There's money to be made in social media if you sell the right way.

There’s money to be made in social media if you sell the right way.

There’s this age-old problem with selling: If we could only get more people to pay attention to us, we could build relationships that lead to sales.

Fortunately, social media offers an amazing source of business opportunities. If you approach it the right way, you can build many relationships that could be crucial to your business growth and success.

This article is about successfully selling (not marketing) with social media. And by selling, I mean the “two people getting to know each other and starting up a conversation that might go somewhere” kind of selling.

Here are eight ways to strike up social media conversations with people you want to meet:

1. Boil the Frog

There’s an old wives’ tale (some truth to it) that says  if you put a frog in boiling water, it will sense the heat and jump out. But put a frog in cool water and turn up the heat slowly, and the frog will hardly notice.

When reaching out online to people you’d like to meet, don’t come on like gangbusters. Nothing screams “jump out of the hot pot” more than a blatant “let’s talk so I can sell you something” message.

Start cool and warm up slowly. Comment on their blog post. Retweet them thoughtfully. Compliment something they wrote. Become familiar to someone—even if they don’t engage you right away—and it’s more likely that they’ll engage you in the future.

For example, this person wrote to me personally, said something pleasant, and left it there. Nice start!

Dr. Rachna Jain, who studies the psychology of social media, says, “When people see you more, they like you more. The shorthand is that familiarity breeds likeability. Especially if you’re seen as giving them value or good content or information.”

2. Givers Gain

The world of social media changes faster than the Clippers change coaches. But some things never change—like the golden rule of networking (social or otherwise).

The golden rule? Givers gain. (Bet you figured that out from the section header.)

As Dr. Jain said, “…especially if you’re seen as giving them value or good content or information.” How? Share a white paper. Share a relevant piece of research. Invite them to a private local business event.

Remember, starting relationships can take many touches. Do this right, and people will perceive you as valuable even before you interact with them personally (which we’re getting to), and you boil the frog at the same time.

3.  Make Henry Kissinger Proud

There’s an old story that’s been told and retold about how Henry Kissinger approached getting the best out of his staff. Before reviewing anything from his people, he’d ask, “Before I look at this… is it your best work?” and the staff would go back and keep working until they could say yes.

When reaching out through social media, give it your Henry Kissinger effort.

RAIN Group and  RainToday have about 160,000 subscribers and followers combined.  And they reach out to me fairly regularly and want to connect.

Many of them remain strangers because they made no effort to relate to me. A standard “my products would be of value” overture does not catch anyone’s attention. No personalization… no genuine connection. Even something better than bad would be good.

But every once in a while, someone reaches out with real effort, energy and thoughtfulness—the kind that would make Henry Kissinger proud. Here’s an example of how one gentleman started a conversation:

This example goes on with several more paragraphs explaining our connections and reasons for why we might both be interested in connecting. This contact effort was obviously customized and it resonated well with me.

4. Be Brave

Call reluctance is common on the phone. It happens online, too. People don’t reach out online because of some kind of fear. “They won’t respond.” “They’ll say no.” “They’ll be angry with me.”

The fact of the matter is most customers believe salespeople don’t reach out enough. In the online world, there’s a heavy emphasis on the concept of inbound marketing. I think inbound marketing is a great approach. But that doesn’t mean proactive outreach—the online equivalent of cold-calling—is either dead or bad.

When you find a particular person you want to connect with, reach out.

As long as you keep points 1, 2, and 3 in mind, you’ll be fine. As business guru Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Be brave. Take shots.

5. Be Positive and Pleasant

When some people gear up their bravery for outreach, they think, “I’m about to reach out to a big-time person. I need to seem big time too!” So they puff out their chest and brag about how awesome they are.

Who made the rule that “important” people should be temperamental and full of themselves? Not endearing. I’ve had the good fortune of interacting with lots of guru types and most of them are pleasant and humble.

Don’t try to come off as the BMOC. The fastest way to come off as inconsequential is to keep saying how influential you are.

Todd Schnick says it so well:

“Actions make you influential. Not your words or tweets. People who serve, people who help others, people who share the cool things that others are doing… those are the actions that make you influential.”

Right on, Todd.

