7 Secrets of Successful Social Selling

Hello and welcome to the Essential B2B podcast brought to you, as always, by Lead Forensics. I am your host Joe Ducarreaux.   This episode is the audio taken from the webinar we ran recently called 7 Secrets to Social Selling. For this I was joined by Morgan Smith, co-host of the B2B Power Hour podcast and MD at Aligned. 

 

Morgan brought wonderful energy to the conversation and offered up some brilliant tips and tricks for upping your social selling game. We are yet to start our podcast on whiskey, tacos and books however, but I’m sure that will come in the  long run.  There are loads to take away from this podcast episode. You really are about to learn a lot. 

 

So without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the Essential B2B Podcast. 

 

Joe:  Let’s not waste any time. Let’s get straight into this, shall we. So what do you think is the most important element of successful social selling?

 

Morgan:  I think it all comes back to credibility.  I think we spend a lot of time confusing attention for credibility.   So there’s this idea that if you have 10,000 followers or 15,000 followers or whatever, you’re a really credible person, and that’s the goal. That may well be true.  There’s probably an overlap between having a lot of attention on the platform and having a lot of credibility.   But credibility really is, can I trust you? Are you showing up with good intentions? Can you solve my problems? 

 

The truth is, nobody really logs into LinkedIn, for example, to be pitched or to be sold.   So I think the goal for any seller who wants to use social effectively is to build credibility, build that trust, show up with good intentions and have good conversations before you ask for the meeting, or before you get them into your pipeline, or into a sequence of some kind.  That’s the thing I always pay attention to.   Am I building credibility with my prospect?

 

Joe:  And do you think credibility comes with forming a rapport or a relationship with people on social media?

Morgan:  Yeah, for sure. I think that’s also why I’m biased towards not sending in-mails or not sending direct messages all that often.   I think if your prospect’s active on the platform.  They’re commenting on stuff or they’re even posting content which is a little rare, but at least they’re engaging on the platform.  Just engage with them.  Building that rapport digitally first and just getting your face and your name in front of them.  Maybe they visit your profile and learn a little bit more about you.   That is the juicy stuff before you have a sales focused conversation.

 

Joe: I guess if you get to understand someone’s personality a little bit more before you even start that process, it just breaks down so many barriers to you, doesn’t it, I suppose.  Rather than just a name that pops up, as you say, in an in-mail or something.

 

Morgan:  Right. Exactly.

 

Joe:  So do you have any examples about people who have successfully leveraged social selling to drive results at all?

 

Morgan:  For sure. I think one of my favourite stories is………because I think there’s a lot of stories about people who use content and then they go viral and drive a lot of inbound off of that.  Which is, again, the attention credibility thing.  That’s interesting, it happens every once in a while.  

 

The story I always like to tell is, we were working with an SDR and he had 800 connections or so, like nothing crazy, around 800 followers.  We worked with him to do a lot of on-platform engagement.   So commenting strategies, getting in front of prospects, not pitching and building that rapport and that visibility, having good conversations.   Within 60 days, I think he had booked 35 meetings and closed 3 five-figure deals. 

 

Joe:  Come on, that’s pretty impressive, isn’t it? 

 

Morgan:  A lot of that just comes back to…….at the B2B Power Hour, we have this rule that we like to call vampire sales.   So in folklore, vampires were not allowed into your home unless they were invited in.  So vampire sales is, you’re not allowed to pitch unless you’re invited.  So you think about that as an engagement strategy. You are going for them to ask you, so what do you do? Or tell me more about your company?  

 

If you can’t say anything about that until they ask you for it, it means you’re there showing up asking good questions, having a good time, dropping valuable resources. Hey, did you see this article I just saw the other day? Have you seen this post about this topic you were commenting on?   Really ramping up that engagement.  

 

It’s more even than just building rapport, its value deposits, dropping value. Because if you obey vampire sales, and this SDR obeyed vampire sales, what happens is it shifts the conversation to where somebody realises you’re taking a genuine interest in them.  Then they’ll naturally say, okay, what do you do? Tell me more about you?   In that moment then, there’s that good, is this prospect the right fit? Is this the right time for this sort of conversation?  

