Episode 119: Husam Jandal – Fish Where the Fish Are

Husam Jandal 0:00

Social Selling simply replicating the old methods of networking on digital media, in particular social media. So it’s not something that is totally new, it’s simply doing all things that are proven to work in a modern place.

Bob Woods 0:17

Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast, featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show.

Welcome and thanks for joining us on this episode of Making Sales Social. I’m Bob Woods, the LinkedIn Sherpa. Also the CMO and LinkedIn slash social selling strategist — say that three times fast — at Social Sales Link.

I’m really excited about today’s guest because I started out my professional career in journalism, and I love to write. In fact, I get to use so much of what I learned way back when, which is many more years than I wish to admit, in my work life today. So I love content. And to do social selling successfully, you’ve got to provide content, but not just any content, it has to be content that your audience wants to consume, and not what you want to talk about. That’s right. It’s all about them.

Joining me on Making Sales Social is Husam Jandal. He is an internationally renowned business strategist and marketing consultant, who helps businesses drive growth through innovative marketing and business transformation strategies. He’s a thought leader, published author, and public speaker with more than 20 years of experience in the digital space. So he was digital before digital was even cool. This includes training Google partners, teaching e-business at a master’s level, receiving multiple Web Marketing Association awards, — congrats, by the way — and earning many rave reviews from businesses of all sizes. Husam has helped companies large and small. Some of the more recognizable names are Google, American Express, Thomson Reuters, and PepsiCo, and I’m thirsty all of a sudden after mentioning that. So Husam, welcome to Making Sales Social.

2:24

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Bob Woods 2:26

Good, good. Glad to hear that. So you handle what I’d call everything under the digital marketing umbrella. Things like online visibility, marketing via social media, email, search, engine optimization, all of those types of things. So, I think a lot of people will go, “Yeah, so he’s just another one of those people.” I know that you have things that make you unique in your world, what are those?

Husam Jandal 2:50

Two things. Number one is having a very strong business acumen — I don’t jump into marketing, I start with the business mind about any initiative, or any goals or any strategy that has to be devised for sales and marketing purposes. But before you start putting together any specific tactics or plans, you always have to start with the business goals and the business objectives.

And luckily, my career started with that, as a business consultant. And I was lucky to develop a very solid foundation about what is the best way for businesses to operate and how they can operate successfully and profitably. And based on that solid business acumen, I have the ability to devise the correct strategies, select the right marketing channels, and execute on the relevant tactics that will help achieve those business objectives. So, that’s really a key asset that I have that helps me derive all of the success that I’ve been able to achieve for my partners or my clients.

Bob Woods 4:02

It’s very holistic, basically. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, no, I like that.

Husam Jandal 4:06

That’s right. And the other point is variety of industries that have been exposed to, I stopped counting how many industries I have contributed to by working from businesses from those industries, they are intense, I struggle to think of an industry that I kind of didn’t touch as far as my consulting practice and helping a business from within that industry. So the breadth of knowledge in terms of the kinds of industries that I was involved in helps me take things to a higher level, because, for example, there are some industries that are not so sophisticated in their establishment or in their marketing and sales intelligence, but because I had that exposure and the successes that I’ve been able to achieve, I’m able to replicate the effective type of activities and strategies that I have worked not just for a particular industry, but also pulling from other industries as needed, if that makes sense.

Bob Woods 5:06

Yeah, actually, that does make sense. And that was a question that had popped up in my mind was the replication part because it doesn’t seem like that, you know, you can go from — Oh, God, I’m going to have trouble coming up with comparison now — like financial services to like manufacturing or something like that. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of crossover but in your mind, there actually is because you can replicate that.

Husam Jandal 5:33

Yeah, absolutely. There are always golden nuggets that can be utilized from other industries, and have them apply to an industry that haven’t used as a tactic of that type or a strategy of that type. And using the example that you mentioned, the financial versus manufacturing, well, you know, a, most of the manufacturing business out there, maybe not most, but the majority are in a B2B environment and there are many financial industry businesses or businesses in the financial industry, that tend to target B2B audiences now, but they tend to target them differently. So, having the ability to pull from those experiences and combine and innovate and create brand new, customized strategies that are focused on growth and development is very powerful. And of course, that all goes based on having a very strong and solid business foundation, business understanding. I typically, before I get into any engagement with one of my partners or clients, I typically actually spend most of the time initially just understanding the business, going into each function into each department, understanding how they operate, because with that, I’m able to identify the potential elements that can be utilized in developing an effective strategy to support the business goals and objectives.