6. Prepare for Window Shopping

When you reach out to people, expect that they’ll check you out. When someone writes to me and I’m curious, the first thing I do is Google them and see what comes up.

Make sure that when the people reaching out to you search for you online, you’re portrayed exactly how you want to be. Determine how your personal brand and online reputation come across, as they’ll greatly affect people’s impressions of you.

7. Release your Inner Battlestar

People build relationships with people they like. If you want to build relationships, be endearing. And the best way to do that? Let your personality shine through.

We’ve received tremendous feedback since publishing Rainmaking Conversations about the core content of the book. But the people that got the most kick out of it caught all the Battlestar Galactica references in the chapters. Geeky? Yes. Me? What can I say.

Boring is forgettable. Personality is memorable. And social media outlets are the perfect place for you to be yourself.

For example, in my research for this piece, I came across articles by Amy Porterfield. I visited her website, and saw her nifty little description of herself:

I BELIEVE in:

• Hard work, but that you have to be able to throw it all away for love and family.
• No drama. Really… not even a little!
• Acceptance. No judgment lives here.
• Wearing my heart on my sleeve.
• Embracing whatever’s next.
• But most of all, I believe that social media should be something you enjoy, not dread.

No drama. Not even a little. I love it!

Now that’s letting your personality shine through.

8. Take It Offline, When It’s Time

Social media outlets are great places for starting conversations, but they’re not the only place to have them. When the time is right, take the conversation offline.

You can start with a phone call or go right to face-to-face (assuming you’ve boiled your frog correctly). In any case, take the leap.

Selling is a contact sport. After you’ve begun your conversation and built rapport, find a good reason to take the conversation offline and see where it takes you.

And a little bonus…

There are so many social media tools available now it can be difficult to keep up. Here are a handful of tools that are helpful for lead generation and sales:

• Google Alerts and Twitter Alerts help you find reasons to create conversations by following trigger events.
• SocialToo can help you keep track of new and lost followers.
• GeoChip is good if you need to focus on a specific geography.
• TubeMogul can help you spread the word with video.

TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences.

• Twellow finds people you’re looking for with a sort of Yellow Pages for Twitter.

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts to help you find people who matter to you.

• SproutSocial helps if you’re getting serious about this whole thing. And, of course, the three biggies: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

If there were a ninth way to succeed in building relationships and selling with social media, and you were to add it to this article, what would it be? Leave your comments in the box below.

*No frogs were in any way harmed in the process of writing this article.

How do you stand out from the sea of competition?

Let me ask you this: when you look at the services you provide and how you market them, do you look and sound like other firms in your space? Does your website look eerily like your competitors? Are you blogging and tweeting similar content?

If the answer is yes, then you need to stop right now.

The only way you are going to get the clients you want and the fees you deserve is if you differentiate yourself. Do something that sets you apart from the rest, elevates buyers’ perception of you, and increases your value.

The fact that you have a website, are publishing content, and are active in social media is a great step. But thanks to more and more firms doing the same thing, it isn’t enough to just have a blog or a Facebook page. Now it’s going to take more work. Now you have to publish high-quality content, not just any content.

“You have to say something important, and you have to say it succinctly. And you have to have a strategy for packaging it that makes it something people will find and will want to read,” says Paul Gillin, co-author of Social Marketing to the Business Customer in a recent podcast interview, It’s Time for B2B Firms to Be More Like Publishers.

Firms have to adopt a publisher mentality and use high-quality articles, blog posts, podcasts, and video to demonstrate their expertise and distinguish themselves from the competition, Gillin says.

“Lots and lots of people are in social media right now, and the competition to get visibility to be seen is more intense. That means you have to get better at producing high-quality content,” he says.

Make a Lasting Positive Impression during Sales Meetings

Publishing quality content certainly helps get people to notice you, but how you handle yourself during meetings that occur as a result can make or break a deal. First impressions mean everything.

If it’s a scheduled meeting, you have an opportunity to set yourself as the standard all vying providers will be compared against. You want to do what Vickie K. Sullivan describes as “call the game and then predict the future.”

You want “to show the value of your expertise and to leave the buyer with a different perspective that they will now use on everybody else,” Sullivan writes in her article, Be the Benchmark: How to Become the Buyer’s Best Option.

