What is Social Selling?

Story time :

I have been following the CEO of Nestlé for a while. Commenting on his posts, wanting to raise my and my colleague, Tom's profile. In one post, he shared a picture of himself at their R&D centre. I commented, would love to invite your R&D team to our R&D facility at some point. About an hour later, the Global R&D lead messaged me on LinkedIn, saying she had seen my comment on Mark's post and would be happy to chat. Connection made, meeting happened. All from a comment on a post.

Is this selling? No.

Is this being Social? Some might argue, yes in the context of social media, but not in the human interaction sense. These lines are blurring.

Is this prospecting? Again, blurred lines on this one. Some will say no, some will say yes.

Would this meeting have happened if I had cold called, or cold emailed the Global R&D lead? Possibly, but odds likely to be stacked against me.

What I do know is the meeting happened because I commented on the post of the CEO, with an intentional offer.

So, what is social selling then?

This is from Forrester back in 2017. I still believe this is the best definition out there. The problem with the term "social selling" is the "selling" part.

This is in part is due to the rise in automation on LinkedIn, with auto-connecting tools, and automated messaging tools where we get put into a "cadence" in the vain hope that some of it will stick. The old spray and pray approach.

The other challenge is that we are talking about social media, and in particular, LinkedIn. Based on people's perception of social media / LinkedIn in a selling / prospecting context this can be a massive barrier to sales teams / client facing / fee earners wanting to adopt it as part of how they prospect / sell / develop business. My clients aren't on LinkedIn, or something to similar.

It is also really very hard to "prove" that it works, in a traditional sales / business development KPI driven world.

In the example I shared, yes, that meeting happened because of a comment. Now the hard yards start. Which could take 6 - 12 months to create a business opportunity with revenue attached to it - where there will be multiple stakeholders and many other influencing factors involved. It worked in that sense that it started a conversation by getting the attention of the audience.

Social Selling, for me can be separated into 2 main facets of the sales process. Prospecting and Nurturing.

Prospecting :

This is creating net new conversations with people, whom you can sell your product or service to.

I see there as being 4 ways this happens :

1) Inbound, based on the content you share into your networks. I saw that, read that, you look like someone who can solve the business problem I have, or, I should at least have in my network.

2) Outbound referral through your shared network (or TeamLink if you have Sales Navigator) "I can you see you are connected to that person, would you be comfortable in facilitating an introduction.

3) Outbound connection request to someone who has engaged with your content, who is the profile of person you sell to. "I saw you comment on my post, thank you etc etc".

4) Cold connection request.

Nurturing :

This tends to be more relevant where you have longer sales cycles, large accounts that you have to engage with multiple stakeholders and/or there can be longer time periods between deals. This also assumes that you are already in conversation with said stakeholders, connected on LinkedIn or following on Twitter. It also assumes that they post content for you to engage with, to "nurture" / "remain front of mind" . These activities are likely to be supported by some form of wider marketing play, such as email updates - or even a newsletter like this one.

I started my Social Selling journey at the end of 2013, beginning of 2014 when I was introduced to the concept. This was when LinkedIn launched Sales Navigator, and for me it was the advent of TeamLink which I was most excited about. Especially in the world of professional services, which has traditionally been built on longstanding relationships and reputation. Fast forward to today and one of the biggest obstacles in all of this is :

When I launched a Social Selling programme at JLL in 2015/2016, I had to A) convince the board to embark on something that had never been done before, to commit a not inconsequential investment to do it. B) who should pay for it? Ended up being a centralised costs. C) bring 150 of my colleagues on a journey of : I don't believe LinkedIn is relevant for my audience/what I do. Why? How? What's in it for me? D) proving it works.

As the case study suggests, this was all about creating the conversation, which we then had to convert into business opportunity and then win. Another version of prospecting one can say.

What I learned very quickly into this programme was I had to help the business understand how LinkedIn can be used beyond just a place to find a new job. Back then, If my memory serves me correctly, LinkedIn was at c. 590mn members. Today, it has more than 850mn members (at the time of writing August 2022). We have also seen a huge shift in the type of content that is being posted on LinkedIn today. Driven by the pandemic as well as the rise of Gen Z / Millenials and how they use Social Media. The rise of the meme culture. And TikTok.

The perception of LinkedIn still stands for the majority of senior leaders : it's not that relevant for selling - exacerbated by the volume of noise, content they cannot relate to, the number of sales systems, it feeling like "marketing" are forcing you to share content from your profile, the "what's in it for me".

And time. This is the default excuse for the majority of people. Which I respect, and understand. However, also challenge.

The other aspect is that there are lots more sales engagement platforms fighting for attention saying that they are the solution to your prospecting needs - they are tangible, with the ability to report on sales KPIs, which, one cannot do robustly for social selling - caveat, if you have Sales Navigator fully synced with Dynamics or SFDC, turn on the ROI reporting, LinkedIn Sales Solutions are getting close. They however, refer to influencing pipeline and closed/won revenue - which I say is the right way to look at this.

This all means that social selling programmes can be hard to bring leadership along from an investment perspective or, leaving it to be part of an employee advocacy play, or social media training.

I hear you.

So, what does this all mean, and more importantly, for you and your teams. Is this still relevant today?

100% Yes. This has to be part of how your sales / fee earning function goes to market.

First and foremost, you will not get everyone to buy into social selling within your sales teams. Irrespective if you are looking at this from a high volume prospecting perspective through to a land and expand in defined enterprise accounts.

You don't need sales navigator, BUT, it does make it considerably easier if you do have it.

Trying to measure it is very hard, therefore don't put too much emphasis on this in the early stages, unless you have really robust crm metrics and behaviours. EG tagging in CRM how an opportunity was originated.

