Have you ever noticed that life is unfair? Have you noticed how some people in your business circles seem to get huge amounts of praise, recognition and success that should be yours? Perhaps they got the promotion that you felt was yours, or perhaps they landed the client…or got the speaking gig…or the book deal…or something that you simply know that you are better able to do or more worthy of than them?

Well, there’s good and bad news. The good news is that by this time next year that picture of success could be you. The bad news is that for this to be you next year you will need to do a lot of work and do a lot of things differently to how you are currently doing them.

Another piece of good news is that you have all the skills and knowledge you need to be a success…you just need to apply them. History is littered with great quotes from people telling you that taking action is the key to being successful rather than being perfect at things.

Whether you prefer this message delivered by the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz who said ‘The enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan’ or you like the Nike slogan “Just Do It”…or perhaps you prefer Woody Allen’s famous quote “80% of success is showing up” the message is clear — get off your a*s and make things happen.

So, how can social help you do this? Well, I’m glad you asked. Whether you are running a micro-business or part of a large enterprise, people buy from people and for you to be successful you will need to look like you are better than all of your competitors (notice I said LOOK). Human nature is such that we all jump to conclusions, so your social profiles are there to make people jump to the conclusions that you want.

Look professional. Look experienced. Look like you care and are passionate. Look credible.

• Photos of you with a glass of wine or out clubbing? No.
• Lots of information about the value that you’ve added in all your roles? Yes.
• Blanks spaces that say nothing about you? No.
• Nicely written buyer-centric detail about what I should listen to you? Yes.
• Nothing ever posted? No.
• Regular interesting topical updates that add value to the reader? Yes.

It’s not difficult to do this well. A completed profile, regular updates, half a dozen tweets per day…all of these are well within everyone’s capability…even yours.

There never has been any reasonable excuse for you not to do this…but you haven’t yet done this. So, start the new year as you mean to go on and turn over a new leaf.

And when you think that you wish you had done this last year remember the old Chinese proverb which goes “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today.”

Oh…and one more piece of good news. Most people are dreadful bad at this…so there’s a great opportunity for you to be the best.

Digital Leadership Associates: We are Global Social Media Management Consultancy. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email or call one of us and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

Helping organisations harness the power of social media to achieve breathtaking results.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on January 2, 2018.

By Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia

You know what social media is. Social media is a gift to humanity, social media is a tool to bring people together, social media helps friends keep in touch and businesses to engage and woo their customers. But is social media a platform for campaigns?

Arguably not!

Do you remember a few years ago Waitrose ran a social media campaign called “I shop at Waitrose because…” where they invited their Facebook and Twitter friends to finish the sentence? Clearly, Waitrose is a loved British brand, clearly people feel a certain affinity to Waitrose, but when you offer an opportunity to an almost infinite number of people to finish such a sentence you are, with hindsight, asking for trouble. I still use examples of this campaign, my favourite being, “I shop at Waitrose because…I HATE POOR PEOPLE”!

This week UberEATS offered me an even better example of what happens when something goes wrong.

You do the math

UberEATS has just begun a tie-up with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. To celebrate, they offered a dozen free doughnuts to anyone who downloaded the Uber Eats app (with 36,000 to give away). Great. Except that London has a big population — 9,000,000 at the last count — and pretty much everyone has a smartphone. That’s a big opportunity to disappoint people if you’re not very careful.

So, 2pm and the promotion goes live and everyone who has downloaded the app logs in to claim their free doughnuts. Guess what. The app crashes. And crashes again. And again. Then it’s permanently offline!

So, given that this is the “social age” everyone takes to Twitter and posts about their dissatisfaction and disappointment.

People shared all sorts of topical gags such as, “Dave marked himself as safe during the donut crisis” or, “14th November will forever be known as the donut apocalypse — the day that @UberEATS and @krispykremeUK ruined the lives of office workers around London”. It also spawned a whole new world of animated gifs.