First, question what’s really going on with your prospect, Sullivan says. Their definition of the problem may be way off base. Work with them to dig down to the root of the problem, go beyond the symptoms. After you do that, ask them, “What will happen if …” and insert their plan of action.

Once you redefine the problem with them, you can brainstorm the criteria needed for the solution, Sullivan says. The trick is to make the criteria very specific so that only you are able to meet it.

“When you contribute to the criteria, you better control the comparison among options. That’s how you can come out on top,” Sullivan says.

Distinguish Yourself during Unexpected Meetings

Unexpected meetings with potential buyers are equally important and possibly more difficult. You could be at a conference or a social event and find yourself face to face with someone who is your ideal client, but the circumstances don’t allow for in-depth sales conversations nor do you have an opportunity to plan what to say to the person.

That does not mean, however, you cannot prepare for such situations. In fact, you must prepare if you want to make a good, long-lasting impression that leads to a second meeting, according to Anne Scarlett in her article, The Best Way to Handle Unexpected Business Encounters.

“You can never be certain of whom you will run into or when,” she says. “Strive to be concise, conscious, consistent, curious, and captivating.”

To do that, you must feel comfortable with the content. You need to know your firm’s top three messages and become skilled at thinking on your feet. Be prepared for wherever the prospect decides to take the conversation.

Sales Success

With your sales process under way, don’t forget to go back and measure your results. Are you meeting your goals? Are there areas that need to be adjusted? Successful organizations do not operate on whims. They make decisions based on performance, striving to continually improve results.

“They review everything from their forecasts to their pipelines, looking hard at important numbers such as cost of sales, percentage of market share, salesperson effectiveness ratios, and customer lifetime value,” says Ken Thoreson in his article, Pay Attention to the Numbers: Using Metrics to Improve Sales Results.

But organizations aren’t just examining the numbers. They’re looking for ways to improve sales results. They combine their goals with individual salespeople’s business plans with a set of metrics designed to gauge everyone’s progress in meeting those objectives. Metrics measured include actual sales activity, win-loss percentages, average order value, and dollar value of pipeline.

If you don’t measure, you don’t know how effective you are. But the real route to success is adjusting as needed to improve those results each month and each quarter.

Photo by: flickkerphotos

From lead to client: Do we have a deal?

We all love referrals—if they’re good. When they’re good, they can lead to satisfied clients and long-lasting relationships. But it takes a little work to ensure you get good referrals, starting with the people you get them from.

In fact, when looking for people to give you referrals (or referral partners), you have to put on your sales hat, says Colleen Stanley in her article, How You Could Be Hurting Your Referral System.

“Good [referral] partners are like good prospects; they must be qualified or disqualified. One of the key qualifiers for referral partners is how well they align with your company values, goals, and objectives,” she says.

For if they don’t align and don’t follow the same client practices as you, you may find the referrals they give you aren’t worth a dime. It’s imperative, therefore, that you make sure their target clients match yours, that they have good relationships with their clients, and that you trust them.

Prospecting via LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be another good source for leads, but again it takes some effort. You can’t simply join the social network and expect prospects to find you. You must reach out to others, and there are some simple ways to do so, writes Kristina Jaramillo in her article 3 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Attract More Clients:

• Update your status regularly
• Start discussions in groups
• Answer questions in the Q&A section
• Publish content and share it with your groups

Do those things, and “you will begin to build your list of connections and prospects. Continue the conversation, and you will turn these prospects into paying clients,” Jaramillo says.

Prospecting Phone Calls

You might prefer generating leads via referrals and social media, but do not discard prospecting phone calls. They might be the most dreaded tool in your selling toolbox, but they are powerful. Again, that’s provided you do them correctly. The key thing is to avoid sounding like a self-serving salesperson, which many service professionals accidentally do in their attempts to not sound that way.

Consider this example from Jill Konrath’s article Are You Making This Prospecting Mistake?

Hi Pat. This is Jane Kerry calling. I’m with Big Deal Strategies, a leading marketing firm in the Minneapolis area. We offer a wide range of services, including branding, collateral development, as well as packaging and web design—one-stop shopping for all your marketing needs.

