Last week we ran a Social Selling & Influence awareness session with a management team.

We covered how it works, what it does, how the programme beaks down and how our clients have changed their commercial lives.

We were close to the end of the session and the Managing Director asked an excellent question…

“How do we prevent this all becoming about vanity...?”

My answer is simple? 

Make it all about revenue...

The 3 main reason for transforming your team to Social Selling?

Revenue, Revenue, Revenue....

Yes there are other amazing benefits but don't let people cloud your vision by making organic reach, impressions, clicks and marketing collateral the headlines....the headline is revenue and always will be...

We are called into a lot of companies where it has all gone wrong and they need a recovery plan. 

They saw their competition putting out content and got a serious dose of FOMO.

So, they jump to the content stick and start firing out corporate content, adverts by any other name, on the platform.  The send round an internal memo for everyone to like and share it, some do some don’t.  It does and changes nothing…

It does nothing because its nowhere near that easy.

Starting you Social Media journey by employing someone to write content or designing a series of videos that you will put out across platforms, is the equivalent of deciding to build a house and the very first thing you do is order a sofa, pictures, and some carpet…upsides down and backwards!

Starting that way is a sure-fire guarantee to make it all about vanity.

Something else we see regularly is organisations who start this way (backwards), see no change in results and blame Social Selling for not working…” yeah, we did tried Social Selling a few months a back and it didn’t work…”. 

Every time we’ve investigated what “didn’t work” we find that nothing had changed internally, and the organisation defined Social Selling as ‘chucking content at Social and seeing what stuck’…. nothing did.

If you really did try Social Selling a few months back, you should be able to share a raft of data including, how many proposals it generated and how many you converted to sales – its all anchored in measurable data and revenue, not gut feels, maybes, and vanity…

So how do you get this focus away from vanity and anchored in revenue...?

• You must start with a strategy, lay the foundation
• Create a mission, put up the walls
• Train the team, put a roof on
• Address the corporate mindset, install the wiring
• Work on the internal discipline, add the plumbing
• Understand where your prospects are on digital, put in windows and doors
• Create a central hub for social media, install a boiler

Now you are getting close to the start line…

Now we can start to create content plans and define our digital identities, we can decorate.

All the failures we see have ignored all of this, all the successes we know about, put all of this in place. Social Selling is not asking people to buy your products and services on social media.

Social Selling is using your presence and behaviour on social media to build influence, make connections, grow relationships and trust, which leads to conversations, commercial interaction, and growth.

Social Selling puts you in the position to have more conversations with people who can help your business whether through referral, by giving advice, an introduction, requesting a proposal or issuing a purchase order…. it’s all about more conversations. 

Social Selling is not something we do, its something we take advantage of being able to do.

We find a lot of professionals are struggling with this. You may be one and that’s ok, you’ve likely been very busy for the last 10 years.  Things have changed and you either didn’t notice or haven’t kept up. That’s fine, but it’s important you are not in the same position next year. 

Use this time to develop the digital skills you need to be able to deliver in a new commercial world.

Once we align all of this and get things working in harmony, we can then start to build your digital dominance in your market, sectors and over your competition.

In the roaring 2020’s, its important your team have all the digital skills they need to be able to network, prospect, develop and close business all online.

CRUX / DLA IGNITE