Why Your Social Selling Tactics Went out with the Ark

The term Social Selling was first used in 2006, I wrote the article “How to get 10 C-Level Meetings a Week using Twitter” in 2015, my book “Social Selling – Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers” the first social selling book came out in 2016. (It’s available worldwide on Amazon by the way).In that time I’ve seen a lot of change, partly because people become wise to hacks and partly as all we do it teach social selling, things evolve, our clients come up with things, we invent things. Social Selling is therefore continually evolving.For example, one thing that does not crop up that often is the phrase “social selling takes a long time” the people that used to say it seem to have fallen by the wayside or maybe because they must have been doing social selling wrong.Let’s explain that social selling, isn’t actually selling on social. People hate being sold to, it burns through trust with prospects and customers. The reason why we are on social in the first place is to avoid sales people. Nobody gets up in the morning and says “the first thing I need to do today is talk with a salesperson”. Sending in-mails and or connection requests and then pitching is no different from a cold call. In fact it’s a cold call on a social network.We don’t want interruptions, we want experts who can help us. LinkedIn is not for selling, LinkedIn will help you get that first meeting and you do that, not by selling, but by building relationships .

Anyway, here are some social selling techniques that went out with the ark:

Looking at my profile and hoping I will either look back or try and connect with you. The dead giveaway, is your summary title and summary which makes you look like every other sales guy. A summary of you company and products, means that if I go anywhere near your profile you will try and see me something, so I, of course ignore you.

Sending connection requests with the call of your university football team. It was big in 2015, but we all know that if I let my guard down, you will try and see me something, so I just ignore you.

The template – You have to laugh at these templates from “ancient Greece” stating “I’m growing my network and maybe we can find some common similarities”. What you mean is you want to connect and then sell me something.

Having a title “social selling expert” just by saying that, we all know you are not.

Pretending to be hip and cool by standing in front of power points. Power point has never been hip and cool.

Posting content from your corporation, this will probably stop you getting future jobs as people see you as an empty corporate suit. Don’t forget, nobody has time to listen to your sales message.

Not commenting on people’s posts and not engaging.

That’s just a stater, hope you enjoyed it.Related: Why Your Marketing Is Very Seriously Broken