Still spending money on people that will never buy from you?

This article first appeared HERE on the DLA blog.

I was working in what we would call today a challenger business in the telecoms market earlier in my career. We are giving the City of London something new – services over fibre. It was exciting, innovative and we were digging up the streets and laying fibre to service our new customers.

We worked hard and played hard – normally at the same time! I’ve written about this before but I’m revisiting the subject after I had a conversation today with the interesting Mariana Lima. Working towards her master’s degree in Marketing Management at IPAM (Portuguese Institute of Management and Marketing) Mariana is currently writing her master thesis, in which she intends to better understand the phenomenon of Social Selling.

Once someone gets me talking about how businesses need to transform and bring social media into their core – I could carry on for ages, and we did! We were discussing how, today, you can build a relationship with someone over social, gain credibility and trust even before you meet. And let’s not forget, meeting people is a key objective of social selling. Many people wrongly believe it’s all about sitting at a keyboard tapping away.

Back to the story – I was mentioning how, when working for the challenger company, there was an unwritten rule that if you were spending less than ￡1000 a month on expenses taking clients and prospects out, you weren’t doing your job properly. I then mentioned a client that was looking at reducing spend on wining and dining people that ‘might’ buy something, choosing instead, to focus more on social selling.

Mariana said ‘…you’re not spending money upfront, instead you can take them out as a thank you’. I immediately thought ‘there’s a blog in that’. Actually, it was more like ‘can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that before’.

Mariana was spot on – the old way of selling (many still sell that way) meant speculating to hopefully accumulate. It meant sending money not just on customers but prospects, suspects and people that had no intention of buying anything from you. When you think about it – it’s seems crazy – spending money hoping to get sale.

Social Selling changes all that, it’s the best way to prospect – buyers engage with you more when they are ready, less time is wasted and you don’t have to hound them because they know you are there. They will be seeing your social activity, content you produce, knowledge and insights you share.

You can wine and dine them at...............To read the rest of the article click HERE