Recently I had breakfast with a friend, Roger Courville. He is wicked smart and particularly savvy with regard to virtual presenting, and during our conversation we began to riff on the idea of “social capital.”
Social capital. I believe on some level, most professionals understand what that means: building influence and personal brand awareness — and sometimes “spending” that capital for a variety of things. (Not necessarily the social capital extracted by Vito Corleone in The Godfather.)
Erase the ideas of social media from your brain. Erase the cocktail hour concepts too — the ones that cajoled you into “joining the conversation.” Instead, consider the social space as an opportunity for you to build your social capital. That is the foundation of social selling.
Are your sales stuck in the dial-up era? One person, one appointment, one sale. That approach isn’t going to work for much longer. Today, your sales effort requires you to work multi-dimensionally, and operate in a three-dimensional digital space. Sure, the premise and goals are still the same — consult, add value, increase opportunities, close sales. Many, if not all, of your selling skills are valid. What is different is the approach and thought process.
With social selling you need to rethink how you define, discover and engage with prospects and clients. You can meet them on a digital or social level, and then use your social capital to move toward an in-person conversation.
This approach works. Consider these numbers from Sales Benchmark Index:
- You are almost five times more apt to schedule a first meeting if you have a personal LinkedIn connection.
- Some 98% of sales reps with more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections achieve quota.
Those are pretty staggering numbers! And your work doesn’t stop with the sale; you must continue to incorporate social selling with constant, quality contact to keep and win new business.
Remember, social selling builds your social capital. Now get out there and ferret out those leads, engage, connect and grow your sales. Otherwise, I will have to call in The Godfather!
