Investment
I’ve been talking about “Investment” on Facebook for awhile now.
“The #1 Rule of Investment is to only invest where you’ll get a return worthy of your investment.”
While I seldom invest more than a few hundred dollars in Facebook advertising every month, I have invested a significant chunk of my time — which is far more valuable than my money because you can always make more money, but you can’t make more time.
When I talk about investing my time, I’m talking about getting my message in front of as many salespeople, sales managers, and owners as possible. After all, the more people you reach, the more people you help. If you don’t reach them, you can’t teach them.
Many of you have already invested in at least one of my sales training products (Getting Started and/or Sales Domination System), paid for one-on-one coaching, or are a member in my private roofing leads program.
Additionally, I’m constantly pumping out 100% FREE training right here on this website, in my roofing leads newsletter, and through social media sites like Facebook. I love helping salespeople. I remember what it was like to struggle. I want to see you succeed.
Bad Returns
The biggest reason why new salespeople quit knocking on doors is because they quit making sales.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you’re not getting the return on your investment that you think you should, you quit investing there.
Lately, Facebook has been a bad return on my investment of time. It’s too bad, too.
For a few years, Facebook was a good investment of my time because it put my message in front of a few hundred (or thousand) salespeople every single time I posted something new — and I was posting a lot because it was reaching a lot of people. The Facebook Page grew from a few hundred “Likes” to now over two thousand people.
A funny thing happened along the way…
As the number of people who Liked the page continued to increase, the number of people Facebook showed my posts to decreased. A post that would have reached several hundred salespeople a year ago is now only reaching a few dozen folks.
For instance, I posted this quick sales tip earlier this morning. As you can see from the picture below, the post was only shown to a total of 30 people in the first 4 hours of it going live on Facebook. (It was liked by 4 very cool, totally awesome, amazing salespeople!)
Do you see where the post says, “30 people reached”?
You might say, “Well, it didn’t really take you that long to write one, single sentence!”
You would be right about that. It didn’t take me long to write out that one sentence, but it did take me some amount of time — time that I could have invested elsewhere for a greater return. It takes time for me to take care of the Facebook page.
Some days I write a little. Some days I write a lot. One thing is for sure, seldom a day goes by where I haven’t invested my time communicating with the people who like the Roofing Salesman page.
Compare the number of people reached in the image above with this post from right after Christmas a few months ago:
Do you see where this post says, “223 people reached”?
Obviously, it didn’t take me long to crank out that post either but you can see where it reached 7X as many people.
If you’re going to go out door knocking for the day, would you rather have 2-3 people answer the door, all day long, or would you rather have 7X as many people answer the door and talk to you?
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Remember the rule about getting free stuff on the internet: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product!”
The data that Facebook collects on their users isn’t just shoved under a rock and forgotten. Every time you like, share, click, scroll, share, or comment on a post, they are collecting that data and bundling it together for somebody to buy in some form or fashion. You are the product. I am the product!
In all fairness to Facebook, they never charged me to host the Roofing Salesman page and communicate with salespeople all over America. They did it for free. I wrote the content, posted the videos, and shared my experiences without having to give them my credit card information.
I didn’t pay them a dime… but I have paid dearly in my time… and my time is valuable because once it’s spent, I’ll never get it back.
My wife will swear that every word I’m about to tell you is the whole truth and nothing but the truth: Some of my longer Facebook posts take me several hours to get the words just right. I have often invested an entire evening writing a fresh article to post on this website. And my newsletters… you don’t even want to know how much time I’ve poured into some of those suckers.
Obviously, not everything I kick out takes me forever to produce but when I do put something out there to help salespeople, I sure as heck want as many of you as possible to benefit from what I’m producing. When it’s posted on Facebook and reaches 200 out of 2,000, that’s pretty bad. However, it’s even worse when it only reaches 30 out of 2,000. Right?
New Direction
I’m not saying I’m going to completely drop Facebook.
They still have some value, but my time is better invested writing another new article to post on this website or hammering out another great newsletter for my platinum newsletter subscribers. However, I am going to go a new direction and invest less of my time with Facebook.
One last thing, many salespeople have told me how much they enjoy my “walking around” videos I post on Facebook. Facebook is a lot easier to upload video to than uploading to YouTube. I can usually upload a 2-minute video to Facebook in less than 2 minutes. It’s easy and painless. However, uploading a 2-minute video to YouTube could take 30-40 minutes… or all morning long.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if the video never makes it into your news feed.
I need to come up with a better way to publish those videos.
Any ideas?
Peace,
Mike
P.S. If you haven’t read, “Good Buyers Make Better Sellers,” you need to go read it now. Everything you do in life is an investment. If you don’t like what you’re getting in return for your time or money, quit doing it.
Mike Coday
Mike started selling roofs in '95 while working as a youth pastor at a small church in North Texas. A decade later he transitioned to speaking at industry conferences and training outside sales teams. Today, he works exclusively as the premier consultant to roofing company owners who are driven for growth.Download this FREE special report now to make more money selling roofs.
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