Bob Woods 6:58

And I bet a lot of those elements are probably underutilized too. I would guess.

Husam Jandal 7:03

Of course. All the time. All the time.

Bob Woods 7:08

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So I mean, especially when you mentioned financial services, and that’s something that we actually deal with a lot at Social Sales Link in that it’s, you would think that it’s B2C but yet you have to show up as a business person even though, you know, obviously, you can do financial services for, in business but also a lot in consumer as well. But because you are seen as a business person, you really have to show up as B2B in that B2C world, essentially. I don’t know if you’d agree with that. But um…

Husam Jandal 7:42

Yeah, absolutely. And at the same time, there are also financial service providers that specialize in B2B environments. For example, alternative business financing, when we talk about, let’s say, invoice funding, or asset-based lending, if we were to dig into that particular industry, so for those type of services, they are exclusive to B2B businesses, just because usually the funding process is based on the credit worthiness of the end client, i.e. the client of the client, potentially. So yeah, from that aspect, you can replicate some of the successes from the segments within that industry to other segments under a completely different industry.

Bob Woods 8:26

Yeah, that’s fantastic. That’s, that’s fantastic. So let’s talk a little bit about proving that success. And specifically, I’m talking about return on investment or ROI, always a big question when it comes to digital marketing and especially for our purposes here, how it works together with sales. This is kind of a holistic question but how do you deal with proving or showing ROI, especially with the companies that may not make that connection that there actually can be ROI derived from digital when combined with sales? And what type of data can marketing share with upper management who’s obviously very concerned, and rightfully so, about ROI?

Husam Jandal 9:06

Sure. So two things. Number one, measurement. You have to measure the results, not just the business results, but the detailed results for every single step in the customer lifetime journey, from the time they get exposed to your marketing campaigns, or content or material all the way until they become a customer and continue to be a customer until they graduate or leave or end the relationship once the service is delivered or rendered. So measure everything.

So start with measurement without measuring the results of different activities on the marketing and the sales side, and making sure that everything is interconnected. For example, let’s say you run a campaign. Let’s say you put a PPC ad on Google Search, a pay-per-click ad and you’ve got a click from there, you want to make sure that you know where he got that click from, from which each campaign, how much did it cost you to get that click, and did that click converted into a lead, if so, great, that lead has to be captured on a CRM, a customer relationship management system. And that lead record should also contain the source of that lead, i.e. the keyword that resulted into that lead, the campaign that resulted into that lead. And then from there, the sales process starts. Getting in touch with that lead, what was the speed to lead in terms of contacting that lead. So all of these things have to be measured, and then converting that lead to, you know, an opportunity and then from there, becoming a client. And then calculating the value of that client. What is the value of that client? Or what is the total lifetime value, on average, for the clients of that particular business? Once you measure that data, then proving ROI is very simple. Yeah, absolutely.

Bob Woods 10:57

Yeah, absolutely. And if you’re more of a smaller business person, just listening to that, and feeling like your head is gonna explode, it still is really important to at least track where your leads are coming from. So especially like in social selling, if you got it from a LinkedIn-based connection, or LinkedIn-based referral — we’re going to talk about referrals in a little bit. But you really need to track those sources to make sure that you know that everything that you’re doing is a success. So while you’re not, you may not be doing that at a granular level, like these larger companies have the time the resources and the people to throw at it, you still need to track that because otherwise, how do you know that this stuff is even working?

Husam Jandal 11:42

Absolutely, 100%. And in addition to tracking that data to prove ROI, which will become extremely simple, because when you know how many clients you’ve got, where you got them from, what is the value of those clients, it’s a matter of a simple calculation to see, “Okay, what’s your top line?” and then “What’s your bottom line?” based on whatever went in between to produce that client and retain it, and then naturally, you will know, what’s your profit, and you’ll be able to calculate ROI.

But even beyond that, when we talk about marketing data, and making sure that it’s available to all types of businesses out there — small, mid or large, there are other data that marketing can provide that help boost the ROI beyond the basic transactional processes that goes between marketing and sales. For example, when you send an email campaign, a salesperson, or if it’s a small business, the business owner, if they were to know who, which contact, open the email, that email campaign, which link they clicked on, what part of the email they engaged with, which page they ended up landing on, and what did they do on that page? That data can help you take sales actions that can further maximize ROI.

