530: Increasing Revenue With Social Selling | Jamie Shanks

Social selling is a technique that salespeople use to engage with interested buyers. And while it involves personal branding, social listening, and interactions via social networking platforms, it could also be online and offline.

Jamie Shanks, CEO of Pipeline Signals, a Relationship Signal Intelligence Monitoring, which monitors Competitive Intelligence, compelling events like job changes, and a list of Accounts for Relationship connections, joins us this week on the Conquer Local Podcast to explore social selling.

Jamie is a world-leading social selling expert who builds global learning communities that help customers scale their businesses and is the author of SPEAR Selling (2019) and Social Selling Mastery (2016), and chats with us about helping revenue teams succeed.

For over ten years, Jamie ran Sales for Life – the world’s largest Social Selling training program for mid-market and enterprise companies. Sales for Life trained over 250,000 sales and marketing professionals in many industries. Jamie’s workshops have been delivered across 6 continents, for brands such as Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Oracle, American Airlines, and Intel.

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Introduction

George: This is the Conquer Local podcast, a show about billion-dollar sales leaders. Marketers leading local economic growth and entrepreneurs that have created their dream organizations. They wanna share their secrets, giving you the distilled version of their extraordinary feats. Our hope is with the tangible takeaways from each episode, you can rewire, rework and reimagine your business. I’m George Leith, and on this episode, we welcome Jamie shanks. Jamie is the CEO of Pipeline Signals and Sales for Life. He’s a world-leading social selling expert, responsible for pioneering the space. Jamie is also the author of “SPEAR Selling: The ultimate Account-based Sales guide for the modern, digital sales professional” He builds global learning communities that help his customers scale their businesses. And for the last 10 years, he’s dedicated himself to scaling his first community, Sales for Life. Over the amazing 10-year career that Jamie has had, he’s evolved the Sales for Life community from social selling to modern digital selling, to attacking the most pervasive problem in sales head-on, sales generated pipeline at scale. Get ready, conquerors. Jamie Shanks is coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local podcast.

George: Conquer Local podcast, Jamie Shanks, joining us from beautiful Downtown Toronto. Downtown Toronto, today?

Jamie: No, I’m in the suburbs, but there’s nothing beautiful about Downtown Toronto.

George: I like looking out of a hotel room in the odd times, seeing the CN Tower. Jamie, thanks for joining us. Did you bring your SPEAR?

Jamie: I did.

George: I was bragging it up before the commercial break that Jamie was gonna bring a SPEAR. Excited to have you join us on the show. I wanna get right into this SPEAR component because it is the theme of one of your books. So let’s talk about SPEAR selling. Break it down for us. Let’s get that outta the way.

Jamie: Yeah, so the easiest way to think about it. First, I pioneered and invented this topic, social selling. And when I wrote the first book, “Social Selling Mastery,” it was over indexed to inbound marketing. Like drawing people into you personally. And our customers had us reverse engineer the IP to turn it into something that was for outbound account-based sales development. So the easiest way to think about this is an acronym that is a process that you take to prospect outbound, and that acronym stands for select and prioritize accounts. Then plan them, engage them, activate those accounts. And then as you create momentum and action and outcomes within your total addressable market, reprioritize that total adjustable market.

George: Yeah, and I think that that’s an interesting lens that you have on this because that’s why I wanted to get it outta the way first, the reverse engineer because I think social selling, I get a lot of people reaching out, going, “Show me how social selling works.” And I’m like, “You should have been on this five or six years ago.” It’s really done differently today, the way to interact with the prospect and the SPEAR acronym really captures it.

