to pay for, Facebook ads, according to a Webs survey. However, most businesses don't have the tools or the resources to design professional-looking social media ads, the survey also found. Facebook research shows that these ads can drive more in-store revenue, leading one-third more people to purchase products or services, and two-thirds of people to increase their order value. 

"Online marketing is an untapped resource for many small businesses, and this tool makes it possible for small business owners to level the field against larger competitors, engage their customers in more modern ways and ultimately grow their business," Scott Bowen, vice president and general manager of digital services at Vistaprint, said in a statement.  

So, how does the Social Postcards tool work? In one simple dashboard, small business owners can design a postcard on Vistaprint, turn it into a Facebook ad, select their desired target audience, publish it and track the results of their campaign. 

Social Postcards users will pay a low, one-time fee to use the service, and the tool comes with several different features, including the following:

• A library of ad templates to highlight things like sales, events and promotions
• An extensive library of royalty-free images to use in ads
• A simplified ad-targeting system based on demographics, interest, connections and more
• An analytics tool for seeing results and optimizing strategy

The tool is also compatible with Facebook on desktop and mobile devices, and adheres to all of Facebook's text guidelines, Vistaprint says.

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How to Get Online Customers to Find You and Trust You

In his book Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Mitch Meyerson introduces you to 22 innovators who have redefined the developing landscape of online marketing. In this edited excerpt, contributing author and founder of Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch outlines the core components of a total online presence—building trust and educating your customers—and offers tips on how to handle these two tasks. 

There are many moving parts involved in marketing, and the online elements increase in importance with each passing day. Much of what happens online now revolves around content. It’s how you get found, why people pay attention, and how you start to exchange value. Without a content platform to build from, a great deal of effort in other stages will be wasted.This 

People today have come to expect to find information about any product, service, company, individual, cause, or challenge they face by simply turning to the search engine of their choice. So if they’re not finding content that you’ve produced, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be worthy of their trust. Which brings us to the two most important categories when it comes to content strategy: building trust and educating your customer.

Here are four ways you can build trust online:

1. Blog. This is the absolute starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication, and sharing so easy. The search engines love blog content as well, and this is the place where you can organize a great deal of your editorial thinking. This can easily be expanded and adapted to become content for articles, workshops, and ebooks.

2. Social media. You need to claim all the free opportunities to create social media profiles on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, but also in the online communities for such magazines as BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur, and Inc. Building rich profiles and optimizing links, images, and videos that point back to your main site is an important part of the content-as-strategy play.

3. Reviews. Ratings and reviews sites such as Yelp, MerchantCircle, and CitySearch have become mainstream, user-generated content hubs. Throw in the fact that Google, Yahoo, and Bing all allow folks to rate and review businesses, and you’ve got an increasingly important category of content that you must participate in.

4. Customer testimonials. These are a powerful form of content. Every business today should seek customer testimonials in multiple forms: written, audio, and video. This content adds important trust-building endorsements and makes for great brand-building assets out there on Google and YouTube.

Here are four ways you can provide content that educates:

1. The point-of-view white paper. Every business should have a well-developed core story that’s documented in the form of a white paper or ebook. This content must dive deeply into what makes your firm different, what your secret sauce is, how you approach customer service, and why you do what you do.

2. Seminars. Presentations, workshops, and seminars (online and off) are great ways to provide education with the added punch of engagement. Turning your point-of-view white paper into a 45-minute, value-packed session is one of the most effective ways to generate, nurture, and convert leads.

3. FAQs. There’s no denying the value of information packaged in this format, but go beyond the questions that routinely get asked and include those that should get asked but don’t, particularly the ones that help position you favorably against your competition.

4. Success stories. Building rich examples of actual clients succeeding through the use of your product or service offerings is a tremendous way to help people learn from other individuals and businesses just like them. When prospects see themselves in a success story, they're more likely to put themselves in that boat.

One thing we know for sure is when people want to find a business, they go online and search for it. You, as the marketer, need to make this easy for them and become a master of online local marketing before your competitors do. This means you must be very, very focused on winning searches that are done with the intent of finding something local. This includes showing up in mobile browsers and on maps.

