Collaborative Social Selling Articles

LinkedIn has collaborative articles. I sometimes contribute to those on social selling but sometimes these articles speak about social selling in a rather worrying way.

They sometimes position social selling as if it is some sort of ploy that you might use. Questions such as “You're aiming to enhance social selling with automation tools. How can you keep your interactions personal?” or “You're facing objections from leads on social media. How do you maintain the relationship?” or “You're facing resistance from stakeholders on social selling. How can you overcome their objections?” or even “You're facing skepticism about your social selling efforts. How can you address doubts effectively?”

These all hint at the fact that you are trying to use social selling like a jacket you slip on when you go to work. It suggests that YOUR social (selling) footprint is somehow different from your social footprint.

Social selling is, in its essence, a behaviour that presents you to your audience in a way that reflects who you truly are and this makes people feel more comfortable with you and this makes them more likely to have a conversation with you. Social selling is a brilliant way of scaling those person to person activities that we used to do with in-person networking events. It enables you to keep reenforcing in a friendly and non-intrusive way that you should be considered the goto person in your field.

Social selling is not a tool to pitch/sell/advertise you or your company’s products/services to people or to overcome the problem that your spam emails and cold calls don’t get the response that they once did.

Social selling is a tool for building relationships.

I know that sounds rather wishy-washy but think about what that actually means in practice.

If you are selling a selling low value, low engagement or commoditised items social selling won’t help you. For example, if you were going to buy a candy bar, a pair of shoes or a meal in most instances you will not give this purchase much consideration. You won’t be making the purchase (or not) based on how helpful and knowledgable the salesperson is. You won’t be travelling from one sweet shop to the next looking for a “candy expert” to guide you through the buying process. None of these purchases rely on relationship and trust.

However, when you are choosing a company to invest your life savings in, or a transformation in your business the decision is a scary one and one fraught with risk. Because of this the relationship you have with and the trust you have in the person (or company) doing the work is crucial because it literally might affect your entire future. Social selling is absolutely the way to go for this.

Social selling is not a series of cheats or techniques. It is not a playbook or a manual. Social selling is a way of life and when you do it right it enables you to be known, loved and trusted by a huge number of people in a way that they don’t find intrusive or crass.

To do it wrong yields exactly the results that doing anything wrong yields. Nothing.

It’s all about relationships.

#socialselling #pipeline #digitalselling #salestransformation #sales?