Jamie: Yeah, I mean, ultimately, if you look at small businesses, the original thesis that I had in social selling mastery and my first batch of customers were smaller businesses where they could create a lot of content, share ideas online and draw people inbound. But now if you’re Thomson Reuters or if you’re Rogers Communications filming here in Canada, as a seller, you have a very defined territory. You don’t care about 50 accounts. And at the end of the day, your marketing team is not providing you with enough air cover to give you enough inbound leads. So you need to take onus on yourself to develop a market and prospect that market. And if you don’t have a defined process, hope and pray is not going to get you to your quota. So you will need to use a process every day, every week, every month, that inches towards the decision-making of selection to actual engagement, to actual pipeline creation.

George: I remember in my early days of selling, and as you can tell, my early days of selling was a long time ago. And I met this guy and he was an insurance salesman and he’d always go for breakfast and at the same restaurant. It was called Coffee Row, which, you’re originally from Western Canada. So, that’s the thing in small-town Western Canada. But I used to ask him, I’m like, “Well, why do you come here for coffee every morning?” And he’s like, “Moving salesperson attracts business.” And the idea was that was social selling. It was him getting out in the community, meeting people at a chamber of commerce meeting or something like that. I’d like to get your concept on how do you land in a community online. Like in social selling online, how do you just parachute into a community and start to build out a network inside a brand new Virgin territory?

Jamie: And this might seem euphoric, but everything is like a Pareto’s law. 80% is this, and 20% is that. I can’t stress enough that 80% is just the inertia of getting going and actually sharing your ideas with that community. So let me make this tangible on how I started. I started 12 years ago serving the sales community. I was a peon of nothing. Nobody. Anywhere in Toronto, let alone the United States or the world knew who I was. So I first built a list of the most influential sales leaders in mostly the United States. So I went on to Twitter and I just did influencer searching. And I built that list. Then what I did is on Twitter and mostly LinkedIn, I would read the content that they were sharing. I would then not like it because that does nothing. I would post comments on their content. Now, all of a sudden, this is called Operation Land Grab. And so Operation Land Grab means you have a community, I don’t. So if you think about how Western Canada was founded, you rode off into the Western sun, and you planted flags into land you did not own. And so the same concept is here. I take a high proficient sales leader. I make comments. Their pipeline starts to notice me commenting all the time. Like who is this guy? They comment back, they connect with me. I bring them into my funnel. And one by one, I first used other people’s land as a means. And let’s face it. In the 21st century, in 2022, I’m doing this with podcasts. You have a community, I don’t. I am in your land, drawing people back to my community. I first start that way and then I create my own community. So every day, every week, I would make a video, I would write an article and I would share it on LinkedIn. And that ended up building us a subscriber database of six figures, 100, 150,000 sales leaders around the world. I have 20,000 followers on LinkedIn. And that began with one. I wasn’t even on LinkedIn in 2008, 2009. So it just began this way.

George: Thank you for that because I think it’s important to lay out that framework for people. I also think people just think that leads will fall from the heavens the minute that you start doing it. So how do you overcome that period where you’re producing this content, and a lot of times, and I’ve been through this too, a lot of times, it’s crickets. You don’t hear anything from the community. And then all of a sudden, things start happening. How do you bridge that gap? Or how long was your gap where you’re, I’m doing all this content. Where’s the money?

Jamie: Unfortunately, it is not a short order that is going to solve this. This is not a 90-day timeframe. Have you ever seen the wealth creation of Warren Buffett? So on his 30th birthday, he was worth something like $10 million. By his 70th birthday, he wasn’t even yet a billionaire. But his wealth from 70 to 80 and 80 to 90 would compound like a billion dollars a year. The reason I’m telling you this is if you started today, you will, and so this becomes a mindset shift. You will be frustrated that you have 37 followers in three months. I’ll give you an example. I started a second company one year ago basically today. And our web traffic went from one to two to now, it’s only in the hundreds and I sit there like, it’s been a year. And I went from only zero to a few hundred people per week. I’ll look at this one year from now, and that’ll be a thousand. I’ll look at this five years from now, and that’ll be in tens of thousands because it’s compounded interest. You have to understand, what is the best time to plant the tree? It was 20 years ago and the second best time was today. If you don’t do this today, you are actually serving your 2023 year and your 2024 year. And I know as sellers, that’s hard to understand because some of us take it as a job, not as a career or revocation, but if you want to be in sales three years from now, the seeds you plant today, it will make your life so easy in the future.