The icing on the doughnut

Rather like the John Lewis campaign of a few years back, with hindsight this should have been foreseen. Actually, you don’t need 20:20 hindsight. You just need common sense! With 36,000 doughnuts to give away (that is in fact only 3,000 boxes) what did they think was going to happen?

So, the long and the short of it is that running smart advertising campaigns can be quite entertaining (if of dubious value these days) and running smart direct marketing campaigns can have huge innovation. But running campaigns on social media is potentially a very bad idea. It’s a bad idea because in an environment with literally hundreds of millions of participants there are bound to be some people who can spot the flaws in your thinking. Or in this case can stress-test your app way beyond breaking point.

Oh, and the icing on the cake (or perhaps I mean “the icing on the doughnut”): they chose to run the campaign on World Diabetes Day!

Digital Leadership Associates: We are Global Social Media Management Consultancy. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email or call one of our founders on 00 44 7823 534 557 and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

Originally published at www.social-experts.net on November 16, 2017.

By Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia

We were talking to a prospective licensee the other day. They are a sales and management training company, and during the conversation they cited some research which shocked me. I mean, it shouldn’t have done because we can all see that the world is moving in this direction, but it certainly was a surprise. It said that,“in North America 50% of those working will be on contract by 2019.”

Yes, that’s right. Half of the workforce will be on a contract or freelance in two years!

This got me to thinking, now more than ever, the importance of having an impressive and appropriate digital personal brand. This probably matters more than anything else you can do in terms of securing work.

Whenever we train individuals on producing a great personal brand we always talk about the fact that people who visit your brand to conclusions. Whether that’s because they see your profile shot shows you on holiday holding a glass of wine (and therefore you have a drink problem) or your profile shot shows you standing on stage in a suit (and therefore you’re a dull but arrogant self-promoter). Whatever it is, the visitor to your profile will see a little and assume a lot.

This is more important now than ever. If the stats are right, the job for which you are competing (in North America) could have half of the entire workforce as your competition. That’s half of the 156,000,000 people who work potentially going for the same job as you.

What does that mean?

Well, it means that you need to “look” pretty special in order to stand-out from the crowd.

So our advice, always, is to tell a story with your profile, make it as interesting a narrative as possible and give the visitor lots of information. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily will read it all. But you must give them the option to read more if they are so minded.

Oh, and make sure you never say or do anything which might bite you. Never tweet, post, share or comment in any way, anywhere, ever if you wouldn’t be prepared to stand by those comments when taken out of context. Time and again we see celebrities being embarrassed by things that they’ve said in response to an emotive issue when they are recounted without the original statement. Basically, if you are not prepared to write it on a t-shirt and stand in the lobby of your prospective employer, don’t write it. Irrespective of your security settings.

But most of all, your personal digital brand needs to reflect who you are and what you’re passionate about. Because who you are is the ONLY USP that you have. If you’re not passionate about what you do, why should I, your employer, client or colleague be passionate about it either?

Digital Leadership Associates: We are Global Social Media Management Consultancy. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email or call one of our founders on 00 44 7823 534 557 and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

Originally published at www.social-experts.net on November 15, 2017.

Many years ago a networking group of which I was a member had a guest speaker along…I must be honest and say that I can’t remember who he was…but I do remember what he said and it has stuck with me for many years since. In fact I have re-cycled it many times (and always said that this great advice isn’t mine…but I can’t remember who’s it is)…so here goes.

In the modern business world there are lots of places you can buy specialist products and services. In the employment world you are not unique. Yes, you are unique as an individual, but not as a skill-set and therefore you are a commodity so the only differentiator is how you act. This guy said “I live my life by these four cornerstones and they have served me well” and it had.

The best thing is that they are really simple and everyone can do them…but, like so much in the business world, despite the fact that everyone CAN do them , most people don’t.

