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Building A Social Selling Ecosystem [Video]

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

social-selling-ecosystem.jpgTired of missing sales? Maybe it’s time to take a page out of Grant Cardone’s book. The best-selling author, international speaker and real estate investor wants to use social selling to grow business from $100 million to $200 million.

How exactly he’s going to do that is a little less clear-cut. The following video provides an overview of the three pillars of social selling and how to get started. But for more granular tips, tricks and tactics, sign up for 10X Growth Con.

Can’t afford a trip down to Miami? Check out Jamie and Grant’s separate tracks at our free virtual summit Digital Growth Conference here

The Ecosystem of Social Selling - Jamie Shanks & Grant Cardone

 
Transcript:
 

Grant Cardone:       

Hey, Grant Cardone here and I’m so excited to introduce to you, number one, somebody that I’m a huge fan of and I’ve done a bunch of work with already, Jamie Shanks. His company is Sales for Life. Now folks, check this out. I’m bringing Jamie in to be at the TenX Growth Conference, and let me tell you why. He basically takes companies all around the world and he builds a social selling ecosystem for you.

I want to bring him onto the show today and show you what that is, but it’s about taking your sales, your marketing, and your enablement, the delivery, because this dude, I’m telling you. His company changes the digital landscape for your company. We’re in a changing world, if you’re doing business to business, if you’re doing retail, if you’re doing everything online, which most things are going virtual and online today, Jamie Shanks is going to be at the TenX Growth Conference. Jamie, buddy, so good to spend time with you today and I cannot wait to see you in Miami.

Jamie Shanks:

Thanks for the invite, Grant.

Grant Cardone:

So, Jamie, talk to me about some of the stuff, like, how is selling changing in the world today?

Jamie Shanks:

Yeah. You know, I was somebody that started a consulting firm in 2010 and failed miserably, almost went bankrupt, because I didn’t adjust to my buyer. My buyer was guys like you, Grant, VPs of sales, VPs of marketing, and they were doing due diligence online and I wasn’t changing with them. So, through that failure, I learned that I needed to approach the buyer as a digital newspaper. I completely changed myself, and through that we created a curriculum that’s now scaled around the globe to 300 customers globally, and all we do is help sales and marketing better align and create a total integration, and the by-product of that is social selling. 

Grant Cardone:

So how does that affect my business? What does that mean, social selling? Does that mean we’re using Facebook to sell?

Jamie Shanks:

Absolutely. Be where the buyer is. So, a first step for you, you need to analyze where is my buyer? My buyer sits on Linked-In and Twitter for a customer success team they sit on Facebook, and in Europe in Zen or QQLine, Webo, basically, wherever your buyer is, I need to meet them halfway during their due diligence process. They’re going to learn with or without me, so I need to be there to enable and help them along their buying journey.

So, for you as a sales professional, it’s about constantly adding value. Think of it like a football game. I’m helping them 10 yards at a time, along their journey with information, with triggers, with referral networking, anything I can to help them make a better decision.

Grant Cardone:

Okay, so I’m running an ad on CNBC right now, you’ve probably heard it. “Tired of missing sales? Tired of missing sales? Tired of missing sales?” Right? And you’re driving to work and you’ve got your Sirius radio, maybe you heard it on Fox or Fox Business or CNN, and I pop up. Years ago, people would just call a phone number or maybe check a website, but today, they hear the ad, hopefully it sticks, they hear it repeated enough times and then they go Google my name.

Jamie Shanks:

One hundred percent.

Grant Cardone:

Is that where you’re coming in, to tie in the marketing and the sales and the delivery? You talk about fulfillment of the due diligence.

Jamie Shanks:

Absolutely, so let’s use Grant Cardone University. A portion of your buyers have already armed themselves with information before your team needs to give them a call. That’s how much online learning they’re doing. In my company, 43% of all of the content somebody will consume happens before my inside sales team picks up the phone for the very first time. So, you have to appreciate that the buyer’s going to do it with or without you. Our job is to help sales people be able to start conversations earlier using these free digital assets that are available to them.

Grant Cardone:

And you’re saying I can do this without spending money. You’re teaching companies around the world—Jamie’s trained over 60,000 sales and marketing professionals in dozens of industries internationally. Thompson Reuters, Oracle, Direct Energy, Lenovo, Xerox, I mean the guy is probably the authority and I know I’m tooting your horn pretty hard here, but when it comes to social selling on LinkedIn, you know ten times what I know about how to sell on LinkedIn. Would that be fair to suggest? 

Jamie Shanks:

No, we just have a different approach. The way you’re doing so fantastic as well. You’re serving your community the way that makes the most sense for you, which is different than the way we need to serve our customers. But at the end of the day, we’re both servicing the customer on LinkedIn to move the ball.

Grant Cardone:

When you’re in Miami, this is some of the stuff I want to really dive deep on, where we have more time than maybe we have in this interview, but how do you serve your customer differently, or how do you see it, than I serve mine?

Jamie Shanks:

Okay, what we want to cover when we’re in Miami, is I want to make this really tactical. Bring your laptops, bring your phones, bring your tablets, because we’re going to do. What we’re going to do is show you tips, tricks, and tactics that you can apply on the spot to book a meeting next week, to create a new opportunity. I’ll give you an example of one. Think of social selling as a Venn diagram of three types of selling—trigger-, referral-, and insights-based selling.

Grant Cardone:

Hold on, now, let’s go over those things. Trigger, what?

Jamie Shanks:

Trigger-, referral-, and insight-based selling. So, it’s a Venn diagram of three circles.

Grant Cardone:

Yes, because I don’t know what those things mean. So, what is the trigger?

