Who are you more likely to listen to? A stranger sending you a knife to eat your soup with, or someone who’s spent time getting to know you and your business?
Have you:
- Ever got a cold-call from someone who clearly doesn’t know anything about your business?
- Ever received sales email after sales email offering you something you already have (or worse, sell!)
- Ever accepted a connection on LinkedIn only to get an ill-judged sales pitch immediately after?
I expect you have. I certainly have.
As well as being irritated by unsolicited sales pitches, I am also frustrated. Frustrated, because if any of the humans behind these pitches (when they are humans) had spent a few seconds Googling me or the startup I work for then they wouldn’t have wasted either mine or their time.
There is also the remote possibility that, had they pitched their product appropriately, I might have wanted to carry on the conversation.
The thing is, there isn’t a shortcut here – who are you more likely to listen to? A stranger sending you a knife to eat your soup with, or someone who’s spent time getting to know you and your business?
We call the latter technique social selling - read all about it below...
What is social selling?
Social selling means building relationships as part of the sales process, generally through social networks (i.e Twitter, LinkedIn etc). Where in the past, a salesperson might conjure images of cold calling/emailing, many today have found that establishing an active presence online increases their lead generation. In other words, the salesperson that uses social selling spends time developing their personal brand and demonstrating their expertise online in the particular sector they work in. If boasting in a vacuum doesn’t sound very effective, remember that the key word is ‘social’. A social selling salesperson spends time interacting, promoting, and getting to know their prospects on social media.
Original Article