1. Smile — it is amazing how many people are not happy to be dealing with you, a person who appears happy and with a sunny disposition will always be preferable to deal with to someone who is grumpy. So even if you are feeling a bit low…smile.
2. Say please and thank you — another easy one, but it’s amazing how many people don’t. Do it always. Do it often. Not just when someone makes you a coffee, but here…on LinkedIn. When someone views your profile send them a note saying “thank you” when someone comments on your post say “thank you”…it makes you better than the other people around you.
3. Always be on time — sometimes easier said than done, but there is never an excuse for being late. Sorry my train was delayed — you should have left earlier. Sorry my meeting overran — so their meeting was more important than this one? Sorry, the traffic was heavy — you should have thought about that. Why is this so important? Because if you can’t get to this meeting on time what chance have you got of finishing my project on time?
4. Always do what you say you’re going to do — this can be very hard, but if your word is your bond. If you absolutely can be relied upon. If you never fail to deliver…the world is your oyster. So few people are able to do this even if they do manage to do the other things.

So, that’s it. This guy swore blind that his success (and he had made a great deal of money and was working for fun rather than income) was due to following these four mantras.

So go on, give it a try…it might make all the difference!

Digital Leadership Associates: We are Global Social Media Management Consultancy. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email or call one of us and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 14, 2017.

By Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia

Having spent some time working for a large software company I can tell you that customers love the idea of marketing automation. Especially the idea that you can “journey map” your customer experience and work out where the customers/prospects can be influenced in order to nudge them in your direction. Then you switch it on and the business floods in, right?

Wrong.

A huge amount of creative content so that all of the customer interaction points have the appropriate things available to tell the story in a coherent way. This may not sound like a huge amount of work because you already have 20 standard emails that you send, right?

Wrong again!

Getting lost on the journey map

Broadly speaking, journey mapping works by considering “personas” and where you need to engage them to help them on their path to choosing your company.

Persona 1 — Let’s call him Dave — is a 27-year-old male who likes Apple products, lives in the city and cycles to work every morning. He has a good job because he got a good degree and is working his way up in the company. He has high aspirations and loves to travel. He plays football on a Sunday morning. He is single…but has fallen in love with his girlfriend.

So, we consider what things Dave needs to read and on what platforms in order that he starts to like our products more than our competitors. But, because we don’t know everything about Dave’s behaviour we “split test’ each communication. We hope to understand whether he prefers one approach to another: colours, type of photos, time of delivery etc. After a period of time we know how to maximise the returns from the communications we send to our generic “Daves”.

But the journey mapping may have shown us that this “Dave” needs us to talk to him 12 times before he is ready to buy. And, those 12 touches are all going to be split tested. So, that’s 24 different pieces of collateral for that one persona. And there could be many many personas.

Keeping up with your personas

Davina the 32-year-old career girl, John the 38 year old stay at home dad, Josie the 19 year old university student and so on.

There could be hundreds if we were to micro-niche these people in order to optimise the response rate.

That’s hundreds…times…erm…24 pieces of collateral.

So who’s going to pay for this? Who’s going to write it all…and select the photography…and proof it…and approve it? Heavens, we know how difficult it is to get anything approved!

And all this because you wanted to make your life easier. Because you wanted to do less work and get more back.

Now think about GDPR, think about the fact that the data you hold on these personas needs to be encrypted and protected and opted in to!

All this because you wanted to give the impression of personalised communications

It reminds me of the famous story of when Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were filming the thriller Marathon Man. Hoffman, famed for being a “method actor”, plays a character who hasn’t washed or slept for three days. So, in order to get in to the role he doesn’t sleep or wash for three days. On set Olivier was overheard saying to Hoffman, “my dear boy, you really should try acting…it’s a lot easier.”

My point being that if you want to make your prospects think that they are getting personalised communications, why not give them personalised communications. Why not give them…social!

Digital Leadership Associates: We are Global Social Media Management Consultancy. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email or call one of our founders on 00 44 7823 534 557 and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

Picture credit: By Humanrobo — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18947366

Originally published at www.social-experts.net on November 6, 2017.

The other day I was presenting for the day with Alex Low, the head of our UK social selling practice. It was really interesting to see him present the content that I’ve presented many times…and watched Tim present many times too. Although we were up on our feet for 8 hours in front of the delegates and I guess Alex spoke for most of that, there was one thing that he said which really resonated with me…and clearly with the others in the room too.

