Author: Shelley Walters
When I started in sales and Social Selling, I had to visit 8 clients physically, every single day. No jokes! In our wildest dreams we could not have imagined a tool like email, never mind social media and Building Relationships Online. Social media has created so many incredible opportunities for us, and it is about […]
When I started in sales and Social Selling, I had to visit 8 clients physically, every single day. No jokes! In our wildest dreams we could not have imagined a tool like email, never mind social media and Building Relationships Online.
Social media has created so many incredible opportunities for us, and it is about time that we took that seriously. We need to consistently find high-quality leads, of course, I am stating the obvious here – but on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, they are there in their millions, trust me.
Actually, you do not have to trust me, just look at the research! According to a recent study conducted by LinkedIn – 72% of buyers use social media to research solutions for purchase.
Seventy-two percent. That is not a number you can or should ignore.
Fact is… cold calls are a thing of the past
We have to face it. Cold emails and cold calls are today’s sales equivalent of trying to use a sledgehammer to fix a computer. Not only are they outmoded, they simply do not work, and most of the time will cause more harm than good.
According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business School, the average executive is receiving 30,000 pieces of external communication per year. Well actually, that was the number in 2010. We can only imagine what that number is in 2020, right?
There can be no doubt that today’s buyers are flooded with random and often irrelevant, pushy requests all the time. Prospects get annoyed, we get frustrated, and opportunities fall through the cracks. If we do not hit our numbers, everybody loses.
So why would we move to social selling? Well, here your buyers are choosing to engage with you and instead of an unwelcome or intrusive and poorly timed call, they get relevant, engaging, and informative information that they can choose to consume in their own time.
This is an opportunity to engage meaningfully with your existing networks on digital channels, in the time that best suits them. This allows us to attract the right prospects and to cultivate our trusted relationships.
You can make yourself visible without being intrusive, and, when the time is right, your potential customers know where to find you.
In the process of Social Selling, you get to:
Define your reputation
Gain visibility in the market and amongst your existing customers (big win!)
Create and cultivate meaningful relationships
Deliver value to your target market and audience and to establish your credibility.
Help shape their buying criteria before your first engagement (a huge win in my opinion)
Stay top of mind, sometimes getting the opportunity is really about the right timing – make sure you do not miss that
Attract the right clients
This is kind of precision and direct access that we could have only dreamt about when I began with sales in 1999!
What Social Selling is NOT
Every week I get questions about why some social selling efforts may seem to be failing, so, let us discuss what social media is NOT.
Social selling is not a short-term tactic to get a deal immediately. It is also not an opportunity to schmooze and self-promote, and it is definitely not an opportunity for us to harass our clients, or to be pushy and prioritize our own agenda.
It is the practice of showing up on social media with information that is relevant and informative to our audience.
You cannot just show up and ‘throw up’ you do need to ensure that there is substance to your content, that you have structured it well and delivered in your own style instead of a canned pitch through Social Selling.
It is not canned. And it is not spam. Its customised, considerate, and personable.
How do I Build Relationships in an online world?
When we become more sophisticated in our approach we can then also become more strategic in our engagements, consider that according to the CEB buying decisions now include up to 6.2 people, and that building relationships with individuals who are not only key decision-makers but influencers is vital – I am sure you can see the opportunity here to layer strategic social selling engagement onto your existing account planning and influence mapping.
If you and your team would like help with this, that is what we do – so please do feel free to reach out to us anytime.
Contact Us at WeSpeak Global and follow us on Facebook
The articles, video and images embedded on these pages are from various speakers and talent.
These remain the property of its owner and are not affiliated with or endorsed by WeSpeak Global.
Siphiwe Moyo’s new book, called “Your Next Move” hits the shelves this week. Career Strategies to Survive and Thrive During Covid-19 and Beyond. As we all think about our responses to COVID-19, we have to try both offence and defence career strategies to survive. In other words, you need to try and hold on to […]
Suddenly half the world is working from home and many of us have new workplace surroundings to adapt to. Remember folks, it’s not the most intelligent or fittest of the species who will survive, it’s those who can swiftly adapt to change. I’ve spent huge chunks of my career working from home, so here are […]
THE ACCELERATION OF RISK as a few months ago, the National Safety Council had me as the closing keynote speaker for their massive annual conference – and I spoke to a few thousand safety professionals on issues surrounding new, emerging, acceleration of risk. Including a story of what happened when Rosie the Robot from […]
Business success isn’t only reserved for large corporations with seemingly unlimited budgets to design customer experience. There are countless stories of small businesses that have grown to incredible heights simply by treating customers in a way that made them want to share their experience with family, friends, colleagues and on social media and encourage them […]
With all the recent fervor over the confrontation between Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Oscars® over a comment made about Jada Pinkett Smith, there’s one character I have yet to see explored in the aftermath to change your perspective: G.I. Jane. Several years ago, when I was building my business as a […]
One morning when I was on my way to school, my life changed for the better with The Power of a Vision. I was 14 years old and an eighth grader at the time, and my school was on the other side of Matlala River in Limpopo. It was quite a long walk through the […]
Over the last four weeks, I’ve elaborated on what I call the Closing the Loop with Cycle of Listening. This consists of: Step 1: Recognizing the Unsaid – Unspoken things in your culture’s organization to recognize that your people aren’t telling their entire truth. Step 2: Seeking to Understand – Leaning in to understand someone’s perspective and […]
4 Types of Keynote Speakers – How To Match Them For Your Function The function of a Keynote Speaker is to create the stage for the remainder of that event and deliver folks collectively with the very same function. What varieties of Motivational Speaker are there? Generally, there are four principal methods […]
Our Mission
© All rights reserved 2025. Created using VOXEL THEME