Some loose metrics for ROI to challenge / kick start a conversations internally for the Why?

If each of your sales team could generate one more piece of business opportunity worth $10k - or what ever your average order value is - would this be a good thing? Most people will say yes.

Subject to size, sales cycles and markets, this could be 1 a year, 1 a quarter or 1 a month - then do the math(s) :

10 sales people x 10k x 4 quarters = 400k in additional pipeline through social selling.

Next, shifting the perception around what LinkedIn is today, vs what people believe it still to be.

Simple way to do this is search by job title and see how many people on LinkedIn have the job title your team(s) sell to :

c. 1mn CFOs on LinkedIn.

Next, how big is their referral network and network influence into the people they want to sell to?

All Filters, 2nd degree connection (geography, industry etc)

In my network, I can be introduced via a mutual connections to 651 CFOs in the Consumer Goods & Consumer Services sector. Straight potential referral. This is also means, I can potentially bring a further 651 CFOs into my network if I were to post relevant, thought provoking content onto LinkedIn. If these numbers are small, then you and your teams need to start thinking about how do I increases my referral network and network of influence. Easy win is to ensure that they are connecting with every person they have a business related conversation with, as well as connecting with all your colleagues internally.

You can do this at an account level too :

Do the same keyword search, filter by 2nd degree and see who might be able to facilitate that introduction.

Hashtags.

This is an easy win to help highlight how invisible your teams are vs the competition, across all social channels.

Here we see there are 16k people following #CRM

And, more importantly, who is in the feed talking about all things CRM related. If you are not sure which hashtags to use, go to your target's company pages and see what hashtags they use and follow those hashtags. Ask Marketing or even google it.

Then explain that if you see a piece of content that is interesting / relevant to your target audience, drop a like or a comment. This introduces you to the author and their network. The more you engage with content which is of interest to the audience you sell to, the more you start to appear in these newsfeeds. This is a 2min a day exercise.

Now, move on to explain, that ideally you also what to be the conversation starter, around topics that are relevant to your intended audience. This could be "I was on a client call, cold call, meeting, etc, I was asked this question - blah - here are my views - blah" add the relevant hashtags, as this will move your content into those conversations.

The usual response I get from taking this high level approach as an introduction, is "I had no idea that you could do this on LinkedIn" or something to that effect.

There needs to be purpose and intention for your team(s).

Once you have fired up their interest, it boils down to 3 core aspects :

1. Your profile - how are you positioning yourself, when someone "meets" you for the first time. There are 850million people on LinkedIn, yet, when someone lands on your profile, you are having a 1 2 1 conversation with them, so talk to them as you would do in person. Do not write your profile in the 3rd person. My profile is far from perfect, but, make sure you are at least are using all the features now available - like a profile video, featured, a complete about section and experience, you have maxed out the 50 skills, added courses, have client recommendations, personalised your URL and are fully searchable off platform.
2. Your referral network and network of influence - make sure it is relevant, BUT, keep in mind only c, 10% of your first degree network see what you are doing - that is why hashtags are key to help you move into the right areas of conversation.
3. Conversation - comments supercharge all of this, and are the easiest for people to engage with, ideally backed up by starting the conversation with your posts / thoughts / ideas.

Conversations are the hardest hurdle for people to overcome. Remind them that we all post content on here and other social platforms because we WANT people to engage with it, so it does not matter if you don't know them - think of it as a conference, that is online - you go up to people at in-person conferences whom you don't know, and strike up a conversation; well, do the same on LinkedIn.

Get in the right conversation - we have talked about hashtags. The other easy win, is go and follow all of the senior leadership team of your prospect accounts, or land and expand accounts, when you follow - when you follow, they get notified you are following them - also toggle the alarm bell, so you get notified when they post something - and if appropriate for you to comment, then do so. You introduce yourself and the brand of the business. Try and encourage further conversation - DO NOT PITCH in comments though.

They will either have the Follow button like Noel, or if it says connect vs follow, hit More, a drop down will appear, and you can follow that way.

OR if they are active on LinkedIn, there will be follow call to action under their activity tab :

Other people to consider following and engaging with, think about the Consulting / Advisory firms, who advise your target audience. Go and find them and engage in conversation with their content as it is highly likely, your target audience will be following them too.

This is all about creating visibility in the conversations you want to be seen in.

When posting on LinkedIn, get your team to visualise one person they want to write the post for. Make it all about them, rather than thinking about how many views this will get. More "personal" posts are getting more engagement at the moment. Well placed humour works, play with giphs and memes, but be careful of course - don't hope on a trending meme that could damage your brand - EG the Depp / Heard one that went around a while ago.

If you are not sure where to start on what to post, use Answer the Public which tells what questions people are asking around topics.

The fundamentals in all of this are about being visible, positioning you and your teams as people who know what they are talking about - even challenge the status quo and perceptions.

And most importantly, can help.

You want to make connections and turn these into business meetings as soon as one can.

This is about creating a 2 min a day habit, that becomes second nature to you and your teams. It is meant to support and compliment the rest of your outbound / inbound approach, not replace.

90% of what I do on here, has intention - I want to get someone's attention, a group of peoples attention, or highlight myself as someone who has a view on social selling / digital selling / sales transformation / future of sales AND I along with my colleagues can help guide to the right answer.

Do these small steps consistently, be yourselves, don't try and game the system, the rest will follow.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this, I do appreciate it. Let me know what you think in the comments - has social selling worked for you and your teams?

I also host a Podcast where I chat to all manner of industry experts in the world of sales & marketing, helping you find the answers you are looking for, have a listen here.

If you would like to learn more about how we can support you and your in business all things sales transformation / social selling / digital selling / crm and more, please do connect and let's chat.