Somewhere along the way social selling got a weird reputation. If you ask a few dozen people what it is, you’ll get a few dozen answers.
Not only will some of those answers waste your time by not filling your pipeline, but they can also damage your professional brand and credibility.
My hope is to set the standard for what it is (and isn’t), how to succeed at it, and show what good looks like.
Much of my success throughout my career can be attributed to the power of social selling. It’s what allowed me to crush enterprise sales records and serves as the bedrock for my business, #samsales.
If I had to define social selling, I would tell you that it's leveraging the data and intelligence of LinkedIn to referral-sell your way to the top, even through people you don't even yet know. I love the investigative element of gathering evidence and drawing connections, a giant game of Sherlock Holmes, if you will.
In today’s newsletter I am going to cover:
- Dispelling two of the biggest myths around social selling
- Tell you exactly how I actually social selling
Let’s get started!
Social Selling Myth #1 - You have to become a LinkedIn influencer
Anyone telling you that you need to be posting daily on LinkedIn, spending hours engaging with other people's content, or that you need to become an influencer has social selling completely backwards.
The majority of your success in social selling has absolutely nothing to do with creating your own content. In fact, many of the best social sellers rarely post on LinkedIn.
Instead of wasting hours trying to wordsmith the perfect post or spending your prospecting block commenting, a true social selling master actually limits scroll time and focuses on using social to find warm entry points into their highest-value prospects.
Content still can play a role, especially if your prospects are posting or engaging in the content of others. But by no means do you need to upload selfies or build a brand in order to succeed.
That said, I’ll never talk you out of creating your own content. It gives you a platform to establish thought leadership, create drip campaigns, and build trust and authority long before you ever reach out. But again, it is not necessary to succeed as a social seller.
Now smash that like and subscribe button, just kidding ;)
Social Selling Myth #2 - It’s all about the Pitch Slap!
Using the same cold email templates and 18-step sequences for LinkedIn messages feels somewhat anti-social. Social selling is finding the indirect paths to your prospects through your existing connections. Once identified, ask them to bridge the connection to your prospect, and make it easy for them to do so. The mutual human between you and your referral is what turns a cold pitch slap into a warm referral.
Let me show you a few easy places to look for these paths.
So How Do I Actually Social Sell?
Social selling is leveraging the data and intelligence that LinkedIn offers: who knows who, job changes, promotions, and shared work history. This data changes every day, so new paths to your top prospects are created every single week.
Uncovering these new referral paths doesn’t mean a hopeless scroll-and-wait strategy; it means knowing how to analyze the data available and set up notifications so you’re alerted when new paths are presented.
Here are a couple of my favorite warm intro paths:
1. Connect with every executive at your company, and mine their network. Becoming an executive takes 20+ years of industry experience across multiple organizations. This results in deep networks that may serve as a warm intro path to any of your target accounts.
Go connect with every leader in your company and use Sales Nav to overlay your target account list against their networks. Flag any mutual connections and batch them over to your Exec (or their EA) and offer to ghost-write referrals for them.
This is an easy, lucrative way into high-value accounts, and as a bonus, you’ll look great showing your executive team you know how to activate their network to create revenue.
2. Track job changes among past colleagues. What if someone you used to work with takes a new job at a company you want to sell to?
If you miss the job announcement in your feed, you’ll miss this opportunity for a warm intro.
I set up notifications in Sales Navigator so I am alerted when someone I used to work with changes jobs. And you don’t have to compile this list manually, it’s accessible in LinkedIn’s lead filters.
While these are just two favorites, I have created a ton of searches and alerts just like these, and I’ll be sharing a few more of them over the coming weeks, or you can grab our 13 Sales Nav Searches To Fill Up Your Pipeline toolkit below.
For a deeper dive and a live Q&A with me! Sign up for the Social Selling Masterclass here!
And when you're ready, this noozy is just a sneak peek of our new course, Social Selling: The Warm Pipeline Machine. Pre-order before Oct 19 and save $100 off.