 

That’s when it starts to snowball. Where if you’re doing this across 10, 12, 15 different prospects in a given week, a good number of them are going to be like, yeah, let’s hop on a call. Tell me more about what you do. Let’s see if we’re the right fit.

Joe:  So that’s something that I’m curious about then.  Because obviously, if you’re nurturing that sort of relationship, it does take time.  How do SDRs and salespeople, how do they balance putting the time in and still meeting their sales targets?

Morgan:  It’s the ultimate question that you just asked.

Joe:  Thank you very much.

 

Morgan:  It’s a very good one. The way that I balance it is I do prospecting power hours.   So it’s actually two hours, I’m not trying to mislead anybody but the power hour is actually two hours.   On the front end, it’s 30 minutes of prep for building the list or finding the people, doing some research, gathering those names and getting focused.  Then on the back end, it’s reflection. What went well, what didn’t and some data entry in case you have to keep track of some stuff.  It works for any channel, but social especially.   The truth is that if you’re blocking out an hour of prospecting with 30 minutes of prep and 30 minutes of reflection, that’s the two hour prospecting power hour.   You can run one or two of those a day.  It’s a good amount of work. You’re not going to do them back to back. You might do them in the morning and in the afternoon. 

 

If through the week you spend maybe one to three of those chunks on social, you’re going to stay on top of the conversations. The mistake that I see SDRs make is, they think that they have to be incredibly responsive on social and it’s just not the truth.  If I get a DM from a prospect, I can immediately respond.   But then you get sucked into the platform all day because you’re waiting for that response. You’ve got the window open and then you start scrolling the feed, then it’s three hours later and you’re like, I haven’t done any work. I’ve just been scrolling LinkedIn. 

 

So time blocking that and saying, I’m going to spend an hour on LinkedIn here or even 30 minutes in the afternoon, just responding to some conversations or some comments. That’s the easy breezy way to really stay on top of it without feeling like you get sucked into the platform.  Because you don’t need to respond immediately. It’s not a sales platform.  If we remember it’s social media and people are just there to engage and have fun and be inspired, we don’t have to respond immediately.  We can take four hours to get back to them or even the next day and then just keep that momentum moving. 

 

Joe:  So it’s less about, as you say, jumping straight back into it then. It’s more about if you can consistently dedicate that time.  I’ve worked in social a little bit here and there and that’s one of the key things that kept coming back …….you can plan strategies or whatever but they can alter and change vary so much……..but as long as you are consistent with what you’re doing, that is what will get you the results. 

 

Morgan:  Exactly. I think the main mistake I see with  SDRs and any account executive who’s like full cycle, the mistake that they make is they’ll spend five hours on a Monday on LinkedIn because it’s the most amazing platform they’ve ever seen.  Then they keep that up for two weeks and then it just peters out and they’re back to cold calling and they’re back to cold emailing.   It’s, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s pace ourselves here. Let’s run the marathon. Let’s not do all of our work up front.  So yes, consistency is key.

 

Joe:  You gave a few examples of how to go about building rapport, it’s commenting, engaging, that sort of thing.  What other ways are there of connecting with people and building those relationships on social?

 

Morgan:  So I think the first layer here is strategic and then we’ll talk tactics. So the strategic question is, are they active on the platform?  Because if they are active on the platform, you shouldn’t be sending in-mails or personalised connection requests.   If they’re posting content, respond to the content.   If they’re commenting, if they’re liking stuff and they’re commenting on things, then you should be responding to those comments and showing up in the same places that they’re engaging. 

 

I think we default to this sort of like direct method for everybody, but that’s not the truth. There’s going to be a lot of people who aren’t super active in that way, that might call for a direct connection request or a personalised connection request. Whereas if they’re active on the platform, you should engage with them.   So tactically speaking, I think about content, comments and conversations, 3Cs. 

 

Content is a great way to educate and nurture an audience. It’s a long-term play. But if you think about an email nurture sequence that you spun up for a prospect, what if you put that into the feed?  If you have an email nurture sequence, you could just turn that into content. If you’re sending connection requests that are blank or you’re engaging with people, you’re educating those prospects on a particular piece of what you sell or the problem that you solve. 