Here are five steps you can take to build a strong local search presence:

1. Make your web pages scream local. There are many ways to make your website pages localized. This is one of the underlying elements that tell the search engines that yours is indeed a local business.

2. Claim and enhance your local search profiles. The local search directories at Google, Yahoo!, and Bing want you to claim and build rich information for local profiles. This makes their job easier when people search for local businesses.

3. Participate in the ratings and reviews game. Lots of local business directories exist with the added feature of user ratings and reviews. If you’re not paying attention to the major sites and monitoring what’s being said, you may be losing business because of one poor review.

4. Update your listings and citations. Citations are mentions of your business and address that appear on other websites. These are a key component of the ranking algorithms because they help assure your business is truly local.

5. Own a social network topic group. Start a local niche group, and build a community of users around the local theme on social media sites such as Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Meetup, or Biznik. If you can find an area of interest to others, you might be able to build a useful and vibrant local tool while greatly enhancing your own local presence.

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Optimizing Your Brand Outreach on Pinterest (Infographic)

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Facebook Introduces Relevance Score for Advertisers

On a scale of 1 to 10, how effective would you say your business's ads are? Soon, Facebook will be able to answer that question for you.

Advertisers on Facebook will soon find a new metric for measuring the success of their ad campaigns: relevance scores.

So what exactly is a relevance score?

Your relevance score is a number between 1 and 10 (10 being the highest score) assigned to your ads based on their performance. Facebook calculates your relevance score based on the positive and negative feedback it expects your ad to receive from its target audiences. Positive feedback includes video views, conversions and more, while negative feedback includes factors like when a user hides or reports your ad. This score is updated as more people interact with your ads and provide feedback. 

Relevance scores can be helpful to advertisers in several ways. According to Facebook, these metrics can help you lower the cost of reaching people. To help Facebook's ad delivery system send the right ads to the right people, ads with higher relevance scores cost less to be delivered. While this is not the only factor the company's ad delivery system considers, it can make an impact.

Additionally, since Facebook gives your ad a relevance score before you even run your campaign, you can test out different combinations of images and copy as well as different audiences. This way, you can see which ones have the highest relevance scores before you make a decision and launch your ads.

Plus, being able to track your changing score can indicate when it's time to rethink your ad strategy.

Just remember that relevance scores, while beneficial, aren't everything.

"[It’s] important to keep this metric in perspective," Facebook wrote on its business page. "Relevance scores should not be used as the primary indicator of an ad’s performance."

"As has long been the case on Facebook, the most important factor for success is bidding based on the business goal you hope to meet with an ad."

And not all Facebook ads are compatible with the relevance score metric. According to Facebook, ads with guaranteed delivery (those bought through reach and frequency) are not affected. It's also not so useful in brand awareness campaigns.

"Relevance score has a smaller impact on cost and delivery in brand awareness campaigns, since those ads are optimized for reaching people, rather than driving a specific action like installs," Facebook wrote.

Facebook suggests using your relevance scores to reach audiences at a lower cost and test out different ads and target audiences — just don't rely on the number you get as the only measure of your campaign's success.

"[Understand] that having a good relevance score is not an end unto itself," Facebook wrote.

You can view your relevance score using any of Facebook's ad-reporting tools as well as tools developed by the company's API partners. Facebook started rolling out the new metric globally this week.  

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Boost Sales With These 7 Social Media Steps

When social media first hit the scene, I thought three things: this is a waste of time, I don't have time for it and my customers are not here. I was wrong on all three counts. Social mediums are vital to your business. They all can grow your brand awareness and your profits.

Just three years ago I was oblivious to these tools. Today, my companies have more than 5 million views on YouTube, accumulated 300,000 Facebook followers and another 275,000 active followers on Twitter. Like you, I started with no followers and a very limited belief in these platforms.

Here are seven things we did that helped us build a presence and a following on the social media platforms:

1. Start. The most important thing to do is to start, and start fast. You don't need to know anything to do this. Create an account and commit to posting content. That’s all! Nothing is going to happen without starting. Billions of people are using social media worldwide -- proof that it’s not complicated. 