So, for example, if you know a particular contact, received an email campaign and clicked on a link, and you know what that link is, then you may call them and say, “Hey, hello, how are you doing today? By the way are you interested in…”and you can talk about that link that they clicked on because obviously they are interested in in in that particular topic that they engaged with. So tracking not just at a high level to kind of see how things are flowing, but also getting the data, additional data that will help you even further boost your ROI by utilizing it on the sales side.

Bob Woods 13:32

And that’s exactly what we’re going to be talking about next because I really liked the point that you brought up about being able to track that click where it came from, and then passing that data on to sales so that they could follow up about that because that’s an excellent example of bringing alignment to sales and marketing.

What other ways can really bring those two departments together? Because a lot of them, you know, most times, especially at medium to larger sized companies, sales is doing its own thing, marketing is doing its other thing, they all think that each group is kind of weird, blah, blah, blah. They’re really not. They really should be working together. So what are things that can be done to bring alignment to sales and marketing?

Husam Jandal 14:12

That’s a very good question, Bob. So there are many things that can be done, but maybe I’ll share a few things that can be considered that are extremely important.

So number one, make sure that you develop what’s called a buyer persona. A persona is a fictitious character that represents a segment of your target audience. So that profile, or that persona would simply say, who’s that target profile or that target audience? What do they do? What are their paying points? What are their problems? What are their needs? Which industry that they are at? Where do they go to shop around?

All of these details about your ideal client, aka persona, that piece has to be developed. It can be a tedious exercise, but it’s necessary because once you develop that persona, and that persona has to be developed by both minds or both functions or both departments i.e. the sales and the marketing, they have to collaborate on making sure that they have the correct persona designed, because then everything to be done in terms of sales, and marketing has to be based on that persona. So that’s one thing that usually I see being missed, i.e. developing a buyer persona and making sure that’s being used for all of the future activities.

The other thing that can help, which we touched on briefly, that helped the two parts work better together and maximize ROI is exchange of data. And by the way, although we did talk about marketing data, but also sales data has to be shared with marketers. So then marketers know what to focus on more, if they know that certain campaign produced X number of sales or clients, then marketers can focus more on that campaign create similar ones, and allocating more budget to the type of campaigns that generated more results or more sales, etc.

So sharing data is important. So sales can share that their own data as well, not just in the form of who converted or how many clients or how many sales, but even some basic data that can be extremely enlightening for marketers such as sales calls having like, if you have if you record your sales calls, marketers must listen to them. Yeah, just so they can better understand what kind of objections that a salesperson is going through. And then, or opportunities, and then they can convert those objections or opportunities into content, for example, that addresses those objections, and those are persons so on and so forth.

Bob Woods 16:50

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. I mean, in all of our training, and this is something, something that I’ve touched on a little in the intro, actually, when I talked about, you know, the content being about them, meaning your prospects and things like that, you’re not writing about yourself, you’re writing about the things that concern your potential customers and that entire audience there.

So that actually leads in — this is really cool how this is working out — that really leads in to do you know, obviously, we’re about social selling and this is a question that we always ask of everyone who’s on Making Sales Social, I just want to hear your thoughts of what do you think about when you hear the phrase social selling.

Husam Jandal 17:37

Social selling, simply replicating the old methods of networking on digital media, in particular, social media, you know, we used, before social media, we used to network offline and we continue to network offline, and we tried not (crosstalk) (Bob: Yeah, again, thank God). So it’s not something that is totally new, it’s simply doing all things that are proven to work in a modern place as a salesperson, we’ll have to visualize it that way. I know when we say the word social media, many salespeople would think of it as a place to go and you know, funny content or, or read the news or do non-business activities, but businesses must use social media, to network, develop relationships online, through particular targeted connections, and be able to convert those connections into something meaningful. It could be in the form of being referral partners that can send you more business or in the form of being ideal potential clients for your business. So that’s what I think when I hear the term social selling, and it’s extremely powerful and unfortunately, underutilized.