We were all having a debate about the importance of making sure you put as much content on your social profiles as you possibly can and Alex said “imagine you’re walking down a busy shopping street and you come upon a shop with empty window displays…you’ll just keep on walking because there’s nothing to look at”. I thought this was a fantastic way or articulating why your profile must be complete and engaging and full of content.

Of course, this is not rocket science. Everyone knows that they need to fill-out their profiles as thoroughly as they possibly can because it is a showcase for one’s talents to a truly global market…however, it is amazing how few people do this thoroughly. Perhaps they have a great LinkedIn summary (doubtful!) and perhaps they have some content for a couple of their past jobs…but usually it’s like they’ve run out of steam when they’re working on their profile. They fill out a couple of jobs…but then they don’t bother after that, or they don’t put as much detail in their Twitter profile as they could…or perhaps they aren’t posting content as often as they might.

Be under no illusions, social selling is hard work. It requires you to expend a lot of effort getting your profiles right. It requires you to write a little bit and engage and post every single day. It requires you to write “blogs” or articles like this from time to time. It requires you to possibly step out of your comfort zone.

But in 2018 it is the only game in town. If you are in sales or marketing you will know that the difficulty of reaching people by phone, the competition to be on the RFP list, falling reposing rates of traditional campaigns and the increasingly onerous legislation about how you handle customer data makes social selling (and social marketing) the only place you can go to get an ROI. And given that each of the networks you’re likely to be using has hundreds of millions of active users the argument for embracing this totally is already there.

But it starts with you. It starts with YOUR profile.

This is one of the most fundamental tenets of social selling — your profile (particularly on LinkedIn) must be as good, as full and as engaging as it is possible to be.

So, my question to you is have you done every thing you should/could have done to make your profile as attractive and engaging as possible.

Or are you that empty shop window?

Fortnum & Mason the luxury provisions (and other things now) provider on London’s Piccadilly spend more on each window display than any other shop in the world (or always used to) and they do this for a good reason.

Digital Leadership Associates: We are Global Social Media Management Consultancy. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email or call one of us and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

Helping organisations harness the power of social media to achieve breathtaking results.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on November 3, 2017.

By Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia

In the sales world, there seems to be an ongoing battle between “social selling’ and “traditional selling” people. Social sellers believe (generally) that traditional selling techniques are dead and that they are no longer relevant. Traditional sellers on the other hand believe that social selling is a fad and will pass and that the “old ways” of building rapport and “closing” are still the way to achieve success.

Both sides of the argument are wrong of course!

Social selling enables salespeople to create opportunities, to turn cold leads in to warm leads, to open more dialogues with more people more easily. However, if you can’t run a meeting, close a prospect and push through the commercials then all of that prospecting will have been a waste of time.

The two skills need to co-exist in harmony because social selling without the ability to close business is really just marketing. And an amazing ability to make friends and close business is totally wasted if you can’t find anyone to take your calls.

So why do I say that “anyone can be brilliant at social selling”?

Well, because social selling is a process as much as anything else. It requires the person wanting to become a social seller to do things differently, to create an appealing persona and to be visible. The basic steps are well documented (and pretty obvious).

