Break Through the Hype of Social Selling

 In July, Forrester released an interesting report, Break Through the Hype of Social Selling. As you might imagine, I have a few things to say about it.

First, some background: I spent years helping to create a new category (marketing automation) and that time serves me well in understanding the hype around social selling.

When new tools emerge, the natural reaction is to buy the bright shiny object and avoid the hard work of strategy, plan, and tactics. From this work, you then build a roadmap that should emerge in this order:

1) Mindset: cultivate the right way of thinking among your teams

2) Skillset: use training, coaching and mentoring to show your team members how to actually do what you are asking them.

3) Toolkit: give your teams the tools they need to do their jobs.

Here’s the problem: many companies skip all the stuff upfront and just start with #3.

That’s a recipe for failure. A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Without giving away too much from Forrester’s report, I’d like to share a few choice bits and pieces. For example, I especially liked this observation:

A common thread across all of the social selling programs we assessed for this report was that social selling was not presented by marketing professionals as a mandate, but instead was developed over time until the sales team embraced these tactics as an effective and efficient way to contribute to their sales objectives.

That makes good sense, assuming that the “develop over time” part starts with cultivating the right mindset, which is: helping, not selling. Nobody wants to be sold, but everyone wants help. People who serve more, sell more.

Without the right mindset, sales teams will use old school tactics in new school channels.

Old school: Smile & Dial / Pounce & Pitch / Always Be Closing

New school:  Reach & Reach / Educate & Engage / Always Be Connecting

I also endorse Forrester’s guidance that you “start by determining how your buyers use social channels”. It’s very hard to use Instagram for a social selling effort that seeks to reach medical malpractice attorneys. You must look at things through your customers’ eyes!

One more positive: these veteran analysts inject a welcome dose of reality into their suggestions, saying, “If you are in the repair stage, pilot a program and learn from it…. you are in ‘startup mode’ and need to get the fundamentals in place.”

They mean if your reps don’t know how to sign in to LinkedIn or understand what “tweeting” means, take it slowly. Give them the basics first, and find a few professionals among your team who are social media savvy and eager to engage in a test program.

To a much greater degree than any marketing or sales movement that preceded it, social selling requires a high degree of personal initiative. To succeed, it must involve individuals sharing with other individuals, not just individuals sharing what their company told them to share.

If there is an inherent bias with the Forrester report and most others from analyst firms, it is the tendency to stress corporate strategic actions above the power of individuals. By all means, arm your sales teams with great content, continuous training, and useful tools. But never, ever forget that it is the personal initiative, creativity and insights of your team members that make social selling effective.

It takes personal initiative to shift the focus from your company, your product, your quota (ME, ME, ME) to your customer, your customer's needs, and your customer's business outcomes (#CustomerCenteredCentricObsessed).

When you skip - or minimize - the Mindset and Skillset stages, you create a social selling program that lacks any heart. It will end up being little more than another corporate marketing effort that disappointed.

People - not tools, not strategy, and not hype - are at the core of every successful social selling effort.

Jill Rowley delivers keynotes, strategy sessions and workshops on Social Selling. Always Be Connecting! Your network is Your net worth.