Why social selling isn't just marketing
Timothy "Tim" Hughes 提姆·休斯 L.ISP
Should have Played Quidditch for England
I read a recent post on Linkedin that social selling = marketing. Really?
The person hasn't a clue!
Anybody that reads my blogs will know that social selling is the complete spectrum of sales, from prospecting, yes, right through to closing.
If you do read people that say "social selling = marketing" then I give you permission to leave a comment saying the person does not know what they are talking about. You can mention my name if you want.
Why social selling isn't just about marketing
There are 3 key elements to social selling:-
1. Your social media profile. This is your shop window to the world and it is from this that the online buyer sees you as either somebody to help them or they move on to your competition. Obviously having a great profile is important, which is why we teach and coach you to have a great profile as part of our social selling and influence course.
2. The second element, is your network. It stands to reason that if you want to influence and sell to people in accounts, you need to be connected to them. Please, please, please don't spam people or pitch at people when you grow your network. Don't forget that LinkedIn allows you to connect to 100 people a week, that's 100 reasons to have conversations. And conversations create sales.
3. The third element of social selling is content. We know that the modern buyer is online looking for insight, they are looking to be educated, they are looking to be entertained. Now, regardless of what marketing tells you the brochures and brochureware they ask you to share on social. Buyers are not looking for these, so don't share them. In our social selling and influence course we teach and coach you how to create content. Content that engages and content that will enable you to have conversations. And conversations create sales, right!
Social selling is all about sales
1. Social selling allows you to prospect as a salesperson, in our social selling and influence course, we teach and coach you how to master outbound prospecting using social. We also coach you so you get inbound. Inbound is important to any salesperson, as the more pipeline you have the better, as a salesperson it gives you choices.
2. Even before prospecting our social selling and influence course will give you the skills to be invited into deals early by clients. Sitting on the top table, will enable you to control the sale, giving you a clear competitive advantage.
3. Social selling allows you to accelerate your pipeline at scale. Our social selling and influence course will allow you to shorten the sales cycle of deals. Once you have prospected a client and had that first meeting you need to nurture them and you need to remain front of mind with the client.
On social, you will have connected with your prospects, you will have connected to multiple people across your target business. If you use team selling, you will have multi-people from you company connected to multi-people in the prospect and you will "wave" at then every day with great informative content.
In the past, the only way you could be front and centre of client is to annoy them with calls and emails.
Here you can nurture them with relevant content. You can, of course, join conversation with different people across the prospect and start conversations. It is this flexibility, at scale, that will reduce sales cycles.
4. You can use social selling to reduce ghosting by clients. Something that has become more and more popular, by creating a "grid" of contacts and advocates within an account, you will find that the client cannot ghost you, of if they do you have multiple contacts.
5. You can also use social selling to close business. Just think, you write an article with the business case for a typical client, your prospects, you are your contacts are going to read it. If you write a compelling piece of content, this is going to drive them to close.
It's all the same methodology, it's not different methodologies for different sales stages. We teach you to do this in our social selling and influence course.
Probably why we can increase revenue by 30% and reduce sales cycles by 40%.
Ask us to show you how we connect social media with revenue and profit.
Every keystroke you make on social, should be, and can be connected with revenue and profit.
So who's doing this?
In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.
But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.
"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"
The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.
“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”
Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.
If this article has been useful and you think it would be helpful to your network or individuals then please share it. Please also tag in the individuals.
Other articles you might be interested in ....
Articles for the CEO
Articles for Sales leadership
Recommended by LinkedIn
Articles to support sales people - sales process and sales tips
Articles to support channel and third party selling
Articles to support Account Based Marketing / Account Based Selling - ABM - ABS
Articles about Employee advocacy
Articles for Marketing
Should you outsource your social media?
Articles for social procurement
Articles for the CFO and Finance
I help sales teams use LinkedIn Live Shows & podcasts for sales outreach, brand building and prospecting. | Founder x 7 } Host Mastering Modern Selling | Founder, Fist Bump “Revenue Through Reputation” book coming soon.
3yMy favorite is the direct statement that social selling is NOT marketing. Yet, so many marketing departments just want the sales team to share marketing posts. 🤦🏼♂️ Sales is always about conversations and relationships. Great article Timothy (Tim) Hughes 提姆·休斯
Life is better with a Guide. Special Needs Parent and Fanatic Fly Fisherman. Helping business owners love their business and their life through value acceleration
3yTimothy (Tim) Hughes 提姆·休斯 my favorite part is that of generating your own inbound and getting choices. This is something that is so often overlooked when evaluating whether or not to do strategic social. When the #salesperson is generating their own inbound they have the ability to focus on the best opportunities for a given time and match the buying process of their prospects.
“At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” CXAC (Cert) Customer Experience
3y🔥Timothy. Many think they know what it is. Others attach personality, strategy and revenue to the activity. 👍
Creating safe spaces to enable individuals and teams to learn, grow and develop. When not doing that cycling, reading and drinking wine...
3yThanks Timothy especially for the clarity around the 3 elements to social selling.
Want consistent and engaging content? Researched, Written and Done FOR YOU - Ghostwriter for small business owners - LinkedIn content, newsletters and blogs.
3yAn excellent article, thank you for writing it 😀 I'm piecing it together!