1. Create an appealing personal brand — at Digital Leadership Associates we often talk about people “jumping to conclusions” and that’s what a visitor to your profile will do. They won’t read what you write. They will read what they THINK you have written and there’s a big difference. You need to consider in your most cynical way whether a buyer really wants to read your CV or whether the fact you are a “tenacious salesperson” is going to make them want to pick up the phone to you! “Buyer centric” is Tim’s term for this. Is your profile written to engage the buyer?
2. Grow your network — there’s no point in having a huge number of connections if nobody ever notices you (we see that a lot). Once you have created your profile, and only once you have, you should start to connect to people in a charming and interesting way. DO NOT SPAM THEM. Just connect with them to make your network bigger. If you have the right profile and the right approach it’s amazing how many of them will ask to talk to you.
3. Look like an expert — on an ongoing basis you need to be finding and writing articles about what it is that you sell. You need to appear like the obvious choice for people who are lost and want to buy, to come to for help and advice. If every day you are publishing (or finding) great pieces which are helping the buyer to make the right decisions, you WILL become the preferred supplier.
4. Persevere — “the more I practice the luckier I get” said Greg Norman. The same is true here. If you publish more. If you share good content more. You are maximising the serendipity of people spotting you at the moment they are ready to buy. It may happen on day one. It may not happen for a while. But rest assured it WILL happen if you do things right.
5. Persevere — I know that was the last point as well, but keeping going is the hardest part. Everyone can (with help) write a good profile. Everyone can easily grasp the principles. EVERYONE can easily find 30 minutes every single day…7 days/week…365days/year…to become a social selling expert for their business…

But most people won’t. Most people will stop whilst just on the verge of success.

The best example of social selling there is

I often hold up my co-founder Tim as the best example of how to persevere.

He is a great salesman. He has spent most of his career selling large deals to large businesses. He’s a clever, smart and motivated man. A few years ago he decided that he wanted to “own” Social Selling (You could own — HR for Women, AI in marketing transformation, or whatever the niche is that you want to own) so he set about doing it.

He began to write about and tweet and share content about social selling. Now, six years on he is the world’s number one. By such a large margin that he has a 35% share of voice on the subject, meaning that every other person in the world who talks about social selling put together only gets twice the coverage that Tim does by himself. Every day he gets “inbound” from people wanting to talk to him about it (and we have built our business on this) and every week he gets an offer to fly, business class, to another country, and get a fee for speaking on the subject.

He has achieved this amazing feat though just one attribute. Perseverance. He has kept on writing and tweeting and speaking and sharing and engaging where others have just given up and stopped.

That could be you. You could be a thought leader and an influencer and expert. You know what you need to do. So do it.

Digital Leadership Associates: We are a Social Media Agency. We do three things: Social Media Strategy, Social Selling and Social Media Management. Drop us an email and let’s talk about how we can make an impact on your organisation.

Originally published at www.social-experts.net on October 31, 2017.

Over the weekend I was doing some maintenance around the house and needed to use some expanding foam filler, which is amazing stuff. It fills gaps easily and quickly. It cures to form a layer which can be sawn and painted. It fills all of those nooks and crannies where it would be impossible to use wood filler. It’s a quick and easy fix and it requires almost no skill whatsoever to use. Sadly though it doesn’t last very long. If you fix something with expanding foam filler you will probably be re-fixing it every year from then on.

It seems that many businesses think that social media is the business equivalent of expanding form filler. Quick, easy and of little long term benefit.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Social media is anything but a short term fix.

There are elements of a social media programme that can yield very speedy results — social selling or social customer service for example, but a full-scale social transformation is time consuming and frankly quite difficult. However, unlike expanding foam filler, it IS a long-lasting solution. Embracing social media across your organisation will yield increases in sales, visibility and share of voice and decreases in costs. It will be easier to hire and retain good staff and it will make the whole enterprise run more smoothly and these are not short-term fixes, these are instead a permanent change to the working practices of any enterprise.

Social touches so many parts of an organisation: Customer interactions such as sales, marketing, customer service. Internal communications. Externalising culture through employee advocacy. Business processes such as social recruitment, social outreach, research, brand, reputation management…that a wholesale adoption of social media cannot fail but to have a dramatic effect and remember that organisations are about people…and social media is about people so the synergy is self evident.

About the Author

However, within most organisations there is a fundamental inertia and resistance to change. Particularly with something that is perceived (albeit wrongly) as being so risky. Which is why it’s crucial to have top-level buy-in, a strong strategic understanding of the importance of this change and a clear roadmap to get from there the organisation is to the place of social nirvana!

Digital Leadership Associates

What we are seeing is that with changes in behaviour, and changes in legislation, that many of the accepted channels for generating sales and keeping in touch with customers simply don’t work…or aren’t allowed any longer. Enabling a business for social really is future proofing it…and it’s probably something that your business should be looking at.

