This article is half right.

As with many people it uses old techniques in a new world.  If you are using social selling properly, you don’t need to close people, you empower them to buy.  It’s a subtle difference.

One area it gets right is that the days of interrupting your prospects and bombarding them with emails and calls trying to bully them into buying are over.

I highly recommend the book by James Muir called “The perfect close” it has a simple, but brilliant technique.

What we this article misses by a long mile is the use and need for content in the buying process.  Content can be used for one to many, one to few or one to one purposes.

Sales people can use it To find business, to move it through the pipeline to closing deals.Again, it’s subtle but an insightful and educational way to drive the business forward.  We are told by US social selling gurus that sales people cannot write content.  This is utter rubbish.  We, as sales people, spend our lives, writing in an action based way.  We are always trying to get people to do things they probably don't want.  We are the best communicators in the world.  Which is why all of the sales people that graduate from our social selling programs are self sufficient in creating content.

Why is this important?

We see we can shorten the sales cycle from legacy sales methods by some 40%, which we think is pretty good going!’