Why Social Media is a Non-Negotiable Sales Tool

Why Social Media is a Non-Negotiable Sales Tool Is social media the sales tool of the century? Whether youre an employer selling your company as a desirable  workplace to potential employees, or  a mortgage broker selling your service to new home-buyers, a presence on social media is a must-have. We caught up with  social selling sorcerer Tim Hughes  to hear whats what right now on all things social selling. Have a listen to the episode  embedded below, subscribe to the podcast,  or keep reading for an abridged  transcript of our conversation. To hear more from Tim, check out the 5 Pillars of Social Selling. What do you do Tim? I dont like to use the word expert, but people quite often place that on me. Im an expert in social selling and social media. My book is available  on Amazon now;  Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. The book really is about how organisations, how salespeople, and how marketers can use social to sell, and use social, in effect, to generate leads and generate revenue. How do you use social networks purposefully to build trust and a high quality community? The fact that people are now using mobile more than anything else, and people are spending more time actually researching things.  People are spending more time actually researching the products, and theres far more products and apps, and the whole thing is getting far more complex. I dont want to sound ageist, but its that the research shows that if youre looking at people up to about the age of 40, those people, generally about 35% of them, rather than go to Google when they want to actually buy something and then go to a corporate website, people are actually going and connecting on to the social networks. Should  you create content to resonate with those people doing research? Yes. A lot of people come to me and say, Tim, you post some really interesting stuff. For me, thats a really flattering thing, because what I want to do is educate people. And thats what brands, salespeople and marketers should be doing. So if we think about the traditional sales funnel and the way that people have traditionally sold, is that youve probably already spoken to the people. Theres already a lead, there would have been a meeting, and you take that person through a process where, say, software, youll do demonstrations and reference visits, and its all defined and you follow that process. I think there should be a new term, whether its the marketing funnel, or what I actually call the relationship funnel, which is where the people that were trying to sell or market to probably dont know about this already. Or they may be in a position that its even above that, where they dont even know that theres not even a need for anything that we do.  What your role in the way that you can use social is to build a community and network with those individuals, so when they actually come out and buy, they actually come to you. How do you  scale a social selling strategy across an organisation? How do  you move from random acts of social to actually getting stakeholder buy in? What  happens quite often at that stage is that when organisations realise that theres this tsunami of social taking place, what they try and do is actually grab hold and try and control it. Its about practice, and how do organisations take this opportunity and drive it through the organisation? Were quite open and honest and say, You actually need particular individuals to help you do that. Because social selling is a strategy. Its a change program. And the only way that youre going to take it through the organisation and stop people going back to the old way is because none of us like change.  We always like going back to what we did before. The only way that you can do that and explain it, and train people, and get people to understand how to post and why you post this, and why not to post that, and to drive it, is to have a person who understands social, who has a business acumen to drive it through the organisation and take charge of that. Whats your take on employee advocacy? I read a report today that says that 70% of brands broadcast online. They dont actually engage with anybody. Certainly if I look at my LinkedIn stream, a lot of it is corporate stuff being put out by employees. Now, theres nothing wrong with that. If youre IBM, youve got 400,000 employees. You connect your corporate marketing to all of those 400,000 employees. Youve got an awful lot of share of voice and youre pumping out an awful lot of content. But social isnt about broadcast, and its not about pumping out content. Social is about engaging, and social is actually about building your own influence in your own community. Is  employee advocacy part of social selling, or vice versa? If I was rolling out a social selling program, I would be looking at employee advocacy as a second or third step in that process. Because ultimately what you want in the organisation is everybody the goal of all organisations should be stated that we want to move to being a social organisation. Thats social empowerment of every employee, whether theyre in sales, whether theyre in development, but doing it in the right way. Which networks  work best for social selling? The two that I always recommend to people, especially if theyre working in the B2B environment, are LinkedIn and Twitter. Brian Solis said that everybody is on LinkedIn, but the interesting people are on Twitter. If Im talking to salespeople or marketers, you need to be on Twitter, not just about because youre putting out information. Change makers will generally be on Twitter. They will definitely be on LinkedIn. But you can find individuals, theyre not C-level, but they will be on Twitter. You can find them in organisations and theyre kind of your link in to the way that you can sell into those organisations. For social selling on LinkedIn, would you say Sales Navigator  is  a must-have? If youre in sales, you basically got to take the professional addition. Its   £300 or so, a year? But if youre in sales, you kind of need that. Its great for, if youve got some accounts, actually finding those people and finding things about those accounts. I know that you can go to websites like Fiverr, and you get some people to actually you could go, give me a list of as a salesperson, you could say, Heres my target list of 20 accounts. Ill pay you £5, and you can go and research all the people in those accounts with these job titles. Any thoughts on  visual networks like Instagram or Snapchat? Because Im in social, I have to pretty much use every platform. Because I get asked opinions about it. I actually like the movement away from text to pictures and video. I think Instagram is all about photos. I love walking around. I walk around London, and I go, Well, Im going to take a photo with that and then put it on Instagram. The same with Snapchat. Its  a great, fun way of taking very small segment videos and putting those out. The thing about Snapchat that I havent really realised until I met up with Brian Fanzo a couple of weeks ago in Manchester. He was saying that the great thing about it is that you can have a one-to-one chat with a brand. Whereas on Twitter, generally if youre dealing with the brand, it goes out to everybody. Follow Tim on Twitter @Timothy_Hughes  and  be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast.