The Naveen Jindal School of Management’s Center for Professional Sales hosted social-selling professional Mario Martinez Jr., CEO of San Francisco-based M3Jr Growth Strategies, a social selling training company, as the keynote speaker at its Spring Sales Awards Banquet.
Dr. Howard Dover, director of the center and of JSOM’s Professional Sales Concentration, introduced Martinez to open the awards banquet held April 28 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Richardson. The banquet recognized award winners and scholarship recipients for the past year.
Martinez spent 20 years in sales — 18 of them in corporate sales — before starting his company. He instructs marketers, sales reps and business owners on how to grow revenue by developing a strong personal brand and to attract buyers by using social networks.
Martinez is in demand as a speaker and has been featured in Forbes and INC. magazines and is a contributor to several publications including Social Media Today and the Huffington Post.
Building a personal brand, which is crucial in social selling, was the focus of his program at the awards banquet.
“Your digital profile must build credibility,” he said. “Transform your online profile into a buyers’ resource page, show how you solve problems and create conversations with buyers.”
A good way to start building a compelling personal brand is to Google your name, he said. “What does your brand say about you? You need to know, because buyers are going to look you up. I once interviewed with a company that asked my permission to access my social media accounts.”
He pointed out that buyers today are digitally enabled; mobile attached (taking their phones or tablets with them everywhere), and video hungry.
“The use of videos online to attract buyers is vital, because the human voice can hold emotion and the human brain is hard-wired to trust the human face,” he said. “In 2011, 69 percent of internet use was videos, by 2018, 70 percent will be videos.”
Martinez provided eight steps to building a compelling personal brand:
1. Decide who you want to be online. “Choose two to five social personas. If all you do is talk about one thing, you’ll wear your buyer out,” he said.
2. Use consistency across all social profiles.
3. Make your social media sites are buyer centric.
4. Follow and study the buying community.
5. Always offer help and provide value to your buyers.
6. Engage with your buyers the way they want to be engaged.
7. Feed your network.
8. Move every conversation offline.
“You are the CEO of Me Inc,” he said. “The only thing that truly sets you apart is you and (in sales), our job is to make things unequal. Make sure you don’t do what is normal, and don’t let your brand suck.”
