The majority of sales people, don't work at market leaders.

In many cases being the market leader can work for you, it can work against you as well.

How can I use social selling if I don't work for a market leader?

How can you punch above your weight in the market?

Are you just another salesperson?

One of the problems that all salespeople suffer from today is that they are just like all the other salespeople.  While you will have done your "immersion training" and have all the content and "battle cards" from marketing.  You still look like just another salesperson.

Salespeople merge into a sea of sameness. 

The first thing you need is a social media profile that makes you look different.

I'm not talking wacky, I'm just suggesting you leave that "corporate varnier" at home and share something about yourself.  You are a human being.  We know people buy people, so be a person.

We call this a "buyer centric profile".  This is so you have a social media profile, where you buyers stop saying "yuck, that's a salesperson, I don't believe a word they say" and they say "this person looks like they can help me, I'm actually going to contact them".

Just think transforming yourself from a sea of sameness to a person who gets calls from prospects asking of they can buy.  Unbelievable I know.

In the first module of our social selling and influence course we teach people how to have a buyer centric profile.

If you look like an expert you will be listened to.

Being seen as memorable and trust worthy, will beat the market leader every time!  

Nobody wants to buy from me!

The next thing you need to more your territory from analogue to digital.

If you want to sell to an account, you need to know people in there, right?

So start building a network in the accounts you want to sell to and influence.

But, but, but, before you run off and start spamming people.  Linkedin is a social network, if you connect to people and say "I'm you local sales person ..." or worse pitch, you won't get far.

People come to social networks to be social.  This is about having conversations on social, the more you are social and have conversations the more business will come your way.

We teach you how to do this in the second module of our social selling and influence course. 

How to punch above your weight in sales

Your buyers are online looking for insight, they want to be educated, they want to see real people.  It will amaze many businesses but buyers are not looking for your brochure on white paper whatever marketing tells you.  In fact research shows that sharing branded content does your brand harm.

As a salesperson, for you to stand out and punch above your weight against market leaders you need to create your own content.  Content that explains how to solve your clients business issues.

See how in this blog, I don't talk about DLA Ignite as a company, I explain a business issue that many salespeople have and then how we can solve it.

So who's 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"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”