Yesterday, my colleague Mike Garrison, put up a great video on the secret sauce of social media, you can watch it here

Now if you are reading this, you were probably pulled in by the head line and you are a busy person so let's get straight to the answer.  What is the secret sauce of social selling? 

Conversations. 

Think about all the wins you've made in sales, its always come from a conversation, yes?

Think about what you are doing at the moment

Cold calling - If you are lucky enough to get through to somebody and they don't tell you to piss off. You may have been given a script, or you have some patter, or you have a pitch.  Either way, it's not a conversation as most cold calling, is talking at people.

Emails - I find email marketing pretty bizarre.  When email first came out you read every email you get, now you just scan emails.  One CMO told me the other day that he has 110,000 unread emails in his inbox.  Email marketing breaks all the rules of sales, you launch a pitch into the most nosiest part of persons world and at which point you've lost control.  Anyway, email isn't a conversation. 

A colleague of mine said the other day that cold calling and email marketing is a confrontation not a conversation.  Great point.

We know that conversations create sales, but the two most common demand generation actives don't create conversations.  Sounds like there might be a problem?   

As the Sex Pistol singer, Johnny Rotten said "ever get the feeling you're being cheated?"

How about we could create some conversations and get some sales?

How about tomorrow, I pick you up in my car and I take you to a place where all your prospects hang out?

There is no time limit on how long you spend there, you can have conversations with your prospects all day.

When you arrive at this place with all your prospects how would you approach it?

Grab a coffee and go up to the first one and start a conversation? Yes?

"Have you travelled far?" "How did you get here?" you would find areas of commonality, yes?

As sales people, we all know why.  Because people will know us, like us and trust us.

The other great thing about having a room full of our prospects is that ..... it's a room full of our prospects. 

Now that would be great wouldn't?

How about if I tell you this happens to be LinkedIn. 

This is exactly how a social network works.  We have conversations.

Now you wouldn't walk into that room with all your prospects and go "I'm Tim Hughes and roll up, roll up and buy some social selling and the first 5 people in a line will get a discount".

Of course you wouldn't as somebody would call security.

But that is exactly what you are doing when you bring your cold calling and email marketing techniques to a social network.

Sending inmails does not create conversations

Send pitches as connection requests does not create conversations.

Sending connection requests and then a week later a pitch does not create conversations.

Why do you keep spending your time doing things that does not achieve the outcome you want? 

But it's worse than that

A gap has opened up between those companies that know how to social sell and are creating conversations and those that don't and are still treating social media as a platform to spam.

In Mike's video he talks about people who are welcomed into conversations, by your ideal clients.

Just think about it, people contacting you saying they want to buy your product or service.  Just think about how little prospecting you would need to do if people came direct to you.  

So you can compare, I get one piece of inbound every day.  My inbound today was asking me to come and present to the CEO of a company.  I'm not boasting, I just use techniques that we teach salespeople in our social selling and influence coarse.  Let me say that again, here at DLA Ignite, we teach you how to get CEOs contacting you asking to buy your product or service. 

Just think if you as a salesperson if you are being contact by CEOs to buy, that would be amazing, but think about what this would feel like if you scaled this across the business?  As a sales leader you would go from zero to hero! 

Problem is, you're not being invited and as long as you keep pissing people off with your spam, you won't be asked to join this conversations.  

Just think of the business you are missing out on! 

Where profit happens

Worth me saying that social selling prospecting does not mean you will transact the business on social.

You have a conversation on social and then take it to a zoom / teams meeting

And that's where the profit happens. 

Mike's video is here worth a watch and if you like it, like it! 

So whose doing this?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling?  Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

If you are looking to be able to sell in this modern world please contact me.