by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
I visited a company last week and they wanted to tell me about their great social selling strategy.
It started with me being told about the success of the employee advocacy program. The business is putting a lot of time, money and resource into creating corporate content that employees can share. I was told this was “very successful” I’m not sure if the measure of this was by the company or by the customers. Let me explain.
When we look at the world today, the sands that we have stood on in terms of business have shifted. When you go back to the 1930s the business strategy was to tell people about your products and services and the louder you shouted the more you sold. This is the basis for advertising, you shouted louder and louder and hopefully somebody will hear you and say “that is the product I want to buy”.
This worked when the buyer was pretty unsophisticated, in fact, people welcome the interruptions as you found out what was going on in the world. Now we have the internet, social media and mobile. Where as, in the past we rang a company up and they sent us a brochure, now if we want to buy something, we can just go online, research it and buy it, all in “salesperson avoidance mode”.
It’s not like we dislike salespeople, it’s just we have all been in a situation where we have spoken to one and they have tried to be manipulative. In fact nobody gets up in the morning and says “the first thing I need to do is speak with a manipulative sales person”.
The same goes for corporate content, nobody is interested. In fact, all corporate content says the same thing, “we are the best”, “we are number one”, so much so that we now tune out of this.
I’m writing this on Christmas Eve and my inbox is full of “corporations” wish me Merry Christmas. The thing is each one of these emails will have taken somebody time and trouble. I’m sure there was even a or several meetings over this. How original they would be sending a “Happy Christmas” newsletter, but actually they spent time and effort creating Christmas spam. I even unsubscribed from some of the newsletters. It’s boring, it’s unoriginal and nobody believes the messages and in fact nobody cares.
This is the mistake that so many corporation make, they think that somebody wants to hear the message and we don’t. Success is not measured on how much of this content we are not interested in is pushed out by your staff. In fact, people will quietly, mute you, unfollow you and your company will get know for being a corporate spammer. A friend of mine has muted content from a sales team he used to follow as all they ever posted was content about the company. Now he just follows the company. Why not get the content once, rather than from all the sales people.
There Is a People Aspect to Corporate Spamming. In fact most people know nobody wants to hear this corporate message, so they don’t share it. At my previous company, when I ever shared corporate content I lost followers. Which is why it is so difficult to get employees to take part in the sharing. They know it’s boring and so does everybody else.
Your Only Unique Selling Point today is your people. All your products are the same, all the messages are the same. The trick today is too activate those people to write about what they want to write about. Clients will find them and see that they are the experts they are. Who is going this? We are, this blog is a great example. But also so are our clients. If this sounds a bit fluffy, one client has saved £500K ($650K) in recruitment fee by sharing one blog. Yes, they have saved $650,000 by sharing just 500 words.
Are you social selling or living in a fools paradise?
People who read this article also read these:
https://www.social-experts.net/how-will-you-roll-out-that-social-selling-program-globally/
https://www.social-experts.net/is-your-linkedin-profile-as-boring-as-wet-afternoon/
https://www.social-experts.net/im-beautiful-now-im-taking-that-to-market/
