by Adam Gray | @AGSocialMedia | LinkedIn
As you may know Digital Leadership Associates is expanding globally. We are signing resellers in most markets and then flying over to spend some time on boarding them to make sure that they understand exactly what they need to do to roll-out our social programmes in each territory.
The other day Tim and I were on a call with one such prospective reseller and they asked an interesting question – “what makes you different from the other people & companies offering social selling training.”
My initial reaction was “because we’re the best”…but I was mindful of the fact that last time I said that in a meeting (even though it happens to be true) I was accused of being childish!
Anyway, my answer was somewhat more sophisticated on this occasion. I said “are you familiar with the expression ‘dogfooding’?” Yes. Well, every ‘social selling trainer’ we have ever come across in our travels fails to exhibit what you might call ‘best practice’ inspire of their self proclaimed brilliance.
The prospective reseller then looked at all of our competitor’s social profiles and agreed that whilst many of these people/organisations can certainly ‘talk the talk’…they are very clearly not ‘walking the walk.’
Writing about how great you are “I am the most…” or “I have 20 years…” or perhaps writing about your products and services “We offer the following services…” simply isn’t appropriate and is only effective in the very short term for two reasons.
- MY ability to add value to YOUR business is not (sadly) based on how good I appear, but instead is based on my ability to get YOU to be better. So me listing ‘the what’ in terms of what I have done is significantly less attractive than me listing ‘the why’ in terms of why I have done it…and why YOU should too.
- for me to understand how difficult it is for you to move forward (in anything, not just in social media application) I must myself have moved forward on that journey. So me saying “you need to write one blog per week every week” if I myself have only ever written 8 blogs is both unreasonable and unrealistic.
Creating and distributing content is crucial to my success (and it will be crucial to yours too) so I have to be able to demonstrate to you that it’s possible for Digital Leadership Associates to create as much content as we need ourselves with a minimum of impact on our work. And we do.
As I write this we have (on our website) published over 400 blogs in under 2 years (almost all written by Tim, myself, Alex and Ian). On LinkedIn we have written an additional 300+ articles. Tim’s video channel ‘Tim Talks’ has interviewed 80 thought leaders, and Alex’s LinkedIn weekly video channel ‘AskAlex’ has now passed the 50 mark.
At Digital Leadership Associates we pride ourselves on walking the walk and it is this, the fact that we actually are not asking you to do anything that we ourselves don’t do, that is our USP and our secret recipe to enable us to turn you in to superstars.
People who read this article also read these:
http://www.social-experts.net/you-have-a-sponsored-post-on-linkedin-im-so-sorry-for-you/
http://www.social-experts.net/attention-all-vps-of-sales-10-things-your-salespeople-wish-you-knew/
http://www.social-experts.net/if-you-leverage-social-media-social-media-will-give-you-leverage/