 

Comments are great because there’s no cap on them. There’s a cap on connection requests. There’s a cap on in-mails.   There’s caps on a bunch of other stuff on LinkedIn and even content to some degree.  You can’t post a bunch in one day.  You can’t flood the feed without getting punished, but there is no cap on comments.   So comments are a great place to engage directly with your prospects.  So somebody’s commenting, you respond to their comment or they’re posting content, you respond with a comment.   But even more dangerously, here’s a pro tip that I love is; you pop in the comment section of the influencers that they follow, the thought leaders that they follow.  This is like a one-to-many play in a way, where chances are if your ICP prospect follows Joe, there’s other ICP prospects that also follow Joe.   So showing up in those same places gets you in front of a lot of ICP prospects.

 

Then last is conversations.  So sending a DM, sending a connection request, sending an email.   Those are always options to strike up a conversation.  But again, if you’re obeying vampire sales, the way you’re going to start that conversation is not, hey, I’ve got this great product that you should check out, we should have a meeting.  There’s going to be a whole other utility tool belt of conversation starters you need to use.

 

Joe:  Just on the comments thing, I think if you are regularly commenting on those people’s things, they will start to recognize your name. Oh, it’s Morgan again. He’s come back saying, hey, that was a great podcast. Come and listen to mine, ?

 

Morgan:  Exactly. Actually, what’s really funny with some of the SDRs we’ve worked with. We’ve seen this happen, where somebody gets really engaged on LinkedIn and then they send an email.  The prospect remembers their name because they’ve been engaging on LinkedIn, but they just sent an email. And so it’s like, oh, well, yeah, I’ve seen Morgan’s name on LinkedIn. And they’ve gotten responses like, hey, love seeing your name in my inbox because I know we’ve been chatting out on LinkedIn. Yes, this is relevant to me. Let’s have a chat.  That sort of thing. It’s not just even on the platform. There’s benefits elsewhere.

 

Joe:  Absolutely.  I’m sure you’ll have had this as well but even I’ve had messages,  emails just from people saying, hey, I heard your podcast on that. I really liked it, so here’s a thing that I’d like you to get involved with.   Yeah, 100%.  So on the content creation side of things, how do you create content that’s compelling? How do you ensure that people are going to engage with what it is that you’re putting on your socials? I know that’s a tricky one.  

 

Morgan:  I was going to say, if I had an answer to this, I would have a lot of money because this is what everybody asks.  But I do think there are a few principles. The first is that the algorithm is a black box.  Nobody really knows how it works.   It’s important to make peace with the idea that if only a few hundred people see your post, it’s still a few hundred people seeing your name and your photo and your headline and whatever your piece of content is in the feed, even if they’re scrolling past.   So there’s some benefit to that.   

 

Really good content usually starts with a problem. What is the problem you’re trying to solve?  So if you think like a content marketer or even a product marketer, one of the great questions that they ask is, how does this content solve the problem that our audience is experiencing?   

 

I talk a lot about social selling and sales navigator and a bunch of stuff like that.  The problems that people have are how do I save leads and lead lists? Or how do I use this new feature in SalesNav? Or it’s even some of the questions we were talking about today. How do I engage with prospects and get them to be interested in me?  So I’m going to create content that educates the audience around that. 

 

Now, the problem that I’ve noticed is that at different companies, SDRs and AEs are not necessarily equipped to answer those questions really effectively. Because there is a certain way you want to answer that or educate the audience.  It’s not really about your product.  It’s about the workflow, the methodology, the idea. 

 

One of the things that I do a lot is I go out and do searches. So I don’t spend a lot of time doing this. Maybe it’s every other week. I’m going to time block out 30 minutes and I’m going to search for the things that my prospects are talking about and I’m going to see how they articulate it.   One of the things I’ve noticed is a lot of SDRs talk about using LinkedIn productively.   I would talk about that challenge very differently, but a lot of people talk about it using LinkedIn productively. So I can go back and create a post that’s like, Top 10 ways to use LinkedIn productively, or my number one secret for ……..whatever the hook needs to be there. 