Adam Gray is co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates a company that provides support and guidance in all areas of Social media. Adam is known as one of the key straits experts on the social media arena having worked with many of the Fortune/FTSE companies and can be contacted on Twitter @agsocialmedia or adam@social-experts.net.

Digital Leadership Associates is a consultancy that helps companies move to digital and social. Set up by Social Selling guru and bestselling author, Tim Hughes @timothy_hughes and myself.

Digital Leadership Associates is a team of world-leading Social Media experts. We bring a breadth of experience honed by working with some of the world’s biggest brands to you, delivering a shortcut to your social journey. We help you to achieve your key business goals through three unique programs; Social Strategy definition and implementation, Social Selling training and mentoring and Social Presence management. We will help you define a Social Media strategy and whole-business understanding of your social vision, we equip your sales team with the tools and knowledge to become skilled at Social Selling and we offer deliver partial/whole management of your social presence.

DLA provides advice and guidance to companies, given by actual Social practitioners, that is people with actual experience in social media, social and digital transformations. Check out our website or contact me at adam@social-experts.net.

Helping organisations harness the power of social media to achieve breathtaking results.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on October 30, 2017.

When I was young I thought, as do many people, that in order to be liked…and loved…and successful what I needed was to “mirror” the people I was interacting with. Well, in fact it was less about mirroring and more about simply trying to be what I thought they wanted me to be.

As I’ve got older I’ve realised that this is not a very good idea. The problem is that no matter how much I tried to deliver what I thought people wanted, it never seemed to be what they actually DID want.

For many years I grappled with why this should be the case…and nowadays, working with people developing their own personal brands, it’s easy to see that they too are going through the same crisis of confidence that I once had.

The most obvious illustration of this is when I work with people to help them write their LinkedIn profile. They write in the third person, or the write using “business speak” or they write about how they add value or mentor people…and they are missing the point, they truly are. The point is (and we have said this before) that people simply don’t care. People don’t want to be sold to. People don’t want to listen to you telling them the same thing that they’ve heard from the last 40 people with whom they’ve had a conversation. What people want and need is authentic honest human interaction.

Of course, as we get older we all realise that the most attractive thing that we have to offer is who we truly are. Even with our neuroses, our mistakes, our skills gaps and our failings we are infinitely more engaging and desirable than we are when we pretend that we’re perfect. The authenticity of being who we really are is our most powerful and important weapon in both business and life.

At Digital Leadership Associates we have been working with a new partner/licensee over the past few days and one of the team there (who I shan’t call-out for the moment) wrote a new summary section to their profile on LinkedIn. A summary which embraced their life, who they were and what they could…and couldn’t do. And, the results are really quite breathtaking. Honestly, it made me (and Tim) tear-up! As a result of the brilliant piece of work they are getting more engagement, they are getting more connections, they are even starting to get inbound.

About the Author

Digital Leadership Associates

So, what should you do? You should be yourself. Embrace your strengths (and weaknesses) and make sure that you are authentic because even with all of your faults and fears…it’s a lot better than the one dimensional creation that most people have as their personal brand.

Adam Gray is co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates a company that provides support and guidance in all areas of Social media. Adam is known as one of the key straits experts on the social media arena having worked with many of the Fortune/FTSE companies and can be contacted on Twitter @agsocialmedia or adam@social-experts.net.

Digital Leadership Associates is a consultancy that helps companies move to digital and social. Set up by Social Selling guru and bestselling author, Tim Hughes @timothy_hughes and myself.

Digital Leadership Associates is a team of world-leading Social Media experts. We bring a breadth of experience honed by working with some of the world’s biggest brands to you, delivering a shortcut to your social journey. We help you to achieve your key business goals through three unique programs; Social Strategy definition and implementation, Social Selling training and mentoring and Social Presence management. We will help you define a Social Media strategy and whole-business understanding of your social vision, we equip your sales team with the tools and knowledge to become skilled at Social Selling and we offer deliver partial/whole management of your social presence.

