Review a month of activity and set your plan for the next 90 days.
On the last working day of each month, set aside about 45 minutes to check what your social selling brought in and how long each activity took. Without that check, you keep posting, commenting, messaging and asking for referrals at the same level indefinitely, including the activities that bring in nothing.
The review you set up now runs every month from here on. The first one also does a second job: you use it to write your plan for the next 90 days. So you produce two things, a one-page monthly review and a 90-day plan.
Before you start, gather the measures from Lesson 8.1, "Measures that matter and vanity numbers", the source-tagged contacts from Lesson 8.2, "Tag every lead with its source", and your trackers from modules 4 and 6.
Write down the five measures for the month just ended, and beside them the same five for the month before. If this is your first month of tracking, there is nothing to compare with yet. Record the numbers anyway. They become your baseline, the first month's figures that later months are measured against.
Then look at what moved. One month is a small sample, so don't read much into a change of one or two. Note the big moves, and anything that has gone the same direction for two or three months running.
Return on time is what an activity brought in divided by the time you put into it. For social selling, the most useful version is meetings booked per hour spent, or the number of hours it took to produce one meeting.
You need two figures for each activity. You estimate the hours yourself. The meetings come from the source field on your contacts. Divide hours by meetings to get hours per meeting for each one.
Wei Ling (an invented example), whose prospects include practice managers, logged one month like this:
Posting: 4 hours of writing, 1 meeting, so 4 hours per meeting. Daily commenting: 15 minutes a day over 20 working days, which is 5 hours, for 3 meetings, about 1 hour 40 minutes per meeting. Referral asks and introductions: 2 hours, 3 meetings, about 40 minutes per meeting. A client breakfast: 6 hours including planning and follow-up, 2 meetings, 3 hours per meeting.
Her total was 17 hours and 9 meetings for the month, up from 6 meetings the month before. Referral asks had the best return by a wide margin, and posting had the worst.
Two cautions apply before you act on numbers like these. First, meetings are not deals. As months of data build up, also check which sources turn into deals. Second, some activities feed others. Wei Ling's posts may have helped practice managers accept her connection requests, and her breakfast fed her referral list. Use return on time to adjust the mix, and be slow to drop any activity entirely.
Take your best-return activity and set a target to do more of it. Wei Ling had asked for referrals at only 3 of the moments on her list from Lesson 5.1, "Referrals come from moments, not from asking more often". Her target is to ask at every one.
For your worst-return activity, decide whether to cut it or change it. Cutting suits an activity that costs a lot of time and still shows no sign of working after a few months. Changing suits an activity where you can see what is wrong. Wei Ling reread her posts and found none ended with a question or an invitation to reply. She kept posting weekly but changed the format, and will check next month whether it helped.
Your own numbers may point somewhere else. Arjun works with couples and spends time commenting on finance writers' posts. His couples responded well to his first event, so his 90-day plan puts more weight on events and less on that commenting.
The plan covers the four areas of the course: content, engagement, referrals and events. Each target is one line with a number you can check at the end of the quarter. For content, say how often you will post and what you will change. For engagement, give your daily routine and the number of conversations you aim to start. For referrals, give the number of asks and which moments you will use. For events, say yes or no for the quarter, with a rough date.
Wei Ling's plan reads: one post a week, each ending with a question; commenting every working day, aiming for ten new conversations over the quarter; a referral ask at every moment on her list, aiming for at least twelve asks; one client breakfast pencilled in for the second month.
Then put a recurring calendar reminder on the last working day of each month to rerun the review. The final project asks for a review like this at the end of 60 days, so treat this first one as a practice run for it.
Your finished page has three parts, top to bottom. First come the five measures, this month and last month side by side. Below that is return on time for each activity, with the hours and meetings behind it, the best and worst activity named, and the action for each. At the bottom is the 90-day plan with targets for content, engagement, referrals and events. The activity below asks you to write it.
Write a one-page review of this month with your measures, then a 90-day plan for content, engagement, referrals and events.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).