The real barriers to social selling success.

We are currently running programmes for a number of clients and watching the individuals’ successes (or not) is a stark reminder that to be successful with all of your social selling/digital selling activities you CANNOT cherry-pick the things that you like (or don’t scare you)…you must do it all.

The thing is that throughout our lives we have certain things drummed in to us such as “don’t talk to strangers” and this sticks with us in to our adult lives. Other things that we often see people rail against are writing personal content, talking about what they’ve learnt and had challenges with (rather than just what they’ve achieved), and carving-out regular time to do the things they need to do on social media.

So here are the top few:

• I want to keep my personal and work lives separate. Well good luck with that. In the modern world there is nowhere to hide and if you do manage to keep a very low profile the person you are trying to influence/sell to might very well assume that you have something to hide by not sharing more elements of who you are. This is a particularly interesting one for me because often the people who don’t want to share personal content are the very ones who know EXACTLY how powerful this is and love to take clients out and develop a really close bond with them. They chat about their hobbies, their interests, their families, their dreams…yet they don’t want to do this at scale for some reason.
• I don’t have time. We are all busy but investing your time in something that has a high chance of a return must be a better bet surely than something with a low chance. Remember, on social media every connection you add, post you share, engagement you have adds to how good you look. Whereas every email you send or cold call? you make is sunk time but social media it has a cumulative benefit to how you appear. If you have time to make 50 dials that don’t result in a conversation (and therefore yield nothing) or 50 emails that don’t get noticed or opened then you have time to send 50 connection requests because once you have the in your network they might see you content from then onwards…forever.
• I only connect to people I’ve met. This is great as a vehicle for keeping in touch with those people and you should certainly connect to everyone you meet…but it is thinking rather small. If you were going to a meeting imagine if you had already connected to the people there and they knew you (and, we hope, liked you) how great would that be. You would arrive at the meeting as someone they were already prepared to listen to and believe. Also why not use the connection and engaging process as THE WAY to meet the people you want. People who are good at social selling make sure that the precious face to face time is not spent getting to know or to building trust (because that’s already done) but as a time to plan where we go from here.
• LinkedIn is a business network, it isn’t Facebook. It is a business network but if you read the Ts&Cs you will see that “you shouldn’t post personal content” is neither. Rule nor a recommendation anywhere in their literature. So why do you think this is so? In many cases I thin kit’s “sour grapes” that someone has posted about getting a new job, getting married, buying a new car, going on holiday and got loads of engagement and views and the person com[alining shares the same old dull marketing material and gets tumbleweed…nothing. No likes, not comments, no shares a precious few views. Don’t be that person who moans at others that are getting success and forming relationships because it could be you too!
• The marketing department produces great content and I just share that. Your audience don’t care about your marketing materials. You don’t care about anyone else’s so why would anyone else care about yours! Remember that YOU are the only thing that everyone in your network has in common so it\s reasonable to assume your network wants to hear about YOU. We have conducted extensive research on this and corporate/paid content gets a very low engagement rate and in many cases actually makes people less likely to read further content. Content you write is much more effective. Content you write about what you’re doing is even more effective. And content that you write about how you feel/who you are is the most effective. Golden rules for content though are (usually), keep it short - because doubling the length will halve the number of people who read it - and say it in YOUR voice - so try not to go though re-working and editing it to try and sound clever. Be yourself, it’s the best thing you have.
• I want to have a small network so I know everyone. The best response to this ever came from our friend Graham Hawkins when Tim and I were in Australia speaking at some events. At this point Graham had a network of perhaps 30,000 people and someone in the audience called-out “you can’t possibly know 30 thousand people” to which Graham replied “I don’t…but they know me.” The bigger your network (not just number of connections but proper network) you have, the better because 1000 people seeing and reading your content is better than 100…obviously.
• I only want to publish once each week so that my audience are really looking forward to my posts when I do them. Don’t flatter yourself. NOBODY (except your mum) is actively looking-out for your posts because they are too busy working on all their own stuff that they. You don’t see every one of my posts (even if you are looking out for them…which you’re probably not) so your network won’t see every one of yours. Therefore you need to post often enough that you stand a chance of being seen by your network rather than forgotten. Ideally this is every day…at the very least several times each week.

The real reasons for these barriers are not, as we know, what people say they are. These challenges are because doing this makes people feel uncomfortable, or in some cases scared. That’s okay. Everyone is scared or certainly out of their comfort zone when they start.

But I can honestly say NOBODY who has done everything in this field that we’ve told them to do has not been successful at this.

Nobody.

#socialselling #pipeline #digitalselling #salestransformation #sales?