 

Basically, the strategic goal here is to tie whatever that piece of content is to a problem that that person is experiencing.  Actually writing it is an art form and all that means is the more you write, the better you get at it.  I look at content that I wrote starting two and a half years ago. I’m like, Oh, God!  

Joe:  I listen to old podcasts and I’m like,  I’m just not that person anymore!.

 

Morgan:  Exactly. So it’s okay not to be great at it the first time you do it. 

 

Joe: So then, if that’s how you spend a bit of time searching for what people are talking about.  How much have you written about AI recently?

 

Morgan:  I think I’ve only had a couple of posts.  It’s so true.  Every chat, every third post is like ChatGPT on the feed.   And what’s actually interesting? Can I tie this back?  To me is the difference between attention and credibility.   Because it’s trendy to talk about AI, which will earn you attention.  But that doesn’t mean that the attention that you earn is actually going to convert to booked meetings, to qualified opportunities, to closed deals.   Which is the reason I’m out on social.  I’m there to build business. 

 

So for my audience and what we sell and what we offer, we don’t really do much with AI.  I’ll talk about it every once in a while just because it’s fun, but I’m focused on that credibility side.   Where I’m like, okay, what does somebody need to know before they buy? And then creating content around that.

 

Joe:  I guess it’s that value add, isn’t it? If you’ve not necessarily got anything original to offer then you don’t really talk that much about AI. 

 

Morgan:  No exactly right.

 

Joe:  In my sort of work with socials and bits and pieces that I’ve done across  a couple of years now, someone once said to me that authenticity is the currency to social media and having a social presence. How does that then translate into social selling, would you say? It kind of ties into your credibility piece you were talking to, I imagine?

 

Morgan:  Yeah. The thing I find is it’s really hard to balance for the seller.  Unlike somebody who can just go and create a personal brand and who’s a freelancer or is a coach or a consultant.  They have a lot of freedom and flexibility about how they can show up. So authenticity to them can be this really, really wide range. But for the seller at a company, they have some balance here. I think of the balance between being NASCAR, where you just have a bunch of logos,  you’re sponsored by a company and it’s just the company’s profile and you as the individual. Especially because chances are, don’t tell any of the sales managers this, but you’re not going to be at your company forever, you’re eventually going to move on. So how do you balance those long-term career things with your current company, selling to the prospects that you want to reach, and building your network. 

 

It can feel tricky and then to layer on authenticity, how do you show up as yourself? So what I always come back to is; first principle is your LinkedIn profile is yours, so make it yours.   It’s not your company’s.   Find that balance between telling your own personal story.   Where you came from, the jobs that maybe you’ve worked so far, the passions, the interests that you have and the reason why you wanted to work at the company you wanted to work at.   It doesn’t have to be a deep reason. Sometimes you want to work at a company because it pays you money and you need to pay rent. It doesn’t have to be profound, but at least to sort of tell that story. 

 

The second thing that I notice a lot, is that people sometimes, and I’m guilty of this so maybe this is more a reminder of me than for anybody else, but sometimes I lean too heavily on just engaging with prospects and that related content and focus on this thing that I want to sell. The truth is that it’s social media, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there that you can engage with and authenticity to me means showing and sharing those interests and passions that aren’t just about work.  It’s showing up as your whole self. 

 

At the very end of my About section, I have……I love to talk about whiskey, tacos and books.  

 

Joe:  Let’s start another podcast Morgan, that sounds like a wonderful time. 

 

Morgan:  But it’s true and that’ll prompt funny conversations in the DMs.  Or some guy does stuff with whiskey fridays or I don’t know, and I’ll go and engage and have a good time there.   

 

So I think it’s okay to show up authentically.  It’s good to just remember that even though it’s a professional network, it’s okay to show your personal interests and your personal passions and just be smart about it. 

 

Sometimes companies are really restrictive about it. I would encourage leaving a workplace like that, if possible.  We’re in the new age here.  If you social sell, you need to be able to show up as you.  My rule is, when I get on a call, my hope is that I’m no different than what they expected from the way I engage and write content

and have conversations digitally.