I’d love to set up a time to find out about your needs and tell you a bit about how we might help your company. Please give me a call at your earliest convenience. My number is 123-456-7890. I look forward to meeting you. Have a great day!

It sounds gracious and far from pushy. But guess what? You sound self-serving.

“When you talk about your company, you’re selling—even if you do it nicely. You really cross the line if you use verbiage like one-stop shopping, industry leader, user-friendly, scalable, best-in-class, robust, or innovative,” Konrath says.

If you want to get more sales, you have to stop selling, she says. You have to sound like a professional who brings substantial value and is worth meeting.

Build Relationships with Clients

Konrath’s sentiments align with what author and speaker Michael Port says. If you want new clients, you have to develop relationships with prospects and get them to trust you.

Use marketing to create awareness for you and your services, but then have a system that allows prospects to get to know you and your services over time. Give them an opportunity to earn your trust, Port says in his podcast interview Marketing Doesn’t Get You Clients. Trust Does.

“Then once you’ve earned enough trust to make sales offers, you will make sales offers that are proportionate to the amount of trust that you’ve earned,” he says. “If you know how to price your offers in the in the sweet spot of the customer’s desire, and you know how to have simple sales conversations that work at the right time, then you can book the business.”

Consultative Approach Draws New Clients

IT company rackAID, LLC applied a similar approach when it saw its business steadily dropping off. Overseas firms and freelance IT professionals were charging significantly less, but founder Jeff Huckaby didn’t want to be the cheapest IT firm, providing sketchy service and trying to make a living on volume. So he reinvented the firm to be far more consultative. He decided he would differentiate his firm by truly partnering with his clients, looking at the long-term needs of these businesses and making recommendations and sales based on a deep understanding of his clients’ needs.

“We use consultative calls in our question-based selling process,” Huckaby says in Gwen Moran’s case study IT Company Reinvents Itself for Growth, Increases Average Deal Size by 46%. “Instead of initially saying here’s this package and here’s what it is, we listen to that person’s needs and you definitely connect those needs to a package that we have that says, based on what you have described to us, this is the package that fits your needs.”

Huckaby says that by uncovering the client’s goals, he is able to better adopt that partner model that has transformed his business. In addition, he can spot opportunities to sell additional services that the client might need.

In the world of journalism, speed has always been of the essence. Every reporter, editor, and producer wants to break the story, beating their competitors to the punch and driving readers, listeners, and viewers to them. Once I even called in a story for my first reporting job, dictating the story to my editor, in order to get the news into the paper before it went to press. Many of us did that. And then along came the Internet.

Thanks to the Net, the pace has dramatically increased. First, news web pages meant quick-hit news stories could reach people faster than any print publication could think about. And now, with real-time online news sources, blogs, and Twitter, people learn about news events almost instantaneously. News reporting has become real-time.

As David Meerman Scott says, “The Internet has fundamentally changed the pace of business, compressing time and rewarding speed.”

That applies to all businesses, not just news outlets. Real-time communications drives business success, says Meerman Scott.

“A comparison of 2010 stock prices reveals that on average the publicly traded Fortune 100 companies that engage in real-time communications beat the S&P 500 stock index, while the others on average underperformed the index,” he writes in his new ebook, Real-Time: How Marketing and PR at Speed Drives Success (PDF).

Your firm may not be among the Fortune 100, but the “real-time revolution” still applies to you, particularly your marketing and public relations. You can instantly react to what’s happening in the news; engage members of the media; spread the word about new ideas, articles, and blog posts; and respond to client concerns.

“When you start the conversation, you are recognized as someone who is plugged into the marketplace of ideas,” Meerman Scott says. “If you talk about an idea early, you naturally get more exposure because the threads of conversation stem from what you have said. If you’re in late, you get lost in the cacophony.”

Consider, for example, Wells Fargo. It was the first bank to have a blog and dedicated social media team, starting in 2006, Meerman Scott says. Ed Terpening, Vice President and Manager of Social Media at the bank, said they wanted to be where their customers are and be able to react swiftly to their comments and concerns. “Tools like Twitter provide us real-time insight into consumer sentiment and news related to our business,” he says.

