published on
Welcome back to the second episode with Tim Hughes. Tim is recognized by many as the world’s leading expert on social selling. In our first episode with Tim, we discussed his career in social selling, common objections and mistakes in social selling, and how COVID-19 will impact business going forward. In today’s episode, Tim shares 3 secrets of effective social selling and examples of good and bad social selling. 3 Secrets of Social Selling Here are 3 of Tim’s secrets to social selling: A Buyer-Centric Profile The first thing we need is a buyer-centric profile. It's not a profile where we say how great we are, how many times we've made news, etc. It’s also not a profile where we focus on our company or product. We need to put ourselves in our buyer's shoes and say, “Okay, if I were a buyer, what would I be looking for in a person who is going to help me?” A buyer is looking for help, not someone to sell them something. This isn’t about selling; it’s about getting a conversation. Once we get to the conversation, the person will give us permission to pitch or not. There are three types of people. One is someone we can sell to. Another is someone we can get a referral from. So they may say, “I'm not the person you need to talk to, but you need to talk to my brother-in-law. He's actually looking for this right now.” The third person is what Tim calls someone with a big mouth, which is somebody who will take our insights and our influence and share it through the network. For examples of great buyer-centric profiles, check out or the profiles of , , , or . A Large Network The next thing we need is a network. This is not just a bunch of contacts. These are people we don't necessarily need to have a phone conversation with, but we need to know. These are people that we could have a conversation with if they came to us. “You need to build a network, and your network needs to be as big, as wide, and as varied as you can have it.” - Tim Hughes BMW is one of Tim’s clients, and they have about 100,000 employees. So to sell to BMW, we would have to be connected to 1,000 people. Tim does risk forecasts by using social for his clients. One client was selling to Domino’s Pizza, and they said it was a done deal to happen that quarter. Tim said, “It won’t happen.” When they asked why, Tim said, “Because the salesperson isn't connected to anybody in Domino's Pizza.” The sale didn't happen. If the salesperson isn't connected to anybody in the meeting, there's no relationship there. Humanizing Content The third thing we need is content. Tim’s company has done the research for what content works and what content doesn't work. Unsurprisingly, the content that doesn't work is advertising because no one's interested in our products, services, or anything that says our company is great. However, people are interested in our people. Eric, one of Tim’s employees, posted about his family going to the beach for his son’s 16th birthday. The post got 168 likes or comments and about 10,000 views. It took him 10 minutes to post, and from that post, he got 168 leads, two proposals, and one purchase order. There is not one single demand generation method out there (cold calling, advertising, email marketing) that can generate that kind of result in ten minutes. That’s the difference digital dominance makes. “The more humanized that you can be with your content, the more engagement you get.” - Tim Hughes Examples of Poor Social Selling One of Tim’s friends used to work at an organization, and this organization had a poor social selling strategy. They would have someone post something, and then tell everyone in the organization to go like it. Tim said there was even an employee whose title was “social selling expert,” but they clearly didn’t understand social selling. Tim went into a big corporate organization to help them with their social...