 

Joe:  Yeah, it’s having that personal alignment, isn’t it? I’ll tell you someone who does it absolutely fantastically is Travis Tyler from PandaDoc. He is fantastic. I think it might have been today or even yesterday, he just put up a picture like, Right! back off my vacation, and it was just a picture of him in the bath. I was like, that’s great.  I really, really enjoyed that. 

 

Morgan:  He’s awesome. I saw Caspian Lewke, he’s another one who’s really good at Gong. He posts a bunch of memes and that’s because he loves comedy.  He loves making people laugh and it is a true passion project for him to find and create and curate funny sales memes for people to engage with.  He shares personal stuff like that all the time. I love Travis. He’s great.

 

Joe:  He’s brilliant. We had him on for a webinar earlier this year. He was just, he was fantastic.  Just to get back to something that you said around content, you said,  the more you do it, the better you get at it.  So I wonder if it’s going to be much the same sort of answer, but how do people improve, continuously improve their social selling skills? Is it a case of just it’s time in the ring, you’ve just got to get on and do it? Is there a secret sauce?

 

Morgan:  So I think that content in particular is partly like going to the gym where you just need enough repetitions to build the muscle.   The same goes for engaging or having conversations on platform, you just need the repetitions in the gym.   But the truth is that you can do an exercise in the gym really poorly. You can have poor form and so you can learn the wrong lessons, or you can hurt yourself in the process. 

 

I think the real question for me is always like, what’s the proper form? What are the guidelines here for sellers that they need to obey? Vampire sales is one of them, I think.  One of our more powerful ones is the rule of three.  If you’re engaging with somebody on platform through the comments, you want to have three round trips before you send a connection request.   This is a really interesting principle because we were trying to figure out how we can get our connection rates to 100%. This is the experiment. How can we get every single connection request that we send to be accepted? And without personalising it or without having some additional message.  The truth was that if we had three round trip conversations;, so Joe, you and I, you have a good comment and I respond to your comment, that’s one.  You respond again and then I respond again, that’s two. Then you respond again and I respond again, that’s three.   

 

By that point, if I send a connection request, you’re almost a 100% guaranteed going to accept.  So the truth is a lot of sellers have difficulty getting up to those three round trips because we don’t know how to formulate a comment that kick starts a good conversation. 

 

So the guideline is work towards the rule of three. What are the repetitions? How can I get this comment to kickstart a response? How do I ask a better question at the end of the post? How do I tell a funnier joke? I love funny comments. I love insightful comments, curious comments. There’s these flavours that you can add or tag in somebody else to be like, hey, Joe, what did you think about this?  If the guideline is the rule of three, the goal is the repetitions on the comment that gets you to that point where whoever you’re having a conversation with continues to respond.  That can be over two days. It doesn’t have to be immediate.

 

The other thing here, aside from just doing more repetitions on content, is when it comes to content, take a look at the posts that do get a lot of engagement and then unpack them a little bit.  It doesn’t have to be anything profound, but there’s a few things that get shared out a lot and it is true.   One is a hook.  What is going to stop somebody from scrolling?  Two is, what’s the story of the post.  What is the person going to learn? Is there more than just……. There’s obviously really strange examples on this, there’s funny ones where like, I was in an airport at 4am and doing all this, the hustle stuff.  There’s those sorts of story posts.   But what is somebody going to take away from this post?  Then how do they format it?  One of the mistakes that I see a lot is people will preserve really chunky text in feed. It’s kind of funny to read a LinkedIn post that’s one line at a time, but the reason that works is because it’s mobile optimised. Something like 60 to 80% of people are on LinkedIn on their phones.  So when you actually read it on a phone, it reads really nicely. It’s really well formatted to read on a mobile device. So having a big chunk of text, somebody’s eyes are just going to gloss over it. 

 

My goal on content, the rule of three is the goal for comments. My goal on content is to earn inbound connection requests. So commenting will support this as well. But what I want is somebody to see a post in the feed and then I earn a connection request off of it.  From that, maybe I’ll send them a DM, like, hey, great to be connected. How did you, why did you want to connect? Or did you see something that was interesting? Or thanks for stopping by my profile, something catch your eye? sort of thing.   

 

All of those elements are ways to improve your content because you’ll learn iteratively, like a feedback loop from the responses on comments and why people are sending a connection request. 