And in Meerman Scott’s research for the ebook, he saw firsthand how businesses worked with writers faced with deadlines. Only 28 of the Fortune 100 companies he asked to interview or comment responded. That’s a missed opportunity for them.

To read more examples about how businesses are using speed and agility to market themselves and work with the media and clients, download Meerman Scott’s ebook, Real-Time: How Marketing and PR at Speed Drives Success. And if you want even more information, check out his new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR.

Learn more in Scott Ginsberg's on-demand webinar "How to Build a Thought Leadership Platform So Clients Come to You with Money"

You finally did it. You created a blog. You’ve taking one of the first steps to establish yourself as a thought leader to attract new clients. And you’re psyched about it, posting three to four posts a week. But you enter the third month, and your energy is waning. No one has commented on your posts let alone inquired about your services. What’s wrong?

Scott Ginsberg, aka “The Nametag Guy,” who presented a webinar on the topic July 27, says a few things could be at play. Ginsberg talked with me recently about mistakes people make with blogs and other thought leadership tactics. You can listen to that interview here:

Essentially there are five things that can prevent people from reading your content or from engaging with you if they do get to it:

1. Are you writing posts that are original and move people? Effective content should follow Ginsberg’s philosophy of MCI – meaningful, concrete, immediacy. “Whatever you write or market has to have meaning and speak to the people you serve. It has to be quick and concise. It has to be stuff that’s actionable,” Ginsberg says.

2. Do you have a platform that allows you to be visible? It isn’t enough to just be on Twitter and tweet your blogs posts here and there. You can’t just go on LinkedIn or Facebook and participate sporadically. Determine who you want to reach, how to find those people, and the method of communication that works best for them. “Without visibility you lose because the biggest barrier to business success is not stupidity; it’s anonymity,” Ginsberg says.

3. Does your marketing sound like marketing? If so, then no one is going to respond and interact with you. “To prevent it from tasting like marketing, you have to provide a continuous stream of education. You want to do it in a way that’s simple, easy, and concrete,” Ginsberg says.

4. Do you have a call to action? With any piece of content you create you need to figure out how to elicit a response from people. You want to do something or offer something that makes them want to contact you for more information. Don’t sell; enable people to buy from you.

5. Have you given your blog enough time? Three months is not long enough. When Ginsberg started his blog, it took a year to get comments. You must press on. You don’t have to write three, four, or five times a week, but you must keep writing.

“The challenge is carving out some time to make sure you are clarifying and organizing and deploying your expertise through the written word,” Ginsberg says. “You don’t have to be an amazing writer. What matters is that your philosophy is there and you’re sharing it with people.”

So many people give up because they get discouraged. Don’t let that happen to you.

“If you can do it consistently and deal with not getting a lot of comments for six months, it’s good because you can fail quietly,” Ginsberg says. “But more importantly, the rest of the people will fade away and you will start to stand out.”

Learn More:

Watch Scott Ginsberg’s on-demand webinar How to Build a Thought Leadership Platform So Clients Come to You with Money.

Challenges, no matter how great, can be overcome (Photo by Darcy McCarty)

“Nothing is easy.”

That is the mantra for several people I know. They sigh, shake their heads, and mumble those words whenever something doesn’t go smoothly or fails to succeed. Life seems to be one long struggle for them.

I don’t believe that nothing is easy. Many people have a natural ability to do things very well, whether it’s engineering, accounting, writing, or speaking in front of people. Those people aren’t without challenges, however, especially if they’re trying to sell their services.

For many service professionals, the challenge is in marketing and selling their services and growing their firms. Add to that the inability to think creatively to tackle that challenge, and they end up with the same old tired solutions that do little to help them. They are usually the ones saying, “Nothing is easy.” But it doesn’t have to be that way.

To break out of that rut, Mark Levy, author of Accidental Genius, suggests using freewriting to open your mind and explore ideas you might never come up with using traditional methods. You essentially approach a problem by writing as fast as you can about the topic or ideas that spring forth from that writing. You write constantly even if the writing turns to random thoughts. But you have to write fast enough that your internal editor doesn’t stop you. Let the ideas flow.

“With free writing you not only come up with new ideas, but you come up with the ability to share the information with other people in a way that they can follow what it is that you’re saying and can act on your words,” says Levy in his podcast interview, How to Solve Business Problems Using Freewriting. “Freewriting is probably the single most valuable productivity tool I’ve ever learned in my life.”

