What are your social selling barriers and how do you overcome them?

Overcoming barriers boils down to having clarity on your goals, knowing your strenghts and weeknesses. Based on that you can upskill yourself and try to bridge the gap as soon as possible

Top performers know that winning business with social selling is about multiple touchpoints BEFORE every asking for a meeting or offering your services. If you have no plan, you will fail to do create those multiple touchpoints. Typically it takes 7-8 touchpoints to get a meeting booked with a prospect, so if you have no plan or approach social selling erratically you will not be able to build cadence of actions to achieve good results. I've met many people who start building relationships and simply through disorganisation and not blocking time for social selling they never take any of their prospects through a process. They build up lots of relationships that stay shallow.

Social selling is about finding, testing and executing the right strategy and bringing enough patience to execute. The #1 mistake I see in social selling teams is that they expect results from a couple of messages in just a few weeks' time. Be creative in your social selling strategy. Leverage your existing relationships and first, try to capture the attention of your prospects in a non-salesy value-providing way. Example: You want the attention of a CTO in a target company. Find out about the latest feature release, write a review about it and submit a post about it on LinkedIn in an applauding manner and tag the CTO and product team. If they react, you can build a relationship.

The crux lies in the strategy, serving as the foundation around which all components revolve. A well-defined vision steers this process, harmonizing all other elements effortlessly. ???? #StrategicVision #FoundationOfSuccess ?????

This falls so short is useful. A strategy is not a content plan with goals. Content does not sustainably convert business. It isn’t social hoping. Social selling is like any sales channel. It requires process, end to end, that harnesses cold traffic, takes control of the audience and moves them through a mindset shift from stranger to wanting to work with you. This would work without content, which is largely only useful for audience growth rate acceleration at the front end.

The best way to personalise and have the best approach is to do micro sales campaigns. This way the message and the content will be much better perceived.

This is a distraction. Engagement helps in some specific cases, though largely only for cold audience growth. The rest is about a process and a well defined message, which the vast majority don’t have.

This is quite ironic as I'm technically engaging right now, but the reality is that people spend way too much time on this stuff without the foundations in place. Commenting, posting, sending messages... it's all stuff that doesn't make the difference. When you have a conversion piece of content in place that you drive people on social media to, that's when things become easier and a lot more fruitful.

The nice thing about the internet is that you can find a tremendous amount of information about people online. The question is, if it is you that is willing to put in the work to research and understand your prospect or if it will be someone else. Social selling is 90% preparation and 10% execution.

Adopting a sporadic, inconsistent, and one-sided approach will not yield the sought-after outcomes. ??? To achieve the desired results, maintain a consistent, hyper-personalized strategy that encompasses multiple channels seamlessly. ??? Align and orchestrate all elements meticulously for a harmonious synergy. ???? #StrategicConsistency #HyperPersonalization #OmnichannelApproach #SynergizedEfforts

The average user is getting 5+ sales messages per day. All those messages tell people they are the best. Nobody believes anything anymore, buyers are more sceptical. Prospects need to believe in you and what you say you can do - that takes time, that isn't something you can achieve cold. Your choice is, do you decide to build trust publicly before outreach or after outreach. The most successful social sellers build trust upfront before their outreach. Too many deals never close or never get past the first meeting simply because the relationship and trust just wasn't there.

Ensuring precision in your communication, maintaining alignment between your commitments and solutions, and fostering a genuine belief in what you provide are crucial elements. ???? Your intentions should be transparent, aiming to create a significant impression while aiding clients in overcoming their hurdles, surpassing mere target fulfillment. ???? Placing the customer at the core and providing assistance exhibit not only potential for escalated business growth ???? but also the establishment of an enduring legacy. ???? #ClientCentricApproach #GenuineIntentions #BusinessExcellence #LastingImpact

People won’t trust you because you have a social profile with some testimonials. People trust the familiar, not the credible. Psychology 101. Be familiar and demonstrate effectiveness with peer centric examples of problem relevant success.

There is no doubt the skill of social selling is different to emailing or cold calling. Social Selling skills are a digital version of interpersonal skills you would need for networking. Cold callers who move over fail because they bring their old methodology will struggle and then blame the platform. Social Selling is a skill which you can learn as a theory, but only develop as a skill through practice. It will test your organisational skills, writing skills and you need empathy in bucket loads. Social Selling today is being confused with content marketing. It's not just about creating posts. The hardest of all skills is creating conversations, how to write messages which are warm and don't feel weird or pushy.

If you want to add social selling as a new discipline to your sales (outbound) team, consider this: 1) Training your team will require 3-6 months of time, depending on their skill set and experiences. 2) Some sales team members will not bring the required skill set and willingness to learn social selling. 3) Hiring an experienced social selling resources is recommended if you want to start rather fast.

Strong communication skills, effective social selling strategies, and adeptness in digital engagement have become indispensable for every modern professional. ???? The market offers a plethora of opportunities to enhance these competencies, so don't allow any barriers to hinder your progress. ???? #ProfessionalDevelopment #CommunicationSkills #SocialSelling #DigitalEngagement #ContinuousLearning

Education is dangerous, because it’s mostly wrong. All those noise about “posting consistently”, engaging and prospecting. Then Magic will happen. Sales isn’t magic. Doing more of the same random and isolated activity does not sustain growth through a sales channel. Implement a process, content, engagement and messaging are tools with which to deliver part of that process. No more. They do not yield in isolation. Spend time learning what you do first. A skill isn’t a solution. Know every detailed step of the product or service that you deliver. It will tell you everything you need to know about how to sell it. An effective social selling process probably has 50 steps. Know them first.

Like all great things, so does #SocialSelling. Build your audience, share the content. Golden formula; make it 80/20 - 80% of the times communicate value and 20% promotion. It'll take time to build-up, to nurture and efforts to closure still remains the same, if not more. #SocialSelling

I like this point! Doesn’t happen much. It is a long term activity that will yield sustainable results, not if every step of the process is measured, reviewed and improved continually.

Another barrier is removing the " social " from selling . Social selling works when you are organically using social to align with your customers on a platform and the form of content they are consuming on the platform. For e.g. very salesy content , comments or messages will ultimately lead to the prospect disengaging with you though what we are trying to do with social selling is the exact opposite