As you may know, I retired on December 29. I had one client tell me that I liked her too much to just drop her. Yesterday I got an email that read, “Just wanted you to know that I miss you.” Another one sent an email telling me that they closed a $35K deal and thanking me. I may eventually take on another client, but never as many as I had and not today.
But, I digress.
So, not having clients allows me time to think. Does Social Media have any relationship with Social Selling? One thing that I think is interesting is that there wasn’t a Wikipedia entry for social selling, but there was quite an entry for social media.
In the 70’s, I did a lot of door-to-door sales, but the bulk of my business came from referrals. Remember this article? Door-to-door gave me the ability to add a new stream of sales to my business whenever I needed or wanted it.
In the 80’s. I did a lot of cold calling. I’ve talked about making 1,000 cold calls to start my business many times. Let me tell you two things. Cold calls suck! and I got good at them, and I can have fun doing them and I can get results doing them, but there are better ways and for most people, cold calls will always suck for the sender and the receiver.
In the 90’s, I left my fledgling business for 4 years to help a start-up. (That start-up eventually became a billion dollar business, but I moved on when it was around $20M.) So, my fledgling business, that start-up, then going back to restart my business meant that I spent a lot of time looking for new business. I went door-to-door, cold called, got referrals and added networking to my repertoire. I’m got really good at finding new business. Remember, no internet and not everybody had a cell phone.
The first decade of the 21st Century was the age of networking. Put me in a room with people and I’ll find prospects. However, there were many that thought they were networking, but were not working. Here’s an article on networking “rainmaker style”.
One more thing. I always knew how much time and money I invested into going door to door. I also knew what my investment was into cold calling and networking. Finally, I knew how many customers were generated from each activity and what my sales revenue was from each activity. So that I knew that the ROI on my networking was five times that of cold calling and that the ROI of the time that I put into referrals was 12 times that of the time that I put into networking. Did you do the math? Referral ROI was 60 times that of cold calling.
So, here’s the questions.
What is the ROI (in Sales Dollars) of the time that you put into
LinkedIn?
Blogging?
Twitter?
Facebook?
Klout?
Triberr?
and how does it compare to the ROI you get with
cold calling?
networking?
advertising?
trade shows?
referrals?
What did you learn?
BTW – Did you see this course about increasing your Social Media & Social Selling ROI?
RainMakers & Sales Rock Stars 
liked the article…….it is always a good idea to reflect on ones efforts for the ROI…..it can be that way with customers/clients as well……come around more often, we need that spark
so many, too many, don have a clear answer for either of those….
That is true. As an author and business man, I can relate to how you said, “So, my fledgling business, that start-up, then going back to restart my business meant that I spent a lot of time looking for new business”. I hope more people discover your blog because you really know what you’re talking about. Can’t wait to read more from you!