Not only will freewriting help you solve business problems, Levy says, but it can help you with writing blog posts and articles and with preparing for speaking engagements such as webinars.

Creating a great presentation for a webinar is just one aspect of running a successful webinar, writes Aaron Joslow in his article, Stop Producing Bad Webinars: 3 Tactics to Make Webinars Shine. You can create the best PowerPoint presentation in the world, but if you don’t deliver it well all will be for naught.

Speakers are “talking to attendees who, for the most part, are listening alone at their desks. While a webinar may have 50-200 attendees listening, the speaker is having 50-200 one-on-one conversations,” writes Joslow.

How do you get such speaking engagements? Vickie K. Sullivan says one avenue is social media, particularly organizers’ online efforts. In her article, How to Use Social Media to Generate Speaking Opportunities, Sullivan says there are many ways to participate in organizations to make yourself known. You can produce video samples of your speeches to share, interact with organizations in public social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and get involved in their private communities.

CPA firm Hughes Pittman & Gupton recognized the importance of social media networks and became an active participant on Twitter and LinkedIn. They use them to attract prospects and to maintain current client relationships. By going on the offense with  social media and other digital marketing tactics, it has been able to keep growing while many competitors have lost revenue and struggle to stay afloat.

“We’re cost-conscious, but we also believe that marketing means going on the offensive. We need to remind prospective clients about us and close that business. If these marketing efforts weren’t working for us, we would drop them,” says partner Brooks Malone in the case study, CPA Firm Goes on the Offense with Digital Marketing and Grows Business.

If you’re selling services to law firms, you must also go on the offensive, says Allan Colman.

“This market is uniquely idiosyncratic, resistant, and challenging, and it requires special insight, strategies, and training to successfully penetrate,” Colman writes in his article, Selling Services to Law Firms: Are You Up to the Challenge?

It is possible to break through, however. Colman says it requires making a concerted effort to understand their markets and challenges and to develop trust. And it means understanding the behaviors of lawyers and law firms, which are unique. Fail to do so, and you can destroy a relationship. But if you follow Colman’s strategies, you will as a result experience extraordinary professional reward.

Are you tracking down the right leads for your firm? (Photo by Borghetti)

Leads—they’re always important and good ones are often elusive. Professional services firms have a variety of strategies in their arsenal for generating them, but according to research from The Shattuck Group five are most preferred. In the podcast, Preferred Lead Generation Tactics for Professional Services, Randy Shattuck says email marketing rises to the top as the most preferred tactic, followed closely by thought leadership.

All of the techniques focus on pulling prospects and leads to you, Shattuck says. And to ensure you’re pulling the right people, you have to first identify them and target your efforts toward them. A general blanket email blast will not give you the results or the clients you want, stresses C.J. Hayden. “The universe is simply too big to market effectively to everyone in it,” she says in her article, Do You Know Who Your Clients Are?

When you choose a target market, you can get to know that market better, position yourself in the marketplace as a specialist, save money and time, and attract clients to you. When your client definition is too general, your client universe remains overly large and your efforts and message will be diffused.

Lack of focus is just one reason why salespeople fail, says Colleen Stanley in her article, Top 9 Reasons Why Salespeople Fail.

“A poor producer can work very hard. Lack of sales isn’t from lack of effort; it’s that the effort is focused on the wrong prospect, activity, and partnerships,” she says. “Top producers have clearly identified their ideal client and have built a strategy around meeting, influencing, and creating value for that specific client. They are very clear on to whom they will sell and what they will sell.”

Sales tools and client relationship management (CRM) go a long way toward helping salespeople focus their strategies. In fact, recent data from Aberdeen Group shows that firms that employ such sales tools sell significantly more. That’s because such technologies allows representatives to gather more information about their prospects and clients and gives them more ammunition to get the job done, according to Aberdeen’s report Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling.

