In his book "Digital Darwinism" Tom Goodwin gives a history of transformations from the past.  The electric motor used today is still based on the steam motor used to start the industrial revolution, the electric light is still based on the gas light.  The only real advancement on the electric light is the switch by the door.  In the days of gas lights you switched the light on at its stem or base.  My bedside light is based on the same model.  100 year old technology and attitude.

You would have thought that in the last 100 years we had time to rethink the electric motor and the electric light?

So when it comes to Sales with the opportunity that social media provides to us, surely we have the chance to "think again" and in fact we have to, as the buyer is driving us down a path.  Today buyers are savey, they have the internet at their fingers, through the mobile phone.  They have a lot of power and your competition is just one click away.  So how in sales can we counter this?

Look at what went on in the past?  We interrupted people, first with letters, then emails, then faxes, then cold calls and now inmails.  Each of those methods are after all is a "cold call".  You interrupt a person and broadcast your message.  But are we not better than that?

We met with a client recently and they said "we sent 250 in-mails and nothing happened" and our response?  Yes.  And why did we say that? Because they looked liked spammers.  If you look like a spammer and send 250 inmails, the answer will probably be nothing.  In fact, you will have probably been locked out of your LinkedIn account.

And this is where this report falls over.  Lot's of great MH stuff (I was trained on MH) but an inmail is a cold call but on a social platform.  Nothing more and nothing less.

This isn't social selling it's "cold calling" on social.  It's the Emperors New clothes!

As my co-founder Adam wrote recently:-

"Social selling is a different way of selling. It requires YOU the seller to develop a personal brand which makes you look helpful, approachable and knowledgable so that buyers are not intimidated by you and avoid your approaches but are positively pleased when you reach out to them (by LinkedIn, email, even by telephone) and this provides the context for you to be able to suggest solutions to their problems. But social selling is much more than simply having a strong and credible personal brand it requires you to have an active social behaviour, regularly publishing, sharing and commenting on things in the social space."

There is nothing about this in this eBook.

Adam went on to say

"Failure to have a profile that makes you look like you’re worth talking to means that you will use all of the great profile filters and inmail templates to appear as a spammer.

The eBook makes Sales Navigator look like an address book and little more, and it makes Miller Heiman look like an old fashioned sales training company that has simply changed the words ‘rolodex’ to ‘SalesNav’ and ‘press cutting service’ to ‘LinkedIn’ - I’m sure they can do better than this."

And I totally agree.

LinkedIn is the best sales tool in the world, but to present it as "the old world with knobs on" does not do it justice and I hope that sales people realise this and don't start spamming me and thinking it's social selling.  It's not.