George: Well, as luck would have it, I have a real-world story from yesterday, where I was meeting with a potential customer and the social seeds that we have been sewing over the last six years led to that 2 1/2 hour meeting and led to the booking of another meeting with the entire leadership team a week from yesterday, where we’re gonna get six to eight hours to do true discovery if we can move forward. And we’re not talking about small organizations, but the individual that I was meeting with was actually quoting social proof that we had put online over the last couple of years and consumed that information. So now, what advice would you have for marketing teams that plant these seeds and nothing pops outta the ground for a long time, and they have to justify the investment that they’re putting in. Like, we’ve got the individual investment that we make, if you and I are building social, we just have to say, yeah, you gotta discipline yourself to spend an hour a week building content or whatever it might be, but we’ve got entire organizations with huge marketing teams and content teams out there that are trying to justify why those seeds haven’t bore any fruit yet. how do they get around that? And how do you articulate the value while you’re waiting for the Oak tree to grow outta the acorn?

Jamie: I think there’s two things that marketing need to do as a step backwards. You’ve all heard the term sales and marketing alignment. I actually think it’s sales and marketing integration, in which you’re basically called team revenue. At the end of the day, if you do not have a symbiotic approach to what we’re doing from air cover, that’s going to land to ground cover and drive results, don’t tell me how many people you put into the funnel or MQLs, which are most of the time, useless, because they’re far too early to move forward. You have to come together and say to part two. We are not going to beholden to the same sort of ridiculous measurements that the rest of our industry might think we should. What we need to do is say to ourselves, okay, marketing is going to influence and attribute many things and let’s stop calling one thing an inbound lead, and one thing came from this webinar, and one thing came from that. A. the buying committee is too many different people. And two, people are learning five or 10 different ways triangulating, and then deciding to move forward. So everything is an influence and attribution. And your investment in marketing is a form of warming up a percentage of that knowledge that a customer is accumulating to make an informed decision. So I believe that if marketing continues to say, well, you asked for 10,000 leads and I gave you 10,000 leads. You will continue to spin the same problems. But if we all say to ourselves, we, as an organization, we need to create five real sales, qualified leads this month. Let’s work completely as a unit, let’s try five different things. And lets as a unit, come up with those five. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who got them, how we got them. And then from there, we’ll try to reverse the engineer at how do we get to six and how do we get to seven? I think, honestly, if you do it any other way, you are just going to have that disconnect and that argument between sales and marketing. This doesn’t work.

George: The one thing that I really like asking a prospect that becomes a customer is what was your journey to arrive here at us having a commercial relationship? And I find that it really helps to understand, and it helps you to be able to say that was a good move that we made maybe three years ago, or that was a good move two years ago. Have you tried that approach? Is that something that you take a look at? Because I’ve looked through all of your material in your bio. I’ve had a look through the books that you’ve read, and it seems like you’re very interested in the process and the journey that prospect might have went through.

Jamie: I think that that’s basically, without being a prognosticator, I believe that’s probably going to be the remainder of my career, and it has a bit of a backstory. I worked at Bank of Montreal Nesbitt Burns. I wanted to be a stockbroker. And then I was there for the 2000, 2001 crash. And I thought stockbrokers were stock pickers, not salespeople. And so I saw the implosion that happened there. And I left, moved to Australia, and did my master’s degree. When I came back, no one would hire me. It took me a year to find a job. The only company that would hire me was a 100% commission, a corporate real estate job. And it was sales. And I had to call CFOs and presidents of companies all day long talking about leasing. And it turned out I was good at it. I was really good at it. And so I saw the struggle of 30, 40, 50 other brokers in my office who just selling was very programmatic to me. Sorry, prospecting was very programmatic to me, but not to others. And as I grew up into that firm, and then I joined a technology company, I was the third employee grew to VP of sales. And we took it this company to profitability. I realized I had a knack for this. And so I have dedicated my whole life to teaching people that selling can be both a balance of sales, sorry – a balance of art and science, but I’m going to give everything I can, every piece of knowledge, I’m gonna pay it forward. And paying it forward came first as a training company. And now, as a technology company, I hope that answers your question, but-

