It’s All About the Conversations

After reading an insightful article about social media by my friend Jim Keenan, I started thinking about the way a lot of businesses and individuals are using social media.  Is it just me, or do the majority of users seem to think that social media sites are just free advertising space?  I see it every day, and I’m sure you do, too: the thinly veiled ads, the blatant pitches, the sales copy in “Free Report” clothing.  It’s got to the point where my Twitter stream is so clogged up by spammers, I’m having trouble staying one step ahead of them.  I wonder how the folks with 20,000+ followers do it!

So here’s the thing:  I want to challenge everyone involved in using social media in their business to remember the key word (and no, it’s not media…guess again).  This is supposed to be social. In other words, it should be about conversations.  Instead of worrying about how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers you have, you should be thinking about how many of them you’re interacting with.  This was brought to light recently at one of the companies I work with.

The company has two teams of of people in charge of using social media sites to connect with potential customers.  Team #1 took a “scorched earth” approach and started slamming their pre-packaged message out to as many people as they could and directing them back to the company’s website, relying on the site to make the sale.  Team #2 took a more deliberate approach of engaging prospects in conversations and walking them through the buying process.

Can you guess what the results were?  I probably don’t need to tell you that, after on week, Team #1 had contacted 500 prospects with zero conversions and Team #2 made far fewer contacts (about 60) with a 10% conversion, and the results are still trickling in from Team #2′s activity as they follow-up on their initial contacts.

I know we all want to chant the mantra that “sales is a numbers game”, and to some extent that’s true; it’s just that we’re usually focusing on the wrong numbers.  Instead of obsessing about how many cold calls you can make in a week, why not focus instead on how many new conversations you can start with prospects in a week.

A friend of mine said it best when he said, “You can’t sit at your desk and answer calls and make a lot of money until you’ve knocked on at least a thousand doors.  And if you’ve knocked on a thousand doors but nobody ever answered, those doors don’t count.”  In other words, it makes no difference how many calls you make a day unless at least some of those calls turn into meaningful conversations with your prospects.  It also means that, no matter how many people follow you on Twitter, if you never say anything meaningful to them, they don’t count either.