Bob Woods 18:48

Yeah, absolutely. And, and I just want to point out that if you go to Sam’s website at HusamJandal.com, he has an excellent article there about referral marketing and about how you can use it specifically. So please, please go check that out. It goes into much more detail than then we can do in a simple podcast here. But it’s a really good article and you know, a couple of the questions that I had, which were now answered already were based on that but that’s only because it’s so important. So if you really want to inform yourself on how to do that more, that’s a great place to go and and specifically look for that arti\

So, now I specifically want to talk about how salespeople whether you know, they’re the solopreneur or entrepreneur on a small sales team, or even a sales pro at a large company, and they want to incorporate social selling into their daily practices how, how do they use content specifically in their efforts?

Husam Jandal 19:49

Number one, the marketing side of the business must assist and support the sales team in their social selling efforts. For example, marketers can develop great content. Salespeople and sales teams do not have the time to do that. It’s not even, sometimes, it’s not even a responsibility of them to do.

So, marketers will have to support the sales team or team by providing them with ready-to-use content. It could be in the form of blog posts, pre-crafted social media content that salespeople can use. Canned messages, for example, that the salesperson doesn’t have to think every time you know, when they connect with someone new, what to say how to get the conversation going. And marketers are good in doing that, by creating great content that can get the communication and the conversation going and started in a direction that will help support the business goals. So get help from your marketing team or your marketing, you know, person, but with regards to having the right content, once you have that, make sure that you use it.

Bob Woods 20:51

Yeah, use it. Yeah, get out there and just, you know, just freakin’ do it basically. So yeah, absolutely. And also do it consistently. I mean, there are so many cases, I see when people are, are out there and like “Oh my god, I’m gonna go…” And then life happens. And it’s like, you know, and then they fall off, you know, maybe partially or entirely, you have to continually show up. And one of the things that we teach is, you know, actually doing kind of the opposite, rather than going all blaaa and getting out there immediately.

Pace yourself. Start off smaller. If you can sustain that smaller, move up a little bit, if you continue to stay that move up your activity of a little bit more too. Consistency is more of the key than actually, you know, just pumping stuff out all the time. And Husam, I would believe that you agree with that but I just want to make sure.

Husam Jandal 21:49

Yes, totally. And to help you with consistency scheduling, you know, block off time, because spending time on LinkedIn, or doing social selling is not a side activity. It should be a core activity. So look it on your calendar, how often you want to do it? How much time? Is it daily? Okay, how much is it? Half an hour a day? One hour a day? And think of it being a business development activity. You’re not wasting your time, just make sure that you have the right processes, the right activities, and the right content, and then implement them and schedule them, that helps with consistency.

Bob Woods 22:27

Absolutely. So, you know, with me being in social selling, not only training it, but actually you know, I practice social selling as well, because we got to stay in business on LinkedIn than anything else. But I’m on Twitter and Instagram too. And I’m even dipping my toe into that thing called TikTok now, which is interesting and fun. And I’ll admit maybe a little scary as well. So for those who are social sellers, especially those, you know, B2B salespeople who look at those other channels and they’re like, “Hmm, I don’t… I can see LinkedIn I’m not sure about these other channels.” What advice do you have for them if they want to branch out beyond LinkedIn?

Husam Jandal 23:15

Fish where the fish are, and I think I did write, I wrote an article many, many years ago. And it’s, I believe it’s listed on my website, the title of it is Seven Tips You Can Learn From a Fisherman. So, fish where the fish are. So, if you know that your target audience — and by the way, that kind of reminds me of what we talked about earlier, which is developing a buyer persona, because when you develop a persona, part of it, you should detail what social media platform they use. Do they spend more time on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Instagram, or TikTok, or whatever. There are many other social media platforms out there. So you need to know where your target audience are spending their time and where they are more receptive to your messaging, and your content.

It’s not about how many, it’s not about quantity of platforms that you are present on but it’s about targeting and being very targeted in your approach. If you think your target audience are primarily on LinkedIn, then just stick to LinkedIn. You don’t have to learn about every other social media platform. However, if you know that a portion of your audience are on other platforms and it’s important for you to reach out to them, then at that time, you can decide on selecting the right platform. But please, going crazy and starting to register accounts and creating pages and profiles on every single social media platform is a distraction. So you have to be very targeted on where you want to be in order to be in front of those who you want to be in front of.

