"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." - Stephen Covey
There's never enough time in the day as a sales executive. You carry a significant number and you're looking to exceed quota. I know what you're thinking, when will you make the time to dominate social media while keeping everything else in the balance. ?You can schedule tweets, you can automate some of this but you still need an authentic strategy to navigate all of your responsibilities. At the end of the day, you've got to stay focused on the twenty percent of the opportunities that will drive eighty percent of revenue growth. This translates to actions, the percentage that will create eighty percent of the impact.
But how do you choose? ??The analogy of rocks and sand comes to mind and I learned this from Dr. Stephen R. Covey in First Things First. Each day when you get to your desk, don't even open your e-mail. Write down the top three things you need to accomplish by lunch on a pad and execute on those in the optimal sequence. These are the big rocks to fit into the jar of your life. These are the proactive lead measures you can affect to lever the Sisyphean boulder of your day up the proverbial hill.
The sand are the reactive prospect e-mails, the training video you had starred to watch, those social media notifications, the news of the day, sports scores, etc. What's important is that you take the time to clearly define what the rocks and sand are for you. If you put the sand into the jar first, you'll never fit the stuff that matters into your schedule - the rocks. You'll struggle just to play catch up.
Social media is just one tool in your arsenal. It's very powerful when you leverage batch processing. Utilize a social listening platform to track your greatest prospects in target companies first. Prioritize them. Prioritize everything. Companies like Avention, InsideView and Nimble can help you do this.
Watch what's trending with CXOs and take the time to comment on it. First listen to the stream and pick out the people with whom you'd like to engage. Then make it meaningful. Ten touches trumps one hundred when you make them count. ?Setting Google Alerts or a daily LinkedIn digest of group activity can give you an edge to find the signal in the noise. Batch process by having the discipline to take just thirty minutes when you wake up and thirty minutes before bed on this exercise. You'd be amazed how far you can get with a concerted mono-tasking effort on the target. The secret is scheduling time just like you would with cold calling and don't forget to still do that too. Yes, it can be a rock or sand. The choice is yours based on the due diligence and time you put in to picking the right targets.
LinkedIn Navigator is a watershed moment for front-line sales managers and sales people alike. It allows us to passively listen to just the targets we wish to pursue and then engage at the precise right moment. It allows us to receive a blended digest of these updates without needing to glue our eyes to the feed like a stock ticker.
The myth of social media is you have to spend all your time on it. Just as with tool such as the telephone, if you schedule your time, have an objective in mind and execute your plan in a concerted way, you can produce dramatic results. There's a major compulsion to 'always be on' because we fear missing something. But control this impulse and realize you can always catch-up at scheduled intervals. Listen to hashtags, listen retroactively to a custom list you built or just listen into the past; arguably even into the future.
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Tony Hughes is ranked as the #1 influencer on professional selling in Asia-Pacific and is a keynote speaker and best selling author. This article was originally published in LinkedIn where you can also follow Tony's award winning blog. Also visit Tony's keynote speaker website at www.TonyHughes.com.au or his sales methodology website at http://www.rsvpselling.com/.
Main image photo by Flickr: Geoff Stearns
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