George: No, it absolutely.

Jamie: Career has been set forward to serving. And this is an important learning for anyone say that was 22. I have dedicated myself to one ideal customer profile to one set of problems. And so that’s created immense domain knowledge. One thing that I see some people struggle is they attack from HR world to finance world, to engineering world and the switching costs, they don’t ever become true experts to a vertical or an industry.

George: Why I wanted to get that information from you is I’m setting this up for the new business because pipeline signals in the very name of the company, is that you’re looking at the pipeline, looking for the signals. And I find that to be one of the secret components of social selling is you’re looking for the signals that are coming from your audience. Let’s discover this. So 2016, you release social selling mastery. And then in 2019, you come up with this concept of SPEAR selling, and what I’m reading between the lines and you kind of said it out of the preamble was, it’s an evolution. But when sellers decide to start using social selling, don’t they start in that 2016 world where it’s like, okay, I’ll start posting a little bit. I’ll share some content, I’ll start to build up my audience. And then they get to a point where they have to adopt some higher-level skills. Am I missing the boat there?

Jamie: Correct. And in fact, at Sales for Life, we designed the curriculum that way. So a seller would go through social selling mastery training first, then they would go through SPEAR selling, and then afterwards, they graduate to us doing it for them with Pipeline Signals. And of course, now we have a multitude of companies coming just directly to Pipeline Signals who are saying, I don’t need to be enabled. I want a managed service or SaaS software. Do it for me. And tell me when somebody leaves my customer base and goes into a prospect and give me the answers to the test. And that’s how Pipeline Signals was birthed, without humble bragging, we enabled 600 global customers and a quarter million sellers at Sales for Life over 10 years. And these sellers would put in the support tickets. It’s awesome what you’re teaching me, but can you just do this for me? And it wasn’t until COVID hit that took me off of an airplane. I was on 80 flights a year for five years in a row. And bought half my life back. So now I’m in my Toronto office going, oh my God, I have this opportunity to start this second company.

George: I find that one of the benefits of companies that are getting good at social selling is that the leads are better. And I love the line that you said earlier around marketing’s job is to drive air cover. As sales professionals, we need all the air cover. We can get we’re in a knockdown drag-out war out there on the street. And by the way, it’s gonna get worse in the next couple of years as we go through some economic headwinds. So, this whole concept of anything that we can do to help us as salespeople. I think, correct me if I’m wrong, in the evolution of your organization, these sellers got better. And they’re like, I don’t wanna invest my time over here in doing this work. I now just wanna talk to more qualified prospects. Is that part of the evolution?

Jamie: The evolution – Well is a force and function of time management. So if you look at a seller, the biggest time vampire that they have is account selection and account prioritization. So imagine you live in Saskatchewan. And Saskatchewan’s your total addressable market as an example. Well, what are you gonna call through the phone book, A through Z of every company in Saskatchewan? No. What you’re going to do is focus in on accounts that are deploying compelling events, triggers, and signals. And so one of the best ways to start, you wanna start in a new market, reverse engineer your happy customers. Who’s left a happy customer, went into a prospect that meets your ideal customer profile, call them first. So it’s pretty natural, but at scale, our customers have 2,500 customers and 5,000 prospects. So one or a series of sellers can’t do all the correlation. So we do the correlating and we do the routing. And then we enable the sellers to understand who you’re calling is a past customer from a year ago. You’ve got a warm fan here, have at it.

