This article is relevant for people, businesses and marketing agencies.  

You can decide to build your social selling program or buy one.

Many businesses and marketing agencies have decided to buy in a program, rather than build it from scratch.  We have many marketing agencies who resell our social selling program. By "white labelling" our social selling program you will be able to accelerate the delivery of your program and get access to a market leading training and coaching rather than building it. 

Anyway, onto the blog. 

Way back in the mists of the time, when computers had people in white coats and clipboards looking after them. The fashion was that you wrote an app for each computer.  The reason was that programming was the new wild frontier. 

Every company, that purchased a computer, hired a team of programmers to write their own accounting systems, payroll systems and manufacturing systems.

This is like getting an iPhone or Android phone and you having to write all the apps you needed.

You need a mapping app, write it yourself, you need an app to communicate with other people, write it yourself .... 

Of course, nowadays this is seen as utter, utter, nuts.

I think it was IBM that started writing programs for their mainframes, they worked out that the more programs people ran, the more computer power was needed, the more hardware IBM sold and the software industry and the software house was born.

Of course today, software is written by software houses, games are written by software houses and we have apps for phones ..... written by software houses.  Why?

If we take a payroll system, it makes sense that we buy a payroll system from a company that knows all about payroll, it's their responsibility to update the software with legislation changes and technology changes.

It's common wisdom when it come to running a business that you stick to what you know.  A bank sticks to being a bank it doesn't come a bank and a software house writing its own applications.  It sticks to being a bank and it lets somebody else write its payroll software.

The same can be said of social selling

You can go to your marketing team or sales enablement and say "can you build us a social selling program?"  But really?  Should something so strategic, that is your future ability to sell be given to these teams?  Should you really be designing training programs from scratch? 

It's like writing your own applications.

Surely it's time to get the experts in?  

Somebody that has trained many people, many times?

Surely your people should be focused on what you do as a business? Focused on your mission? 

Surely you should be talking to a business that has been doing this for the last 5 years?

People that have a proven track record across different territories and different vertical markets?

Focus

Here at DLA Ignite, all we do is social selling, which is why we are good at it.  we are not a full services marketing agency that does websites and content and ABM and campaigns and, and, and ...

We stick to one thing, which is why we are really good at it.

How people learn

As well as being experts on social selling we also have expertise in training and coaching

It's all about building and applying consistent, repeatable, positive habits, this does not happen from listening to the 90 minute "hints and tips" presentation.

Time

Another problem with building this yourself, is that we are already 5 years ahead of you.  As a business building it yourself, means you have to wait for somebody to develop something.  I know of a large accounting company who employed a "social selling evangelist". This person took 2 years to come up with a plan.  Just think of the business and competitive advantage that was lost in those two years?  Some say, they lost their number one market position in that time.  It's possible in the fast paced world of IT.

History has shown that business should stick to what they do best and not try and reinvent the wheel.

As a business you are going to have to do social selling so what are you going to do, build or buy?

PS: We can start on Monday. 

If you are reading this and you are from a marketing agency, I would love to talk to you about how you can white label our social selling program.  No need to build anything yourself, you can tap into our 5 years of leading innovation and experience.