Social Media Strategies

The Shattuck Group’s surveys did not name social media as one of the top five lead generation tactics, but several professional services firms are having success using it, including Shaev & Fleischman LLP. In Law Firm’s Blog Leads to More Clients and Coaching Opportunities, Gwen Moran writes about how Shaev & Fleischman gave up traditional high-priced marketing techniques and started writing a blog. That blog has evolved into a hub for bankruptcy advice and information that accounts for 70% of the firm’s business.

In addition, the social media success of the firm’s partner, Jay Fleischman, led to a new consulting practice. The great results the firm saw as the result of using social media tactics caused many other firms to ask how they, too, can succeed with it.

If Twitter is your social media channel of choice for marketing your firm or your expertise, there are a few rules you should follow, says Eric Rudolf in his article, Dos and Don’ts for Using Twitter to Grow Business. In this follow-up to his 5 Twitter Rules Firms Should Never Break, Eric Rudolf offer five more rules businesses should follow, including being cautious of what you tweet. Competitors are always watching, he warns.

Think creatively to break out of your rut (Photo by broterham)

Admit it. Sometimes you feel like you’re in a rut. You set goals for yourself and your firm, but they just seem tedious—more things to bog down your ever-increasing to-do list. If that’s the case, then you need to take a second look at your goals. As Jill Konrath writes in her article, Challenge Yourself: Why You Need to Set Big Goals, goals are meant to inspire you, not burden you.

To break out of that rut, challenge yourself. Set goals that seem unattainable, Konrath says. Doing so will help you to think creatively and grow your business faster than you thought possible.

One goal could be to double lead generation through social media marketing—Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Think it can’t be done? Think again. In his podcast interview—Social Media Marketing Better than SEO for Web Traffic—Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, talks about how in just six months the website has generated 100,000 visitors a month using primarily social media marketing.

You also shouldn’t think that those mediums are not for B2B firms. In fact, Stelzner points out those firms laid the foundation for social media marketing, especially consulting firms. And it’s still a very young medium, with the potential to grow much more.

Bylined articles and blog posts go a long way toward making your social media marketing a success. Your website or blog can the home base to which you direct people from Twitter and LinkedIn. But getting articles published in other publications can also help with business development, says David M. Freedman in his article, How to Leverage Bylined Articles for Business Development.

“A series of articles under your byline, published in respected periodicals, builds name recognition and shows that you are authoritative, credible, and reliable—exactly the kind of adviser your clients and prospects look for,” Freedman says.

Many businesses are seeing the benefits of social media and other pull marketing strategies and are spending accordingly. This week’s chart shows that spending on inbound marketing, which includes social media channels and blogs, is expected to rise. Of the 231 businesses surveyed, 51% expect to spend more on inbound marketing tactics.

A firm’s success also depends on whether it provides environments that allow staff to excel, according to Robert Croston, John Doerr, and Mike Schultz in their article, Strong Performance Environment Key to Firms’ Revenue Growth. You might develop challenging goals, but won’t come close to achieving them if you don’t provide an environment that enables people to meet them. If you want your people to become rainmakers and help grow revenue, give them the tools, resources, and environment that allow them to do so.

Trust—it’s what you want all prospects and clients to have in you. But it takes work to earn that trust. As Nancy Fox says in her article this week, 5 Ways to Win Business and Influence Decision Makers, you “gain influence and trust with business decision makers when [you] demonstrate that [you] understand them, their business, and the needs and wants of their business.” Start by identifying the real decision makers and then develop a relationship with them, paying attention to the client’s wants and needs.

Charles H. Green reinforces that thinking in his article, When You Fling Mud at Competitors, You Get Dirty, Too. You want to focus on your client, not your competitor. You may be tempted to point out what you do better than your competitor and point out your competitor’s flaws, but that doesn’t sit well with clients. They may think you care only about winning the sale and beating the competition, not about really helping them.

“Focusing on your client, not on your competitor, is the trustworthy thing to do,” Green says. “And when trust in businesses is declining, those who act in a trustworthy manner differentiate themselves. Isn’t that what you want?”

You also instill feelings of trust, as well as demonstrate understanding of clients, when you write and speak about issues important to them. By writing a blog, publishing articles, or speaking at events, you show prospects that you have the expertise they need. Getting to that level, however, also takes work, says author Tom Davenport in his podcast interview, So, You Want to Become a Thought Leader? But if you do it well and set yourself apart from others also trying to show their thought leadership, the benefits are enormous.