George: I find that the social sellers, the new social sellers, all those Vendastians that listen to the show, I’m talking to you. The people that have just discovered social selling. When you pick up a prospect that they have worked through social selling, and then started to have conversations with and started to do some discovery, they are 1,000 times better than a prospect that didn’t come through some sort of a social selling component. And it makes sense because they’re getting that air covered. They’re getting that content. They’re learning more and they’re more qualified at the end of the day. So if that’s the case and I see you nodding, and this isn’t a video podcast. So I’ll just say, Jamie’s nodding right now. If that is the case, and we know that that’s the case, and you’ve sold a ton of books and you’ve got all these customers that you’re working with, why the hell don’t more salespeople understand the power of social selling.

Jamie: They may understand it, but it is Pareto’s law as to what a seller is willing to do to improve themselves, to do something about it. And you could use any sport that I’m a massive downhill skier and a competitive water skier. I’ll use water skiing. This weekend coming up, I’m in a national qualifying competition as an old man in a competitive water ski sporter, I have to go through the inertia and pain of practicing and training and paying money and signing up for these tournaments. I have made this conscious effort. There are lots of people that are happy being a cottage skier one Saturday, twice a year kind of thing. And it is first, after being around so many sellers, I’ve come to recognize that there is those that have an innate initiative and drive for change and growth. And then those that wanna mail in every day. They wanna go through the motion. I mean, there is enough process tools out there to make sellers so much more effective, more yields per seller that they just don’t take advantage of. And I see it with, if anyone listening, who runs revenue operations or sales operations, these organizations will spend so much money on tools and technologies to enable their sales force. And most of those tools and technologies end up being shelfware. The sellers just don’t use them. They revert back to their old world. And so I wish there was this magic way to either test people properly, for willingness to change, or to get people to actually change it. As a training company, we will pass on knowledge. There will be skills that are absorbed. But it will be a curve. And Gartner actually measures it. 20% will adopt, 50% will change somewhat and 30% doesn’t matter what you tell them. They’re like a roadblock.

George: No, a couple of weeks ago, I was at a conference listening to some of our friends over at the Alexander Group that work with sales organizations all over the world. And they were talking about performance management around components of this. We’re seeing top organizations that if sellers are not going to adopt social selling, it’s like, it’s part of the job description. They’re even testing for it when they’re hiring and they’re like, show me your social profiles, show me how involved you are. What’s some advice that you could give organizations that are trying to adopt this and keep in mind our audiences, large sales organizations and sales leaders and individual sellers, because that individual seller looking for a job, part of that resume better be you’ve got great, robust online social profiles because I wouldn’t hire anybody that isn’t involved in that moving forward.

Jamie: I have rarely seen a company build a strong, effective internal social selling program in-house. So the best organizations and you’re talking about serving the global enterprise. That’s my whole life. Global enterprise, global nude market. They all outsourced this function. They brought in experts to help them. And then those experts either licensed the IP for the sellers to run with, or they used components of it and then built their own core IP. It’s gonna have to start there. And as a seller, you’re going to have to start becoming very comfortable. Using tools like LinkedIn and video tools like Vidyard video. Every day, as part of the job description, it needs to be open on your desktop, akin to your emails and Salesforce or HubSpot. Every day, and if it’s not part of your daily routine, you’ll never get there.

George: I’m excited that sales enablement is growing as a function inside organizations because I have found over the years that when you go talk to the sales enablement team, it’s just a bunch of people that couldn’t meet quota. And they were good people though. So they moved them over into sales enablement because they understood the organization,

Jamie: Manager.

