If You’re Not Social Selling, You’re Losing Sales - Here’s How To Do It

How ‘social’ is your social selling? We’ve got a breakdown that’ll change the way you view social selling as a whole. Oh yeah, and build out your network at an upcoming, game-changing sales event!

In Today’s Jam

• How did the top social seller become successful?

• Tap into the Sales Success Summit, and expand your network.

Tim Hughes Is The Most Influential Social Seller in the World - Here’s How He Did It…

So, who is Tim Hughes? The guy’s accolades in the world of sales are pretty huge. Everywhere you find him on Google, his background reads like this:

Deep Dive on Tim Hughes

Missing Ingredients: After joining Twitter, Hughes was inspired to not only explore the importance of social in its role in sales, but to also equip other salespeople to leverage social for their own success. He and his colleagues took on a sales training endeavor, attempting to turn participants into “social sellers”. Aaaand… it failed! They tried everything from LinkedIn training, and profile writers, to masterclasses, but no game. According to Hughes, they failed to “create the mindset and habit change that’s vital to become social”.

Launching DLA Ignite: Recognizing that social will play a vital role in selling in the foreseeable future, Hughes alongside his business partner, set up the company, DLA Ignite. The goal was to transform organizations on every level: Sales, Marketing, Human Resources, Internal Comms, Customer Service, etc. It gets better.

Establishing Authority & Relevance: Hughes goes on to drop Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers, a sales book revamping the social selling topic. Hughes expressed on the Linking into Social Podcast in 2017, that no one was adding anything new to the topic of social selling; authors had moved on to writing on regular topics again like closing deals. Filling this gap in the market would do wonders to establish his authority in sales, particularly social selling.

Maintaining Momentum: With the launch of DLA Ignite in 2015, and the release of his book in 2016, Hughes goes on to collaborate with Adam Gray and Hugo Whicher on another book. The second is titled, Smarketing: How to Achieve Competitive Advantage through Blended Sales and Marketing. Similar to the first, this lands Tim Hughes several podcast appearances and tons of traction on platforms like LinkedIn.

Tim Hughes’ Four Keys to Growth

Based on our findings, the secret to Hughes’ success is based on these principles:

Keep Social Media Social: Younger folks may be hip to the purpose of social media and how best to navigate it as a business. For some older, larger companies, however, there is a real disconnect with how to take their products and services and communicate that on social media in the form of good content. Some large companies even forget the ‘social’ component altogether and resolve to overwhelm users with slapdash “content”. As Hughes put it on the Linking Into Sales Podcast: some companies employ an ancient approach to social media, treating it like a broadcast schedule from ancient television. Essentially, they believe social media is a place to dump bad content onto viewers.

Build Communities: According to Hughes, “the only way we will sell anything is by building communities”. Hughes explains that many elements in social selling aren’t even new. They are simple principles that salespeople need to stick to. For instance, what is a community? For Hughes, back in the day, this was his Filofax and Rolodex (basically contacts of key persons/prospects within his respective territory). The concept: if someone is going to make a decision about your product or service, you want to know about it. You can achieve this by ringing people up or finding ways to have them contact you. It’s going to be hard to achieve this if you aren’t actively building your community.

Bridge the Gap: If you have a ‘community’ in your iPhone contacts, in a notebook at home, or wherever it is you’ve stored key contacts over the years, start plugging those in on your social media pages. In Hughes’ case, this is how he developed his online community. Remember the Filofax and the Rolodex (the latter of which they are still making today and that totally blew our minds); all the contacts he had from the 80s and 90s have all connected with him on LinkedIn and Twitter. So avoid starting your social media accounts, thinking you’re starting from scratch. Find those contacts and connect with them online.

Connect people with quality content: Hughes's approach to social media has remained consistent to date. He has prioritized creating and sharing content that is impactful, and in doing so, has managed to attract more prospects over time. In a nutshell, he advises against focusing on pushing out x amount of content per week, to land some exorbitant amount of meetings. Good content will land you that one decent lead every week. From there, it’s just a matter of building.

Tap into the Sales Success Summit

The Sales Success Summit is organized by Scott Ingram, founder of the Sales Success Podcast. The event targets salespeople who want to learn from the top 1% performers in their field and are looking for game-changing events that allow them to expand their network and arsenals.

The two-day event takes place in Austin Texas, October 16 - 17, 2023. Tickets are listed on the site at $1199, but we believe that may have been increased; the site states that tickets go up by $50 on the first of each month.

Check out past presentations here.

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