 

Joe:  So to keep on the sort of the theme of figuring out what works with content, how then can you measure the success of your social selling efforts and make data-driven decisions? So we’ve spoken about content, I want to get back to how you measure the sales success.

 

Morgan:   So the truth is sales success is sales success.  You want booked meetings, you want qualified opportunities, you want those to become closed deals.  

 

The mistake that I see is we treat social as if it was cold calling or cold emailing. The truth is the time, the distance between your first point of contact on cold call, cold email and the time to book a meeting is usually pretty short, particularly if they’re a qualified lead. 

 

The time is much longer on social, from first contact to booking a meeting and that comes back to the credibility challenge.   People don’t log into LinkedIn to be sold. They come there to learn, to engage, to be inspired.  So the goal is to earn that credibility with the person before you book a meeting.  Almost by law of nature here, one of the things that is really interesting to see is that the backend is very different.   So whereas it’s very quick, if they’re the right fit to get a lead on a cold call to a booked meeting, oftentimes it can take a long time from booked meeting to closed deal.   This is more of a concern for mostly account executives who are doing this.  If SDRs are compensated on booked meetings, maybe it’s less of a concern.  But for social, even though it’s longer on the front end, the back end is a lot shorter.  If you think about the reasons why, and we put all these pieces of the puzzle together, the reason is the buyer already trusts you. If you’ve been engaging with them and you’ve been publishing content and you’ve been having good conversations in the DMs, the buyer already trusts you. The buyer probably has a good sense about what your company is capable of and what problems you can solve. They also already see you as a credible source or as a person that can help them. Whereas on a cold call, you’re just somebody picking up the phone, hey, it’s Morgan, let’s have a chat and,, I don’t know who this is?  

 

Joe: Can I have 27 seconds?

 

Morgan:  Right, yeah. You want to roll the dice? sort of thing.  The classic openers. So the credibility is not there.  Traditionally converting that booked meeting from a cold call to a closed won deal is a lot harder because you have to do all of the work that social does up front. 

 

The way this translates to data and metrics is, we usually set a 60 to 90 day benchmark to see results.  It’s sort of like an escalation ladder. So there’ll always be low hanging fruit, people who are in the right time, right mindset, ready to buy, that you can find and engage with that will usually close pretty quickly.  

 

Then once we shift a little bit longer, 60 days, 90 days or even a little bit longer; your work through that by commenting, engaging, getting in front of the audience, producing content, that’s going to educate and nurture those leads so that maybe when you send a DM or they come inbound, that timing fits up.  So we start to snowball and we start to create this momentum.  

 

I don’t log, on a technical level, I don’t log anything on LinkedIn into my CRM until they are a booked meeting. Some sales managers hate this because they want visibility into how that channel is working, but we don’t have that visibility yet. Sales Navigator can help organise some of this work, but from a data perspective, I’m waiting until a booked meeting to take that lead and put it into the CRM.  That way I can see over 90, 180 days, 360 days, how many meetings are coming from this one channel and how many of those meetings are converting compared to maybe my cold calls or my cold emails.   So it’s a little bit of a longer play, but I’m still looking at those end result sales metrics, just at a different timeline.

 

Joe:  And also, you spoke to some of the objections you might come up against when social selling versus the cold calling objections. Are there any other common challenges and objections you get in social selling versus the ones you get in cold calling? Are they much the same?

 

Morgan:  I think the thing that I see SDRs run up against the most is either some sort of messaging fit or timing fit on social. So this is the risk. You’ve really only got one shot on social because if they ignore your connection request, it’s not a burned bridge but you need to wait a pretty long time before you can try again.  Same with in-mails.  Somebody sees your in-mail, they go, no, not for me and so they’ll just ignore you now. They put up a, it’s like a spam filter but for their brain, so it’s like a mental spam filter. I don’t need to pay attention to this person anymore. 

 

Whereas on cold calling, you can just pick up the phone again, a week later. Hey, I called you last week. We didn’t have a chance to chat. You got 27 seconds to roll the dice? or whatever. That’s not true on social.  So when I use direct, direct connection request, direct in-mail, I’m staying really, really targeted.  I’m talking 3% of a total list. I’m rarely doing this, where I’m sending some sort of pain-based message to try and prompt an immediate response.  Observation about their account, why that’s important, is this worth your time? Are you interested in having a conversation to sort of prompt that conversation? 