2. Post often and keep posting. There is no such thing as posting too much content. There are some “experts” out there who discourage frequent posts. They think if you post too often people will quit following you, but in the beginning, you don't have followers. The only way you are going to get attention is through frequency. Those who quit following you because you post too much aren’t your market and won’t buy from you anyway. If people aren't complaining about how much you post you are not posting enough. In three years, I posted more than 1,200 videos on YouTube, the social medium I consider to be one of the most powerful. That's almost 400 videos a year.

3. Be the celebrity expert in your space. Post content that makes you the expert in your space. Think in terms of providing information based on what you know and the service your business or products offers. Offer tips and insights such as how to, how not to, what to avoid, how to find the best, what makes it the best, how to fix it, repair it and what you must know. If you are a dry cleaner, post everything there is to know about dry cleaning, stain removal and fabrics.

4. Make planet Earth your target. Unlike traditional marketing, social media allows you to pitch the world. In the beginning, you want attention from anyone. I have followers in China and India that may never buy my books or sales training programs, but they may share my content with someone here in U.S. that can become a client. Understand from the start that anyone worldwide can see your content and be inspired to take some sort of action.

5. Create varying content. Use every form of content possible: videos, photos, quotes, articles and blogs and curating the content of others. Content sharing is the easiest and the one that may get you more followers faster. By sharing the content of a competitor or another expert and giving them credit, you will pick up followers from those that follow them.  

6. 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your content should be information based, not promotional. In the beginning, you may even shift that to 95/5, where 95 percent is information. No one is going to come to you because you posted something promotional because no one is even following you. You have to get an audience that wants your content. As you grow followers, you can increase promotions.

7. Do not delegate. No matter how important your position or how busy your schedule, you must take ownership of your social media presence. I run three different companies and I still find time to post daily because I understand the power of these mediums. I am also supported by an entire marketing department of young social media-savvy people, but none of them knows more about my businesses than I do. They help create and push promotional content, but my voice is my own. You have to be authentic. Many brands miss this.

No matter who you are, how old you are or what you do, these mediums can be great for your brand and business, but first, you must get started and get a following.

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Frank Kern $20,000 Video

View Frank Kern's $20,000 video in this video series on the world's best internet marketer!

Money Is Everywhere - Frank Kern

This is extremely interesting. Ever asked for money?

Facebook Posting Techniques that Really Work

There’s a fine line between a scientific approach to marketing on Facebook and a haphazard shotgun approach. For those of you who prefer not to "point and shoot," a new study from a San Francisco-based social media strategy firm offers an in-depth analysis of the top 20,000 Facebook Pages and up to a quarter million posts in an effort to determine the most useful posting techniques.

In the just-released report called Engagement and Interaction: A Scientific Approach to Facebook Marketing, Momentus Media provides answers to the seven most frequently asked questions by Facebook page administrators:

1. When’s the best time to post? While weekends and off-peak hours from 2pm to 5am are the times when page admins are least likely to add a new post, those are the posts that receive the highest interaction rates. Thursdays, on the other hand, shoulder the highest number of postings during the week and the lowest interaction rate. And since a high level of postings results in a lower interaction rate from users, it only stands to reason that posting in off-peak hours means you’ll gain more interaction from fans.
    
2. How many times should I post per day?You’d think too many posts would offend your followers but the report suggests frequent posting increases interaction. As you might suspect, fewer posts reduce the chances users will see them. And while unsubscribe rates go up after three posts per day, they level off at higher frequencies. The secret is to find that balance between optimizing interaction and managing unsubscribes, which is going to be different for every business.
    
3. What type of content elicits the most interaction? By far, photos generate the highest interaction rate for the six varieties of content, with status updates ranking No. 2. Others -- in descending order -- include video, music and links. The fact that links are at the bottom is interesting, considering they are posted the most often. Photos rank at the top because they’re visual, easy to digest and they elicit emotion.
    
4. Should I ask fans to Like or Comment on my posts? Absolutely. Just by taking advantage of a "Like" call to action boosts your interaction rate by 216 percent. Momentus Media analyzed 49,266 Page posts, comparing interaction rates for posts with "Like" and "Comment" calls to action and those without. And while only 1.3 percent of status messages had a call to action attached, those who used "Like" or "Comment" showed a huge boost in interaction rates.
    
