Last year it was all about 'Bitcoin', Blockchain, GDPR and other key buzzwords, people everywhere seemed 'addicted' to the latest buzzword.
And now.......
Everywhere you look you see the next big thing 'Social Selling'
Beware the ‘Social Selling Snake Oil Sales teams’.
I attended a ‘Business Expo Event’ & smelt something I hadn’t smelt since the start of the .Com bubble in the late 90s.
I’m also getting a good whiff of it on LinkedIn & it’s definitely ‘snake oil’.
The flavour of oil this month will 'generate more business than you can handle, you can sack your social media agency, get rid of the lead generation toolkit you got sold during the last snake oil ‘great deal sale’ & become......A LinkedIn Guru!
Wooooo, ‘what do we get?’ - For £299pp you get a 2 hour seminar that will help you unlock the LI tools that are right under your nose, by the end of the session you will be LI famous around the globe, the star of your sector, your thumb will be numb from accepting all the inbound connection request because your prospects are now desperate to buy from you.
Really, I mean really?
Coaching, mentoring, supporting, guiding, confidence building CANNOT be delivered in a 2 hour session, or even a couple of them.
You and whoever else you drag into the session will fail spectacularly - and you will say ‘that social selling thing, it doesn’t work’.
Even the guys at 'Linkedin' are pushing all sorts of training video's to help boost 'employee engagement' and brand alignment on the platform, the site is littered with ads for 'Sales Navigator' and the like. Well to be honest, its not actually the 'next big thing' the concept has been around for many years, its surge in growth and use has come about due to the significant adoption of companies using 'social media'.
At Digital Leadership Associates we set our stall out not to just do Linkedin training, nor to be just another marketing agency and not to transform only sales by using social. We are practitioners of what we preach, we do what we ask you to do.
Here at DLA we transform the whole organisation. Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, Internal Comms, Customer Service all with social.
When Tim Hughes & Adam Gray envisioned the DLA they did it with an aligned vision that's shared with all involved in Digital Leadership Associates, especially me, which is a deep desire to transform lives as well as companies.
In sales we transform people every day (through our Social Selling programs) but outside of this we are also empowering and transforming people in roles across the Enterprise creating the classic “more for less” scenario, the impact of this means that “legacy process” competitors may never catch up.
I came across this really great infographic about The History of Social Selling from Koka Sexton, which highlights (amongst many things) that the term can be traced back to the 1940's & 50's during the what we laughingly call the 'analog age'.
I find it both amusing & confusing that people are now translating 'social selling' as a way to avoid one on one conversations - Oh great, I don't have to actually meet or speak to anyone.
What nonsense!
"I'm not sure where this myth comes from that social selling means that the whole sales takes place on social, it doesn't. Social facilities a meeting and meetings are conducted the same as they always have. Social also speeds prospects through the pipeline. What it does replace is the constant interruptions by phone, email and adverts which piss us all off"'People do business with People' - an undeniable FACT.
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