by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
Two years ago, when we setting up DLA www.social-experts.net we were approached by a number of individuals who wanted to sell us a social selling cheat sheet and eBook. I thought it strange that people thought there was money to be made selling something that a dozen people offer on the internet for free.
So while I pointed out that as they written this eBook in company time, the IP (intellectual property) didn’t belong to them, so it wasn’t theirs to sell. They assured me it was written in their own time so the IP was theirs. Funny as it had their companies logo all the way through it. This was clearly profiting and even it was the best eBook in the world it wasn’t these people’s IP to sell.
The other thing that really struck me was that it wasn’t actually that good. What do I mean?
Anybody who follows our writing will know that here at DLA we try and drive the social selling debate forward. We don’t write “ten tools for Instagram” articles as there are plenty of other people who do that. We take a strategic approach, the same approach we take for our clients. Social Media and Social Selling is a strategy after all, sorry but if you treat it as a tactic, and you can, you won’t get maximum benefit. Our clients are those that want sales transformation where they can see a clear upturn in revenue and competitive advantage.
The same when Matt and I sat down and wrote the book “Social Selling – Influencing Buyers and Changemakers” we felt that that the “Social Selling” influencers had run out of things to say and either said the same things (time after time) or went back to talk about sales, closing, objections, etc, etc. We feel this is a path well trodden, and of course if you don’t have any (new) ideas you repeat your old ones or repeat old stuff. Just look how the social selling lists have changed from 2014 to today!
I’m not saying DLA have all the ideas, we just try and create some. Being as I was first to market with a Social Selling book #justsaying and our blog http://www.social-experts.net/blog/ has become a destination for social selling, digital selling and digital marketing thinking. We do after all post a blog a day. We do try and push forward the boundaries of subjects of the day. Anyway, back to the eBook.
One of the things that was startling about the eBook was how old fashioned it was. Let’s not forget I was being sold a state of the art play book that was being used by a household name to train it’s salespeople. Based on social selling thinking, it was 2015 thinking and a lot has happened since then.
What do I mean? Not long ago the same household name company (we don’t know if they use the same eBook) but based on one of the questions we were asked it probably is. One question we were asked at the panel was “what was your most successful inmail?” My answer, “er, we don’t send them”.
This is the danger of using a social selling programs to that has past their sell by date. Inmails are a cold call, but on a social network, if you do social Selling correctly you don’t need to send them. Of course you could be stuck with 3 year plus old material. We recently had a company say to us “we sent 250 inmails and got nowhere”. Yes, that is about the size of it. They have gone on to have some amazing results, way above the “typical” results of 20 – 30% incremental revenue that we mention here.
Other outdated posting we see, award ceremonies photos (nobody is interested), pitches about your company (again nobody is interested), mass liking of an article, mass sharing of an article. How to turn what is probably content into corporate spam. There is a brand accounting software company currently sponsoring posts on LinkedIn, which is sad. All was OK a few years ago, but social selling and the way we engage with prospects and customers has matured.
The conclusion. We didn’t buy the eBook and the person turned up in a new role soon after, at another household named software company. I wonder if they are using that old, out of date, playbook?
People who read this article also read these:
http://www.social-experts.net/innovation-disruption/
http://www.social-experts.net/gdpr-the-email-funnel-pyre/
http://www.social-experts.net/time-to-stop-being-scared/