George: Yeah. But it’s good to see that it’s becoming a function. And the other one is rev ops. That rev ops is becoming a function. I’ve said on this show over the last few years, when I get fired and I have to do this all over again, I’m gonna hire a rev ops leader first. That’s gonna be my very first hire because building the pipes and roads after the fact, it just doesn’t work out. It’s a hell of a lot longer way to get to the goal. Jamie, I’m sure you and I could have conversations for hours around this, but I always like to have our guests just have one, give our listeners one thing. Like they’re out there that listening to the show, they’re running down the street. What’s one thing that they could do tomorrow in your opinion, that would help them become better at this function and this part of the job?

Jamie: And I’ll talk to an individual contributor. The first thing that I would do, would walk into the office with your customer success team and say, give me the names of our top five best customers. I would grab a sheet of paper. I would write down the names of those companies and draw a circle around them with spiderwebs coming off of them. And I would look at that customer. So I’m drinking a YETI water bottle right now. I would take YETI, put it in the center of a sheet of paper, circle it, put spiderwebs around it and ask myself a fundamental question. Who cares about that story? I would then use a tool like LinkedIn to reverse engineer people that left YETI that went somewhere or are interconnected to the key stakeholders that we work with at YETI, like who do they know? And I would be talking to those people and telling the YETI story. That’s called the sphere of influence. I scaled Sales for Life from zero customers to 600. Every time we drew that map, we reverse-engineered it, we called those people. It was a simple scaling exercise. You can do it yourself as a seller.

George: Jamie Shank, CEO at Sales for Life and new CEO. Thank you for telling us that story about Pipeline Signals and how you’ve been growing that over the past year. Two great books, “Social Selling Mastery” and “SPEAR Selling.” Thanks for sharing all those knowledge bombs with us today here on the Conquer Local podcast.

Jamie: Thank you.

Conclusion

George: Love all those takeaways from Jamie today. It’s basically like a master’s class in how you could put social selling into your day-to-day activities or into your sales organization. Listen, be nice to our friends from marketing. They can only provide you with so many leads. And as the salesperson, you gotta be creating and building out your own pipeline like that. We’ve been talking about that for years in this show and it’s great to hear from Jamie. In fact, I’m hearing from some sales leaders that you need to be creating 30% of your own pipeline through your activities. Now, the easiest way to do that is just do a great job with your customers. And then they’ll refer you amazing leads. But you’ve gotta tell that story. And that’s what social selling is all about. Taking those organic moments and getting them out into your audience, but then how do we build an audience? So that’s another component that Jamie talked a lot about today, and we’re gonna get to that in just a moment here, where he left us with some components around how to build out that audience.

Now, a couple of things for marketing teams. We not only need sales and marketing alignment, they just need to be the same thing. It basically is team revenue. Because the minute that you have a marketing team and you’ve got a sales team over here and they’re not aligned, then the name game comes in. Marketing’s doing arts and crafts and salespeople are out just having steak dinners and not doing their job. You just don’t want that. You wanna have the two teams together and the street needs to dictate to marketing what they’re hearing and what’s working and what’s not. And asking that question, I think is really important. I learned a number of years ago. You’re walking out the door. You get your hand on the doorknob, you’re leaving the customer. You’re excited because you got the contract. You can’t wait to get to the car, to ring the bell or get back to the office, to ring the bell, or leave the phone call to ring the bell. But just what about asking this one question? How did you find out about us? We had a really great conversation today. There’s a really good fit between our two organizations. What was the thing that brought you into our world? And then they’ll give it to you. You’ve built the rapport, you’ve been working with the prospect, you brought them through the customer journey, you navigated the tour. And just asking that one question. Now, you have some insights to go back and say, let’s double down on that thing. Because it worked to get us this ideal customer profile. That’s just one little thing that you can do to give marketing some feedback on all the great work that they did. And Jamie mentioned it, it’s called air cover for a reason. You’re gonna be way more effective doing your ground troop work if you’ve got some great air cover telling your story when you go into battle working with your leads.