5. Should I ask my fans questions? You’d think that by asking questions you’d get a better interaction rate, but such is not the case. However, Facebook page admins looking to achieve the highest comment rate should pose questions and then directly ask for fans to reply with comments.
    
6. How long should my status messages be? According to this study, size does matter. While there’s a higher posting rate for shorter posts (especially those that stay within the 140-character limit for cross-posting purposes on both Twitter and Facebook), interaction increases as the length of the status message increases.
    
7. How long do my messages remain in the Newsfeed? In the first hour of a Facebook status update, half of the users who will click on the post will have done so, with 90 percent of the clicks occurring within nine hours of the post going live.

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How Can I Get People to My Facebook Page?

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Facebook: Where Selling Meets Social

Imagine you live in a small town in a big, old house with a wrap-around porch on Main Street. You are sitting on your front porch as people walk by on a warm summer evening. You sip lemonade, commenting on the heat, and playing checkers with your neighbor. Many of the people who walk by wave or say hello. Some stop and visit for a while, chatting about births, weddings, deaths, local gossip.

Sometimes those who join you on the porch also invite friends to join them on the porch to sit and chat. Others walking by shout a quick hello and a short bit of news without even slowing their pace.

This casual, dynamic, social environment is Facebook.

Facebook is the new town square where people connect with friends, family and acquaintances. People do not go to the town square to search for the answers to a problem or to buy life insurance. They go to meet people, to see and to be seen, to interact.

Facebook is about who people are: what they like, what they believe in, and with whom they like to associate. Facebook is where people share announcements, opinions, and insights not for any particular objective, but just to share. To connect. To be alive.

People do not go to Facebook to search for the answer to a problem, to find a product or learn about your service. The front-porch experience is about connecting and exchanging ideas and news or even just a "poke."

Can you still sell on this new front porch? Absolutely.

Selling on the front porch is not that same as selling with Google AdWords. An ad that had terrific results on Google AdWords may flop on Facebook. But why?

Consider this example. Search for "guitar" on Google. Instantly, Google shows natural search results related to the keyword guitar. As Google delivers links to information about guitars, it also simultaneously displays ads related to guitars. If Google does its job well, users shouldn’t care because the search results and the ads are of equal interest to them.

Now search Facebook for "guitar." Facebook's search feature searched content only on Facebook. Because Facebook’s ads aren’t based on what you are doing right now, which is searching the word “guitar,” no guitar ads will appear. Rather, you will see ads focused on who you are as a person: your age, your sex, your marital status, and the pages, TV shows and other things you’re into.

In Google you get to sell to the specific need that the user is digitally shouting at you. Not so on Facebook. If you were to stand on your front porch, or Facebook, and yell at everyone walking down the street that “I have a great deal on car insurance,” some people might stop by and talk with you, but most would start walking down the other side of the street.

Selling on the front porch is about engaging people where they are, based on their personal likes and interests. This is what makes Facebook such a great tool for advertising products related to art, beliefs, music, culture, health, fitness or hobbies.

Let's say sell pottery. Selling directly on Facebook (“Buy this glazed mug right now for only $150”) can turn off your audience -- Facebook users are not shopping. You’ll miss the real opportunity and will probably not sell enough pots to pay for the ads.

So what might you do instead? Tell a story based on what marketers like to call your unique selling proposition. Why is your product or service special? You must offer something nobody else offers, does or promises.

Next, craft interesting and engaging content that reflects this unique selling proposition. Are you selling pottery as an investment? Art form? Dinner plates? Are you selling to twenty-something hipsters? Forty-something professionals? For each one of these groups, you may craft a different front-porch experience that provides value to your audience, like a video visit to an artist’s studio, a buying guide for different types of pottery, or a slideshow of crazy, one-of-a-kind pieces.

Pictures, videos, cartoons, testimonials -- all about pottery -- support your front porch conversation and validate your unique selling proposition. Gather email addresses through at least one special offer that comes only through email, and always invite your visitors to share this information with their friends.

Selling on the front porch is not new. For years I have been encouraging my clients to engage their customers with a website with a strong landing page offering relevant conversation and value-added information.

Rather than focus initially on products or service offerings, first provide free information around your products and services. If the potential customers request more information and you collect their contact information, then you have a lot more space to work with them until they are ready for a sale.

