Overcoming the timing problem

And how you can harness the power of social media when the buyer says "now's not the right time"

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Let’s say you’re trying to pitch your services or product to a buyer. Everything is going well. The buyer likes what you’re offering, and is open to your price point. But. The timing is just off. They’re just not ready to move forward at this time. Maybe because there’s no immediate need, or maybe because you’ve caught them off-cycle. Maybe budgets are being decided in a few months, or maybe it’ll be a while until they release that RFP.

What do you do then?

I’m not sure what most of you lawyers do. But in the B2B tech world, there is a classic playbook for these types of scenarios. It involves some combination of follow up “check ins” like phone calls, voicemails, or email follow ups. If you’re close enough to the buyer, and have their cell number, you can even send a text messages.

This playbook definitely works. The problem is that doing it effectively requires constant reminders and lots of mental effort. Back when I was still carrying a quota, there were days that I simply blocked out large swaths of time to do these check ins. They were draining. And not just because they were time intensive. It was because I felt like I was annoying the buyer.

Modern marketing and automated email marketing applications have tried to solve this problem for us. They’ve created something called a “nurture sequence” which is essentially a series of pre-scheduled emails sent to your buyer, to make sure that you (and your company/firm) stay top of mind. It’s extremely low effort, but has the unfortunate consequence of bombarding your buyer with useless emails. Which means they’ll automatically delete anything you send them.

Not good. But what else can you do?

Well, today I’m going to talk about social media. And how you can use it to effectively supplement your “check in” or “nurture” efforts. It requires far less effort to do than emailing / calling people one by one, and is far less annoying to the buyer. If you do social media well, you might even help accelerate the buying process.

You can use any social media platform, too. As long as it’s some place where your buyers like to congregate. It could be LinkedIn, but it could be Instagram or Twitter, depending on your market. For the purposes of today’s article, I’ll focus on LinkedIn. I’ll explain how it works for “nurturing,” why it’s so effective for selling, and the underlying psychological factors that help make it so powerful.

Let’s get into it.