Bob Woods 24:52

That is fantastic advice. Just yeah, yeah. Yep, fish where the fish are and — see if I can create a phrase out of this — fish where the fish are and it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel or something like that, I don’t know. There’s something like that there but I’m not (unintelligible). So now that we’re in that kind of advice phase, is there any other advice that you want to give those salespeople who are interested in social selling?

Husam Jandal 25:17

I would say try — one tip that sometimes is missed by salespeople is try to think of it as being just an offline activity, like you’re going to a networking event, for example. How would you conduct yourself, how would you behave? For example, you can go sometimes to a networking event where a person is, you know, just immediately in the first minute, handing you their business cards. Well, do you think that’s a good practice? Maybe you want to learn a little bit about that other person before handing your business card and starting to talk about what you do on your on your offerings and your services and your products, the same type of etiquettes apply to online.

So when you’re doing things on social media, you found a great potential connection that you want to connect with, take things slowly, just like as you do offline, you know, learn a little bit more about them, read about their business, read about their industry, review their profile. (Bob: Amen.) So yeah, so again, many of the offline good habits that we’ve developed over the years sometimes are missed when we are doing social selling. So I would say that’s another tip that I would love to highlight.

Bob Woods 26:30

That’s great. That is, that’s great advice.

Bob Woods 26:33

So now any advice to, and let’s talk a little bit more specifically about marketers now who are, they’re looking at social selling, they’ve heard of it, maybe they’ve heard of other companies, maybe even competitors, and who are doing it and doing it successfully and they’re wondering not only if it’ll work for them, but how they can support their salespeople with it.

Husam Jandal 26:57

There are many, many ways they can do that. But sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are experts out there, including yourself, Bob, that can help devise and provide them with the right steps and the right processes.

So if the problem is knowledge, and not being sure or not knowing what needs to be done, or the best way to go about it, well, tap into the expertise available to you. So that’s one tip that I would share.

Number two is work with your with your sales team and your salespeople and understand what are the things that they want to do as far as social selling, and fill in the gaps, such as providing relevant content that can support all of the different steps to tracking data and sharing that data with the sales team to make sure that they know what’s the result of their activities as far as social selling, and so on and so forth.

Bob Woods 27:50

Okay, that’s excellent advice. I like that a lot. So earlier, I mentioned some of the larger companies you’ve consulted for in the past, and I’m still thirsty because of that PepsiCo reference, do you handle smaller companies, Husam? And which do you like better? Larger, or, you know, the Fortune 500s or those smaller to medium-sized companies?

Husam Jandal 28:14

Ah, that’s a good question. I have been in my field for more than 20 years. And I’ve worked with Fortune 500, 100, and I’ve worked with startups, solopreneurs, very small businesses, and pretty much all the other sizes in between. Today, I enjoy working more with midsize businesses where the owners are still involved in the business, and that they’re heart’s on the business. That’s my preferred type of engagement, I am thirsty for growth and assisting others grow. And usually, when the owners are still in the business, and the business has developed and established enough, kind of a mid-size-ish type of size of business, usually I am able to bring the most because number one they are established enough and by filling the gaps and devising suitable growth strategies, their growth can be in multipliers. Working with larger companies is something that I enjoyed too, however, I tend to quickly become impatient with red tapes and too much protocol protocols. (Bob: Yeah.) And (crosstalk).

Bob Woods 29:29

(unintelligible) and the (unintelligible), I’m guessing too. Yeah. (Husam: Exactly.) Yeah, as, yeah, I can’t, I just, yeah, there’s a reason why I’m not involved with those anymore. Although we will obviously serve those companies and we actually do really well when when when we work with larger companies. And I’m sure that you’re not going to turn away a Fortune 100 company if they come to you.

So that, so I think that that’s a really good place to wrap up this conversation. If you’re interested in finding out about Husam more, his website is at HusamJandal.com. It’s H-U-S-A-M-J-A_N-D-A-L.com. His name is going to be in the promo copy, you just put a .com right after that, and you’ll get to his website. So, thanks Husam for your time today. I really appreciate it. This was fantastic. I enjoyed it and I hope you enjoyed it too. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode of Making Sales Social.

And as you’re out and about being the successful salesperson or marketer that you are, always remember to make your sales social.

Thanks for watching, and join us again for more special guest instructors bringing you marketing, sales training, and social selling strategies that will set you apart. Hit the Subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast. Give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website SocialSalesLink.com for more information.