Episode #162 Selling Yourself Before You Meet The Client

I have been recruiting new staff over these last few months. One of the younger candidates breezily told me during the interview, “I checked you out on social media”. This is the modern age, where everything about us is available only a few mouse clicks away. This “checking you out” phenomenon has been around for some time and the frequency only increases. My LinkedIn profile tells me that twenty three thousand people are following me, around a thousand people are looking at my profile and that around two thousand people are searching for me. That is a lot of scrutiny and unthinkable ten years ago. As salespeople we are being “checked out” before we even meet the client, but what will they find?

I was not active on social media until I heard sales training guru Jeffrey Gitomer speak at our Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego in 2011. He was speaking about his 40,000 followers on Twitter, challenging us about how many followers we had and stressing the importance of social media. I had been cautious about this social media thing and had avoided opening accounts. After the Convention I opened up accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From the very start I only posted business related content. You won’t find photos of me in straw hat, with an exotic drink in my hand, as I sit around the pool, basking under a friendly sun in some tropical clime. It is all business and there are over one thousand eight hundred blogs on my social media. This is no accident.

Coming late to the party proved to be fortuitous, as I found many of my American friends who got on to Facebook while they were at college, had content on there they didn’t want to share with potential clients. This is the point. Clients look at our social media to “check us out” before we have that first business meeting. We may have connected at a networking event, followed up with them and wrangled a date and time to meet. Before we do that they are looking at our social media to get an idea about who we are. So in your case what are they going to find?

When they Google you, what comes up? Is it random stuff or is it content within your control? I suggest it should be content in your control. What would that be? Content marketing is a broad based term for putting your wares up for free on social media, to demonstrate you provide value. As salespeople we should be clinical in looking at what we put out there.

We can write articles, now known by what I think is a most unattractive term “blogs”. We can write about issues in the industry or the market and how to fix those. We absolutely should steer clear of anything that sounds like propaganda for our company, product or service. The first blatant hint of gross self-promotion and you have lost your audience. These blogs may be suitable for publication in industry or business related magazines. The editors are always looking for high quality, free content.

Those blogs can be read into a microphone, recorded, spiced up with some music, edited and turned into podcasts like this one. Some people prefer to multi task and walk the dog, run around the streets or go to the gym and simultaneously educate themselves by taking in good podcast content. These same blogs can be delivered in front of a camera and now you have video content for YouTube. It might be a simple affair on your phone live streaming, or recorded for later editing to spruce it up or you might have some high quality gear involved, including teleprompters.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a total legend of self promotion, but is verging on illiteracy. He knows he cannot write, he hardly reads anything except for social media posts, so he uses video as his main means of message delivery. He strips out the audio for podcasts and the content for transcripts to become text posts. If you don’t like writing and you can talk and most salespeople can certainly talk, then this may be a way to create content that will impress potential clients.

The point is to control what clients will see by getting your best foot forward. Provide credibility through the value of your knowledge, relevant for buyers. I release five podcasts a week now and have two television shows on YouTube. On August 8th this year Google announced they are using AI to enable them to do voice search, in addition to text search. If you haven’t created voice assets like podcasts or video sound tracks, you will be missing out on the opportunity to be found by clients.

You will be looked at and checked out, that is a certainty. What is less certain is what the client will find. Choose to impress potential clients by cramming your social media full of content that make you look like a legitimate expert in your field. Build credibility before the sales meeting. We all understand the client mantra of ‘know, like and trust” can be amplified so powerfully through social media. Make it happen.