Jamie Shanks:

Trigger-based sale, this is an example that I’ll show the team. Job changes of your own customer base is a trigger of an opportunity to create revenue in a net new company. Think about it. You’ve worked so hard to sell Company A. It’s six times cheaper and easier to sell to somebody you’ve already sold to, than it is to go find a net new customer. But what’s happening in North America, every 2.5 years, on average, a person is up and leaving their job and going somewhere else. These are your advocates. Tools like LinkedIn mechanize an approach to show you who’s leaving your customer base to new prospective accounts. When they get there, you’re hitting them up.

 Grant Cardone:

I’m sorry Jamie. It’s funny you say that, because my guy Heath, yesterday was announced at the sales meeting, he’s like, Heath got a deal today, and this is the third time we’ve sold this guy. 

Jamie Shanks:

Exactly. So, that’s a trigger. Referral-based selling. I’ll give you an example. You and I are first degree connections. I’m able to go into your LinkedIn network and see every CEO that you could introduce me to on Miami Beach. So, by reverse engineering your network, which is known as your sphere of influence, I can tap that way faster than picking up a phone book and trying to call somebody. I can leverage Grant as my way into Company A, B, C in Miami. All that social selling is, is all these sales processes that already have existed pre-digital, but you’re just mechanizing it through digital platforms to speed up that process for you. 

Grant Cardone:

And then, the third piece.

Jamie Shanks:

Insights-based selling. It’s the long tail. Grant, you are the master at this. I learned this through you. The reality is, there’s sales tactics that book meetings tomorrow and then there’s value you create today that you use the lighthouse versus the tugboat. Right? This is content marketing 101. If I have to recognize that if I want to set myself up to Q4 success, I have to become a lighthouse today, so that people come inbound to me months later. And that’s content marketing. That’s insights-based selling. Teaching people, nurturing them along a journey, so they can make better decisions. I’m going to come back to that.

Grant Cardone:

This is Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life, he’s coming to Miami to deliver a workshop, a very tactical, strategic, where we’re going to—what I’d actually like to do, Jamie, if you have time, is show how you could do this for somebody in the audience.

Jamie Shanks:

Oh, we’re going to be pulling people out of the audience on-stage, doing it together. 

Grant Cardone:

So much of this, I think, goes over people’s heads and one of the reasons I wanted to spend three days at this conference—by the way, what do you think about my line-up, man?

Jamie Shanks:

[laughs] It’s like a Who’s Who. I’m just happy to ride coattails here.

Grant Cardone:

Let me ask you that. Why did you make a decision to come to this thing?

 Jamie Shanks:

There is a variety of different reasons. One, you talk about it in your books. You have to look at your own social network and if you feel that you’re one of the strongest people in your social network, you’re in the wrong social network. So, I’m trying to up my own game. You’ve created an ecosystem around you, Grant, that is unbelievable, so, self-servingly, I have to be honest. That is one of the greatest advantages of a smaller business trying to penetrate larger accounts. I get to learn from people like yourself who have already done it.

Grant Cardone:

And what do you hope to take away, selfishly, Jamie? As a spectator, not just as a master and expert that’s going to be delivering help in the audience. That’s a given. What do you hope to take away?

Jamie Shanks:

I have to assume that everybody in the crowd feels that they’re a sales person, whether they like it or not, if they’re an entrepreneur and or a sales person. For me, I look at it, and say to myself I need to learn the skills, whether it’s communication-based skills, or mindset skills, skillset, everybody in that crowd’s going to have that’s higher-level than me. And I get to meet these people and understand what they did to change their mindset, then their skillset to get to where they are.

Grant Cardone:

I promise you that the audience will be the best audience that you’ve ever delivered to. Jamie Shanks is known as the world’s best at building social selling ecosystems, and if you sell online, if you’re taking hits, if you have a website, if you’ve got any kind of activity happening on Google around you, or LinkedIn, or you’re trying to hire people, you’re trying to sell more products, Jamie Shanks can help you do it. He can show you how to build that ecosystem where you take advantage of and integrate sales, marketing and enablement. Jamie, I look forward to spending some time with you, man, and learning from you.

Jamie Shanks:

Thanks so much for the invite.

Grant Cardone:

Dude, I guarantee you, Jamie, I’ll make a million dollars off of what you deliver in that conference.

Jamie Shanks:

That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic.

Grant Cardone:

Where are you going to be flying in from?

Jamie Shanks:

I’m going to be flying in on the Wednesday, I’m doing a conference the Thursday morning near that area, Ft. Lauderdale, and then I’ll be there Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, Sunday at the hotel that you talked about.

Grant Cardone:

Yeah, but where do you live, Jamie? 

Jamie Shanks:

Toronto, Canada. 

Grant Cardone:

Okay, he’s coming in from Toronto. Jamie Shanks, look forward to seeing you at the TenX Growth Conference, buddy. Thank you for your time today. 

Jamie Shanks:

Thank you so much.

Grant Cardone:

Folks, that’s Jamie Shanks. He’s going to be just one of 21 master experts, Jamie, I’m bringing him in for me. I have to learn more about social selling here. My business is going to do almost $100 million dollars this year, I’m going to figure out how do I go to $200 million. How do I go to $500 million? I know this. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, they have all the traffic in the universe.

If you live in America, you’re using LinkedIn, or you’re using Facebook. If you’re not using one of those two, hey, you’re probably not doing business today. I don’t sell anything to your grandma, so if your grandma is not checking on LinkedIn, then how can I sell to them, how can I use them, how can I take advantage of them, how can I grow my business with them? Don’t miss Jamie Shanks, March 17th, 18th and 19th. I’ll be there and I’ll do a Q&A with Jamie afterwards to answer your questions and help you figure out how to take what he’s giving you, these gold nuggets, and turn it into gold bars. See you at the 10X Growth Conference.  

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The Ultimate Guide to Social Selling