 

So for a lot of the buyers, the most common objection on social is that they’re not interested, which is pretty common on cold calls.   But the way it can come across on social is they’ll just flat out ignore you.   So you don’t even get that feedback. Yeah, they’ll just click ignore on your connection request, or they won’t open your in-mail, or they won’t respond to it.  So it’s really, really important to recognise the ways that you can get feedback and overcome those objections are through conversations in comments and DMs, etc. and not necessarily a traditional way of just going direct and seeing who bites.   Because you won’t earn that feedback that you might earn on a cold call where you can hear the tonality or the way that somebody is objecting to it. On social, there’s this whole screen you don’t even get to see and they just click ignore. You don’t get anything out of it. 

 

Joe:  You don’t even get to know that they’re just going, nah, forget it.

 

Morgan:  Yeah, exactly right and it’s infuriating because other times, somebody may just not have logged into the platform for a while and so you don’t know the difference. Or you don’t know if somebody just missed it.  There’s no feedback on direct and that’s why a lot of the indirect side, comments, content, conversations, are much more useful for validating and overcoming those objections. 

 

Joe:  100% it’s lovely stuff.  Morgan, you’ve offered up quite a lot of actionable tips and tricks for our audience today. So that is absolutely fantastic.   If there was one key takeaway you would like everybody watching this to remember today, the most important thing, the golden rule about social selling, do you think?

 

Morgan:  You got to earn the conversation. That’s to me the golden rule. You just have to earn the conversation because if you don’t people will just ignore you or they’ll think you’re spam or they won’t see the value in talking to you on a social media platform.  So earning the conversation comes back to how well you know  the industry, how well  the account you’re trying to sell to, how well you know the person you’re trying to sell to, your guesses about what their problems are or what they’re interested in.  Really, really just having genuine conversations, spending a little bit of time to build that rapport to build that credibility with the prospect is really where you win on social.  It always shows up in the long term.  It always snowballs down the hill where maybe today you feel like, oh, it’s kind of a waste of time. But then 90 days from now, that prospect is like, man, Joe, you’re the guy I need to talk to about this. And that’s when you see the payoff. You’ve earned that conversation.

 

Joe: And particularly if you are prospecting, Morgan Smith, mention whiskey, tacos, and books and you’re in, you’re away.

Morgan:  You’re in, you’re in, exactly. 

 

Joe:  Morgan, thank you. 

 

Morgan:  One last idea and this is more for executives, but you asked about data and metrics and I didn’t want to forget this. It would be very fascinating to work with companies who can cross-reference Lead Forensics data and see the accounts that you’re working on LinkedIn.   It’s a very cool RevOps way to see, are we getting traction from these accounts on other portals besides our individual sellers profiles? It’s another way to look at success in the long run. I just wanted to drop that one in there. Joe:

 

Joe:  Well, thank you very much and we obviously appreciate that. You can’t ask for more there, can you?   So, Morgan, thank you so much for joining us for this webinar, thank you everybody for watching. We’ll be back next week with another Lead Forensics webinar.  

 

Morgan: Thanks everyone. 

 

Well there we go Morgan Smith on The Secret of Social Selling.   Here are our key takeaways:. 

 

Credibility is important in social selling. Attention should not be confused with credibility. Building trust, showing up with good intentions and having good conversations before asking your prospect for a meeting or getting them into your pipeline is crucial. 

Engaging with prospects on various social platforms, building rapport and understanding their personality before the sales process can really help break down barriers. 

Follow the vampire sales rule, don’t pitch unless invited.  Deposit value and engage genuinely. 

Content, comments and conversations are the three C’s of social selling.  Engaging with your prospects by using all of these things is really going to help you succeed.

Thank you again to Morgan for joining me and thank you for listening.   Remember to subscribe to the Essential B2B Podcast wherever you get your pods and give us a five-star rating where possible.  We’ll be back next week with another excellent edition of the Essential B2B Podcast.