by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
Sitting in Singapore after on-boarding our reseller, I was reminded about there are two rules of thought around Social Selling. There is one where you assume that Salespeople are idiots and don’t want to do Social Selling, so you find ways to force them to do it, even to the point where you give up and you write their profiles.
This way changes nothing and won’t get you a Return on Investment (ROI).
Or there is way where you use change management techniques to empower and activate the people to want to social sell. This version does get an ROI and fast.
If anybody sits you down and tells you do do something, what is your first reaction? To rebel, of course! If somebody tells you to have a social profile for the good of the company and to push out boring corporate content. Of course you don’t want this and you will rebel! We all know corporate content does not work anymore.
You wanted to learn to ride a bike and wanted to learn how to drive a car! Why? Because, you could visualise the new found freedom it would give you. Because, maybe your friends were doing it. Either way, you were empowered too ride or drive.
You couldn’t learn to ride a bike or learn to drive, by reading a book, or attending a webinar, or being told to by your boss. You couldn’t learn to ride a bike or learn to drive by watching others.
You learn’t to ride a bike or learnt to drive by somebody providing you with the framework and the guidelines and then they mentored you. You were the person that did the work, you were the person that fell off the bike or stalled the car. You picked yourself up and got back on the bike or put the car in neutral.
Programatic Social Selling is the same. Nobody forces anybody to do anything, it becomes natural, because you want to do it. Social Selling is about empowering the employees, not by telling them, but getting the to understand how it applies to them in the work place. To sell more, to appear as an expert to their prospects, to stand out amongst their sales team and their community and Territory. That’s not about being a corporate robot or mouthpiece.
When we on-boarded the reseller team here in Singapore, like the sales teams we activate, it was the team themselves that did the work. The sales team (and the partner here) changed their profiles, wrote content, expanded their network and got the leads and meetings. Not an agency, trying to get more money, by writing profiles. But the sales teams and our partners, felt empowered to do it themselves.
It was the Partner here, that when they got the leads and meetings, that they had that “a ha!” moment. They then realised that if they took the process and scaled it out, they would get more leads and meetings. Programatic Social Selling is after all a process, crank the handle faster, you get more leads and meetings. Plus based on the fact you are great at execution, you will get more and more closed deals. But, but, but, without that empowered “a ha” why would you even bother?
This means that companies become self-sufficient for their own demand generation. None of this lead, feast and famine, we leave a process and programatic social selling legacy, created by the team. Time, maybe to take a look?
People who read this article also read these:
https://www.social-experts.net/why-prospecting-is-so-important-but-the-right-prospecting-is-key/
https://www.social-experts.net/is-your-linkedin-profile-as-boring-as-wet-afternoon/
https://www.social-experts.net/free-yourself-from-the-inefficiency-and-ineffectiveness-of-legacy-sales-methods-of-the-past/
