you are. Many entrepreneurs around the world have had very similar moments like mine, and many times, their best eureka moments are sparked from desperation. My eureka moment ignited a second-half comeback that warrants me telling you this story to help set the stage for this book.
Throughout the summer of 2011, I worked to support my few remaining clients, but was preoccupied with thinking about new business development for myself. At night, every night, many times at 3 a.m., I would be in our spare bedroom, staring aimlessly at my laptop, hoping that some serendipitous event would come save my business. I can vividly remember these nights like a recurring bad dream. Oddly enough, I would have LinkedIn open on the home page. I honestly don't remember why LinkedIn specifically. I would spend hours and hours thinking about all my business development success via the telephone, and thought about how I could communicate with prospective buyers faster and with greater scale. This speed-to-market thinking is what probably had me staring at LinkedIn. I began to really see the potential of LinkedIn as it seemed like I was one-degree connection away from so many Toronto vice presidents of sales. Unfortunately, I couldn't find best practices online to help me monetize LinkedIn. I remember thinking about my experiences via the telephone, and kept trying to mentally reverse-engineer my process inside LinkedIn. Slowly, throughout the summer of 2011, I started to figure out new ways to create sales opportunities for myself on LinkedIn. Each time I had successful breakthrough the night before, the next morning I would show my existing clients the tactics I had used. I found that clients were more excited to learn my LinkedIn sales tactics than to talk about my existing sales consulting services. Week by week, month by month, I got better and better at monetizing the powers of LinkedIn. Not only was I becoming effective with the tool, but my clients were showing repeatable success and quantifiable return-on-effort from my tips. By autumn of 2011, the entrepreneurial lightbulb turned on in my head – “If only I could find a way to turn my new LinkedIn sales tactics into a business.”
Fast forward to the afternoon of April 18, 2012, at the AA-ISP Leadership Summit in Dallas, Texas. At the conference, there was a breakout session by Josiane Fegion titled “Wake Up and Press Refresh on Social Media.” When I first arrived at the conference, I noticed this session on the agenda, and preplanned that this would be my moment to speak up in front of the entire room about my LinkedIn tactics. As I walked into the breakout room, I took a seat in the middle of the room on the right side. Little did I know, I was surrounded by sales and marketing superstars:
● Left of me: Gary Ambrose – CEO of TimeTrade
● Right of me: Ralf VonSosen – then CMO of InsideView, later to become CMO of LinkedIn Sales Solutions
● Behind me: Ken Krogue – Co-Founder of InsideSales.com
About 10 minutes into Josiane's presentation, she asked the audience for specific examples of sales success leveraging social media. I sprung up like a leopard looking to attack a gazelle! I shouted “We have been helping clients send LinkedIn InMail to prospects with a 12- to 20-percent message-sent-to-new-lead-created ratio.” That one line changed my life forever. Honestly, I can pinpoint the moment exactly. The breakout room's temperature seemed to change as the buzzing of chatter began to build. People looked at me as though I had invented fire. Almost immediately, someone from the back had shouted, “Can you describe exactly what you're doing on LinkedIn?” So, for the next few moments, I explained what I later would call the sphere of influence sales process. I felt like a rock star for the first time in my life. I had potentially created a consulting service that people actually wanted!
After the breakout session had finished, Gary Ambrose and Ken Krogue approached me to exchange business cards. They both asked me to call them to discuss doing a joint webinar and ebook on the topic of LinkedIn. I walked into the main lobby of the conference center with a sense of hope and newly found self-confidence I hadn't felt in two years. The very next thing I did was call my business partner George Albert. This call should have been recorded, and I should plaster its text on the walls of our corporate office:
Jamie: “George, it's Jamie.”
George: “How is the conference, any great leads?”
Jamie: “George…I'm telling you, we're scrapping everything! I have been talking about our LinkedIn stuff, and people around here are calling it ‘Social Selling.’ George, we're going to stop all of our other services and just coach people on Social Selling!”
George: “Are you f&%king mental?”
George may tell you this isn't exactly what he said, but I beg to differ. He was right: How could we dismantle a business that was slowly starting to climb out of the abyss for this social selling thing? But for me, the point was simple, as social selling was a term that only a few people on earth could define. But, it seemed the appetite to solving this social media for sales thing was only going to grow exponentially.
Throughout the summer of 2012, I began to test my assumptions on the demand for social selling. George and I agreed that I would create a basic curriculum and train ten clients for free! Based on their feedback and quantitative success, we would both have a sense for the demand, and we would have ten client success stories to shop to future buyers. Providing our training for free was one of the smartest business ideas I've ever executed. Within 90 days, we had ten extremely satisfied advocates and collected empirical sales success from these engagements.
I guess you can say, the rest is history. Over the next four years, we've created the world's largest social selling training system called Social Selling Mastery. As of the date of this publication, our system is being used by more than 60,000 sales and marketing professionals worldwide, and growing exponentially. We've helped companies acquire billions of dollars of incremental sales pipeline and revenue. It's been incredible to see our curriculum on every continent, in every size of company, within dozens of industries. Our idea of giving free training to our first customers in exchange for feedback inspired us to crowdsource all future curriculum development. Our current curriculum, the basis for this book, is the most robust and comprehensive in the world because it's consistently evolving from sales and marketing professionals' feedback.
I want to share my humble social selling beginnings with you because it proves that anyone can build a personal brand. Building a personal brand is going to be a major step you'll take to scale your company in this new digital economy. If you and your entire sales and marketing organization apply the principles based in this book, I promise you that social selling will positively affect the growth trajectory of your company. I can't wait to hear your stories of social selling success!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not exist without my beautiful wife, Rebecca Shanks. Her contributions go well beyond this publication, as I wouldn't have a business without her. Rebecca ensured my survival as an entrepreneur as both the household matriarch and financial stabilizer.
We're blessed with two incredible children, Hunter and Henley Shanks. I can't fully articulate how much of what I do is to better serve them. I once read that a parent's job is to become a series of positive memories for his or her children. This is what excites me about this book. My children (ages four and two at the time of publication) will know the successes that entrepreneurship has brought our family, but this book serves as a memory of how hard Rebecca and I worked to achieve that success.
The foundation to my work ethic is from my parents. While they're not entrepreneurs themselves, they work harder than anyone I know. They also supported me in every hare-brained business idea I've ever had. The lesson I've learned is that you must allow your children to freely choose their own path, no matter how different from your own. My parents let me experiment, and they let me fall down. I believe entrepreneurs can be grown and cultivated from a very young age. I was one of those lucky people.
My