That thought leadership, combined with effective PR, will also help catch the eye of the media. And when you make a name for yourself in the media, you increase your trust factor even more. The easiest way to spread news about you and your firm is through press releases, says Paula Phelan in her article, PR Strategies That Get the Media to Notice You, but those press releases must be interesting. Even if you don’t have any “hard” news, you can get the media to take notice using service announcements, client case studies, and articles written by industry experts.

The Role of Social Networks

You can take your media connections a step further and develop relationships with writers and editors via social networks. Make them aware of your expertise and your willingness to talk to them about issues, and they will seek you out when they need analysis and quotes for stories.

It was social networking and online marketing that helped networking solutions company Juniper Networks increase its contact base and allowed the company to engage with potential customers, writes Stephanie Tilton in her case study, Networking Solutions Company Discovers the Power of Email and Social Networks.

“Juniper tapped into Web 2.0 technologies and social-media platforms, including YouTube, live chat, forums, and Twitter. By embedding ‘forward-to-a-friend’ mechanisms into its communications, Juniper made it easy for recipients to pass them on and for the company to measure activity. By the end of the campaign, nearly all emails ended up going viral. Plus, [they] could see how many contacts it had built up and how quickly they responded to various promotions.”

The company opened the channels to allow customers and advocates to communicate with them and share ideas and suggestions. In return, Juniper Networks created a web portal that includes online lab facilities, an online forum, webcasts, and education programs.

Further evidence that digital marketing channels are becoming a priority for marketers comes from Econsultancy and ExactTarget. A survey that they conducted shows 66% of B2B marketers will increase investments in digital marketing such as social media in 2010. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, is dropping considerably.

No matter what marketing tactic you employ, make sure you use it to show prospects and clients how you can help them. Avoid the sales pitches and being part of the “me-to” noise. You want people to trust you and to seek out more information from you—not run away from you.

Use your social network to spread the word about your events (CC BY-SA 2.0)

If you’re selling a complex service in a crowded industry niche, you know how challenging it can be to establish your firm. It’s doubly difficult when you’re the start-up in an established space.

That’s one reason this story about Avature is instructive. In 2004, this firm entered the crowded field of customer relationship management (CRM) technology and consulting and the company’s leadership was looking for a way to differentiate.

They already had a lot going for them: the founding team had previously launched and sold a successful jobs website. With their new company, the experienced team members wanted to position themselves as thought leaders in the CRM field. They did this by co-creating content with other industry leaders and then distributing it through free webinars, video, and slide presentations. What’s most interesting is the approach they took—combining social media and partnerships.

Here’s a snapshot of the Avature approach:

Find your audience: Avature started by identifying which social media networks would be most effective for spreading the word to their target audience. They listened to who was participating on these networks and what they were saying.

Find partners: They partnered with industry leaders (through existing relationships) to create compelling content. They didn’t want a thinly veiled sales pitch, so they created content around a timely topic (web 2.0 technologies) with recognized names (Pixar Animation Studios). They positioned the webinar events as two industry leaders speaking on an issue the target customer valued. In addition, they sought out very active participants on the social media networks they targeted to help spread the word and create buzz around their message.

Find the right platforms for social sharing: Avature kept its message available and circulating after the live event by posting the recorded event online. (They used the free Blip.tv to host the hour-long recorded event and posted the PowerPoint presentation that accompanied each event on SlideShare, another free service.)

The approach proved to be a success. In one six-month period Avature ran five webinars that attracted more than 200 people—with more than three times that number viewing the recordings and presentations online following the live events. Beyond being a thought-leadership platform for the company, each webinar generated a minimum of 10 qualified leads for the company’s software, and of those, 20% turned into sales. In addition, new business from referrals increased by more than 50% in the three months following the webinars—with many non-customer referrals from people who referred business to Avature based on what they had heard about the company.

“You have to think about your messages as something someone is going to want to read. They want to be educated, and the message needs to tie back to your product or service.” says Michael Johnson, director of sales. “We weren’t interested in just saying, ‘Here’s what our product or service is.’ That would die on the vine and not get very viral.”

Has your business used webinars in your content mix? What kind of results did you see?