Now, the other thing is we need to take the work that marketing is doing and use it. What I find when I’m working with organizations is there’s that tension. Marketing builds great content, sales doesn’t use it. One thing that you could do, salespeople, is take that great piece of content, that marketing purpose last week and share it to your network online. But the answer that I usually get from sellers, I only have eight people online. I only have eight people in my audience. Okay, well, that’s a bigger story. We need to build your audience. But imagine if you took that story and sent it in an individual email to those eight people. Not very efficient, is it? But if you take it and put it onto your social media profile, guess what happens? You start to get more shares and likes and you start to build that audience. So it really is chicken and egg. You need to have the content to get the audience. And then when you have the audience, they expect the content on a regular basis. So you have to make a commitment. And Jamie talked a lot about making that commitment, that you’re going to get the content or develop the content or take the content you’re being given by marketing and share it out. And you’ll get two followers and you’ll get two likes and then you’ll get five and then you’ll get 10, and then you’ll get 100. And next thing you know, five years from now, you’ve got a podcast with 250 episodes. But it doesn’t happen overnight. And you need the discipline to keep doing the work. So I can’t stress this enough. You’re probably not gonna get hired if you don’t have social selling in the coming years. I’m telling you right now, when we look at a new hire and they don’t engage in social selling, they probably go to the bottom of the list. And we’re finding more and more organizations are catching onto this. That social selling is the way that you can help salespeople build a bigger pipeline. It really is that simple, but we have to commit. We’ve gotta get in there. We gotta play the game. We gotta commit and put our time in.

There is that period of silence when there isn’t engagement and is it 90 days? Is it 120 days? Is it six months? Just expect it. It’s like ghosting. You’ve heard me on this show go, oh, a salesperson’s like, oh my God, five leads today ghosted me. But what did you expect to happen? You are in sales. You’re not shooting fish in a barrel for a living. In sales, you’re going to have a calendar. You’re gonna put people in your calendar. Some people are gonna ghost you. Same thing here. I’m gonna produce content and I’m not gonna get an instant dopamine hit. You’re not Kim Kardashian. So you put the content online and eventually, it’ll start to get picked up. You gotta commit. And there’s gonna be some silence for some time. And thanks, Jamie for validating that.

Now, what we call the golden nugget. And Jamie dropped that at the very end. How do I do something right now to start to build out my social audience and my sphere of influence? And he talked about the spiderweb. Think about every contact you have of a spiderweb and the number of webs that are out there are the number of people that they have for followers. When Jamie talked about how he built his business, he didn’t say, yeah, I picked this 62 mediocre sales influencers that I found online. No, I picked the 10 best. And I went in and started mining their audience. And that’s how it’s done. It’s a beautiful thing about social. I can enter into a community. I can build my own community. I can connect with other people that have a community. I can start to share my content, my thoughts, and my ideas. And I start to drag those audience members over to me. And that’s how I built my online social audience over the years as well. It’s almost theft when you think about it. It’s not theft. It’s providing value to an audience that finds value in that content, and then they become yours. So some people are like, oh, you’re stealing my leads. No, you’re not. It’s online. It’s open. Anybody can access it. That’s the exciting thing about it. And it doesn’t, by the way, if I do it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do this stuff because the last thing somebody would do when they describe George Leith is say, rocket scientist. What it is is it’s having some discipline. And it’s believing that you have quality content to share with your audience. Those are a couple of components, but I love that analogy of the spiderweb. every person in your sphere of influence has a network. And by utilizing social and utilizing some of the things from Jamie’s SPEAR analogy, it’ll help you take advantage of this social selling methodology.

If you like Jamie’s episode, let’s continue the conversation. Check out these episodes around social selling. 441. Less is more when it comes to your social media strategy with Krista Neher. Or check out the amazing two-part series with Viveka von Rosen. 417 and 418 on becoming a LinkedIn expert. She is a great guest. Lots of energy there with Viveka. Please subscribe and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And thanks for joining us this week on the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.