DLA provides advice and guidance to companies, given by actual Social practitioners, that is people with actual experience in social media, social and digital transformations. Check out our website or contact me at adam@social-experts.net.

Helping organisations harness the power of social media to achieve breathtaking results.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on October 16, 2017.

In the last two years I have been to more places for business than during the rest of my life: USA, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Turkey, Australia, Ireland…and in a few weeks I’m off to Canada.

It’s tiring travelling for business but it’s incredibly rewarding to see the world and to meet people from other countries and cultures for work rather than as a tourist, because it gives you a much more lifelike snapshot of what these people are actually like and what the culture actually means.

I have some thoughts based on travelling east and west, to developed and developing countries and to places that are free…and places that are not so free. These are my conclusions:

1. people are people. Whether I’m in San Francisco, Stuttgart or Kuwait City, people like to chat, people like to go out for dinner and people like to visit Starbucks (where invariably the barista writes the wrong name on your cup). So people interact in the same way irrespective of the regime in their country or their religion or their seniority…you just need an open mind. Which brings me on to…
2. don’t believe everything you read. Of all the places I travelled the one that surprised me the most was Saudi Arabia. I went with an expectation that it would be a terrible place where I would fear for my life and the zealots within the country would be offended by who I am and the fact my views are different from theirs. Nothing could have been further from the truth, they were charming people. Friendly, welcoming and helpful and I didn’t meet a single person who didn’t fit this description. Yes, I missed having a beer at the end of the day, but it certainly wasn’t the place that the news had led me to believe it was.
3. cultural differences don’t make business difficult. If you have a good product/service and the prospect you’re talking to wants it because they think it will add value you can make a sale. The differences in culture will not really effect the dynamics of business nor the fundamental nature of people wanting to achieve more results with less effort/money/risk…that is true of every country and culture.
4. be courteous and charming…but a little bit cheeky! Do not offend people when you visit their country because you are a guest. You’re beliefs and behaviour should always be tempered but good manners and common sense. That doesn’t mean though that you can’t crack the odd joke and have a bit of fun. Most of the people I have met don’t mind a bit of gentle ribbing about the difference between them and you, and when travelling, one of the key USPs that you have is that you are NOT just like the other people there.

So, why am I saying all this? Well, the fact of the mater is that we live in an increasingly global world and you might well have to sell your products and services overseas.

At Digital Leadership Associates we are a small (but growing) business and we have a licensee in North America and we hope to have one in Australia and in France shortly. We’ve worked in the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany America, Australia and Malaysia and we’re only just over a year old. We have seen that there is a global market for what we do…and there’s probably a global market for what you do too.

An attractive proposition is an attractive proposition…it really is as simple as that.

About the Author

Adam Gray is co-founder of Digital Leadership Associates a company that provides support and guidance in all areas of Social media. Adam is known as one of the key straits experts on the social media arena having worked with many of the Fortune/FTSE companies and can be contacted on Twitter @agsocialmedia or adam@social-experts.net.

Digital Leadership Associates

Digital Leadership Associates is a consultancy that helps companies move to digital and social. Set up by Social Selling guru and bestselling author, Tim Hughes @timothy_hughes and myself.

Digital Leadership Associates is a team of world-leading Social Media experts. We bring a breadth of experience honed by working with some of the world’s biggest brands to you, delivering a shortcut to your social journey. We help you to achieve your key business goals through three unique programs; Social Strategy definition and implementation, Social Selling training and mentoring and Social Presence management. We will help you define a Social Media strategy and whole-business understanding of your social vision, we equip your sales team with the tools and knowledge to become skilled at Social Selling and we offer deliver partial/whole management of your social presence.

DLA provides advice and guidance to companies, given by actual Social practitioners, that is people with actual experience in social media, social and digital transformations. Check out our website or contact me at adam@social-experts.net.

Helping organisations harness the power of social media to achieve breathtaking results.

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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on September 26, 2017.