There is a myth we often hear out there that social selling means you never meet a person face-to-face.  Really?

We often hear people say "I cannot use social selling, as I have to meet and talk with customers".

I never know where this myth came from but it's utter rubbish.  Social selling does not stop you talking to people on the phone, or meeting them face-to-face.

There are two reasons to use social selling:-

1. The first is to get meetings.  The meetings can be over the phone, over web conference, or face-to-face.  The critical thing about social selling is it is NOT selling over social.

Nobody gets up in the morning and says, first thing I need to do today is talk with a salesperson.

Social allows you to build relationships with people, you can build them fast and at scale.  (Note, quicker than legacy sales methods like cold calling).  If you think that the recent Gartner advice on B2B Enterprise decision making now needs 10 people to make that decision.  If you use cold calling, that is a lot of calls, a lot of voicemails people will never respond to.  Add to that, calling people up, pisses people off.

Our advice, always would be to take your conversation off social and meet the person.

2. The second reason to use social selling is to accelerate your pipeline.  That my friend, is a blog for another day.