If you Sell Social Selling – For !@£$s Sake, Be a Social Seller

2018-09-11 15:09
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by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn

Picture the scene

You are standing in front of 10 salespeople, all with amazing track records and 20 years overachievement.  You mission is to convince them to embrace social selling.

As you stand in front of them and start, in whatever way you have decided to complete your mission.

What will happen next is this.

One of the sales people will reach for their laptop, open it up, open a web browser, bring up LinkedIn and look you up.  Yes, if you are going to stand in front of people and convince them that they can do $ Million deals (and we have clients that are) on social, you had better be good at social.

What do you think happens if they find a LinkedIn profile that is: written in the third person, boastful, 18 months since you have written an article, very little content on any previous job, outbound links not tidied-up, and surprisingly…very few recommendations!?

Do you think this is the guy who should be laying down the law about how to use social?

No, of course it’s not.

As the sales guy shows the rest of the team your profile, that’s it, 10 minutes in and you’ve lost the audience.  Time to get your coat! 

I’m sorry but people who post about social selling and position themselves as social selling experts have to lead from the front, be the high water mark of social selling.  I find it strange that “social selling companies” use advertising (or cold calling) to sell their products.  It’s like saying, what you sell doesn’t work!

Everybody who works for Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) www.social-experts.nettake pride in setting an example over social media and social selling.  When we stand in from of people to coach and mentor them in social selling, social marketing, social human resources etc, we use our own profiles examples.  We have an internal culture, so that if people don’t think we are meeting the high quality that our clients would expect then we can challenge each other.

(I’ve just been told on Slack about a number of typos in a blog I’ve just written, nice to know, somebody is watching your back.)

Somebody said to me yesterday that “most companies had a failed social selling program” they then went on and added “so why do all yours work?”.  Nice complement and 100% true.

Why?  We have discussed our “secret sauce” many times in our blogs, but one of the reasons is we are our own reference site. Eat our own dog food as the American’s say.

We are a social company, we don’t do any outbound marketing.  No cold calling, no advertising, no email (we deleted our email database due to GDPR).  All of our business comes through inbound or referrals.  We 100% practice what we preach and if you were going to pick a social selling company, that should be one of your buying criteria.  But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

People who read this article also read these:

http://www.social-experts.net/social-selling-is-a-bacon-roll-for-your-business/

http://www.social-experts.net/6-ways-to-gain-influence-with-b2b-buyers/

http://www.social-experts.net/simple-and-easy-are-not-the-same-thing/

 

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AVANTAGEHeadquarters
Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via empowerment.
OUR LOCATIONSWhere to find us
https://dlaignite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/img-footer-map.png
GET IN TOUCHAvantage Social links
Taking seamless key performance indicators offline to maximise the long tail.