Finding Balance in Sales

“Lesson not just karate only. Lesson for whole life. Whole life has a balance. Everything be better.” - Mr. Myagi, Karate Kid. That's one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies. There's nothing more satisfying or stable than having balance in any given situation. Sales is no different. We're asked to maintain a certain number of metrics to meet goals and use social selling to help meet those goals. But it's not always best to treat prospects on LinkedIn as just prospects you're going to begging for meetings. These connections require conversations and discussions. It's about building relationships with these people.

This is completely contradictory to what sales people are taught when it comes to picking up the phone and dialing for meetings. There's nothing strategic about it. Just call people. It's a numbers game right? But what if the ball game is moving over here to a more social selling atmosphere? How can sales people balance the demands of meeting their numbers but spend the necessary time to engage in fruitful relationships on sites like LinkedIn in a no pressure environment with potential customers? In essence, we have to do both now. The traditional ways of selling aren't going away. You'll still need your lists, your messaging and your outbound tactics. Building your brand on LinkedIn is more long-term and won't happen over night. You still need to strike the right balance with traditional phone work and LinkedIn prospecting.

I sat in on a webinar today about LinkedIn prospecting and the top two issues that people fall into are messaging and consistency. Messaging can be a challenge but when you look at it from the standpoint of, "hey, I'm just trying to develop a relationship with this person and the issue we uncover from their business will naturally come out as we're talking", it's a lot easier to get a meeting. There's no need to force feed a meeting on LinkedIn when you just met someone with that approach. That's like walking up to someone at a work event and giving them your pitch right away...awkward. These are people. Just be you. It's sounds so simple in 2022, but apparently some of us haven't gotten the memo yet. Myself included sometimes. We need to remind ourselves of this.

Traditional outreach isn't dead, we still need to take part in those phone and email activities everyday. But balancing this out with social outreach is starting to become more of a theme and not just something sales reps do every once in a while. It requires time and nurturing to build those relationships the right way. And when it's time to solve their problem, guess who that Linked connection is going to look towards to solve it because you took the time to get to know them?

Don't be afraid of pushing content out on LinkedIn to grow your brand - great content, good content, it doesn't matter. Just put stuff out there that people will read that you'll get views on. Don't worry about the "Likes, "shares" and "comments" - those will come. Your focus in the beginning should be on providing content that you think will help people. Then let everything else fall into place. Balance out this approach with your traditional outreach and you just may have something.