Interesting article and I'm sure you all remember when we all put e in front of everything. eProcurement for example, then we put an i in front of everything, the iphone is another example. Let's not forget that the iPhone is 11 years old this year. We then put digital in front of everything, like digital marketing. For sales we put Social (Social Selling) and now digital (Digital Selling) in front of it.
For Europe any way (apart from low value, transactional items) social selling became selling. Business as usual. Most, if not all of the outbound call centres were closed down and cold calling has pretty much died.
It's interesting that in the home of Social Media, in the US in 2017 70,000 outbound caller jobs were created. Maybe it is the land of the cold calling guru who obviously want to keep the role alive.
Maybe the social selling / modern buyer suits the European buying process better than it's take to become the chosen format for sellers.
I suspect that while there will be some serious struggling in the US, in 2018, social selling will be selling. It is where some 70% of the US population spends it day.
In April 2018 will be the third anniversary of the article I wrote "How to get 10 C-Level Meetings a week with Twitter" so if you had shifted to social selling 3 years ago, you would have had 1,440 C-Level meetings. I'm sure even if you got a 10th of that, 144 C-Level meetings that would make a major impact to your pipeline?
And if you are not social selling, (sorry selling) you are seriously falling behind!
Remember when we put an ‘e’ in front of everything? Ecommerce, emarketing, esupport? Now, that’s just the way we do business. The same is true of social selling. In 2018, we can officially drop the ‘social’ before selling and recognize that any sales pro worth her salt is using digital and social means to complement her sales techniques. In 2018, we can officially drop the ‘social’ before selling and recognize that any sales pro worth her salt is using digital and social means to complement her sales techniques. What we’ll see more of is sales pros ratcheting up responsiveness by using their powers to connect people to people and people to data.
http://customerthink.com/10-digital-marketing-predictions-for-2018/
