Approaching Spaces, Strategies to Optimize Your 30 Minutes on Stage
We’ve talked about leveraging social channels in outreach, being a reply guy, and now it’s time to dive deeper on the next best social selling strategy to leverage on X. Selling through Spaces!
This image is an example
There isn’t a better live forum today where you can directly engage with your prospect on social media than X Spaces. Obviously, face-to-face interactions beat out social media experiences but those are very limited and constrained to events or harder to schedule IRL meetings. This is why I like to leave my notifications on and know when one of my prospects is on a live stage.
Not only is it helpful to sit in and listen for key sound bites you can leverage in outreach, but joining the conversation should be your #1 goal whenever you enter a ‘Spaces’ with one or more of your prospects. You want to make them aware of your existence to validate that you are indeed a real person and that your emails are not spam.
Let’s imagine for a minute that your best-case scenario comes to fruition, you joined the ‘Spaces’ and were accepted on stage. What do you do now? How do you draw lines from the current topic to your solution?
The key to it all is being authentic. The prospect is either on the stage to talk about their product or enjoy a late night conversation. Not to be sold to! Even though sometimes you’ll join a Space that is talking about a similar topic or problem that your solution solves and you can share your expertise as a part of the current conversation (these are gold). Most of the time this isn’t the case.
During the 80% of Spaces where directly selling your product isn’t an option, you should aim to be genuinely interested in the conversation. Let your prospect talk, like it says in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, ‘Encourage others to talk about themselves.’ Allowing people to feel heard in an open forum, enables you to not only learn even more about what they value but also allows you to be portrayed as a ‘fan’. Your goal isn’t to get them to say ‘yes’ to your product live, rather your goal should be to score time with them. You can do that by seeming genuinely interested in what they’re doing, asking great questions, and letting your prospect know that you’d love to learn more at another time. You’ll find that most people love to talk about themselves, and will frequently do so for hours. Use that to your advantage.
When talking, you can insert small lines like, ‘Would love to talk about this at depth later on’, to tee up further conversation, but what’s most important is following up. After the spaces make sure you are seen! A good tactic is to follow up with an important sound bite from the conversation and ask to learn more about it over a call. From here, you're off to the races!
Follow along here and on X if you’re interested in learning more about navigating sales in our increasingly digital world