The goal, once you pay for a click, is to begin to build a relationship with a customer, one where they like you, appreciate your expertise, and want to purchase from you.

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3 Ways to Use Social Media to Build Rapport With Your Customers

These days, prospects and customers have more information thrown at them than ever before. From phone calls and snail mail to emails and social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, each new way for a person to initiate contact makes it harder for companies to break through all the noise.

With sales -- and any industry, really -- the base of a strong prospect or customer interaction is a relationship. But how can you build a lasting bond when the people you’re trying to connect with are constantly bombarded with other requests and information?

One solution is a practice called social selling. Between LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, customers and potential new clients are everywhere online -- and salespeople should be, too. Today’s prospects don’t want a traditional “discovery call.” They want their sales representatives to have an understanding of who they are personally and what they need, and social media can help with this.

But how does an individual practice social selling? And how can an entire sales team implement a social selling strategy? Here are three easy steps to kick off your social selling program the right way.

1. Get to know your prospects.

With social selling, a sales representative’s job is to understand the individuals they’re targeting on as many different levels as possible. Maybe you both went to the same university or grew up in the same hometown. These tidbits of information make for a stronger initial engagement and can help build a lasting relationship.

Using a variety of social media networks in your investigation is important, and keep in mind the strengths and weakness of each. LinkedIn is great for finding commonalities and historical data, but is rarely the most up-to-date platform. Twitter, on the other hand, is often used several times a day for everything from announcing colds to career moves.

With social selling, it’s also necessary to find the right balance between too much and not enough information. No one wants a complete stranger to know everything about them! Find logical bonding points and easy ways to bring them up naturally in conversation, as opposed to abruptly dropping in information. Noticing you both grew up in the city may be an easier entrance than the fact that you both enjoy yoga.

2. Let your prospects get to know you.

When implementing a social selling strategy, you need to show not only that you understand where your customers are coming from, but also that you’d like them to know you better, too. When dealing transactionally-only, it can be easy to forget the individuals on both sides of a sales interaction are, in fact, regular people.

As salesperson utilizing social selling, you should have an active online presence, where you thoughtfully interact with various groups and gain an understanding of different digital communities. Social profiles allow prospects and clients alike to get to know you better from afar, which builds trust and shows them who you are as a person, outside of your one-on-one interactions. Most of all, it makes the individual on the other end of the phone or email more willing to engage with you as a specific person, as opposed to “The Company” that you represent.

3: Organize and analyze.

What good is information without organization and analysis? Just like any type of data, social media insights are only truly helpful when there’s a level of understanding and interpretation behind them.

Just as you would sync direct contact with a prospect into CRM, make sure to track your social insights and interactions closely. Tools like TweetDeck can assist with segmenting social streams to help keep new, up-to-the-minute information organized, while creating a timeline within your CRM platform allows you to have all the pieces of puzzle readily available when initiating contact with a potential client.

Once you’ve got all your informational ducks in a row, it’s time to analyze. Do you have enough of a basis to create a warm outreach, or is it better to wait until you’ve learned more about this individual and feel like you can build a meaningful relationship? Understanding whether you need to gather more information is extremely important, since an unprepared initial outreach could ruin a potentially advantageous relationship.

Communication is a big part of analysis among the sales team. Teammates will benefit greatly from bouncing ideas off of each other and asking for advice. For example, a sales person could ask a teammate, “My prospect just tweeted that she’s going to be really busy this month. Should I wait until next month to pitch her?” or “My prospect just posted a picture of his lunch of Instagram. Is it awkward to tell him that I share his love for burritos?” Having a team member or two weigh-in can help speed up analysis and provide clarity on what’s most appropriate.

Salespeople are known for being social, but in a field as competitive as sales, it can be easy for representatives to isolate themselves at the office. Sales managers should encourage sharing across the team by instilling a feeling that when the team succeeds, everyone succeeds. Sharing advice and best-practices can help each individual on the team learn and grow from the experiences of their teammates. Not only does social selling help with the initial engagement of a prospect, but the insights and connections you can gain from this technique will help set up the basis for more meaningful, fruitful engagements long-term.

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