What exactly is social selling, and how do you know if you're doing it right (or wrong)? Our guest today, Jill Rowley, is the de facto expert on the subject. Jill is an international speaker, digital transformation expert and startup advisor who began her career as one of the first sales people with Salesforce.
On this episode, Jill explains what social selling is, what the keys to social selling are, and a few things you should be doing to embrace the current digital age. We also discuss what not to do with social selling, and the misapplication of marketing automation today. You won't want to miss this episode with Jill Rowley!
Listen to this episode and discover:
· What is social selling?
· Why your network isn't a group of potential buyers, and what a network actually is.
· What was the original intent of marketing automation?
· Why more is not "more better," and what that means.
· How to become visible and valuable through content.
· And so much more!
Episode Overview
Jill became a student of marketing starting back in 2002, because her buyers were marketers. She learned what was driving modernization and transformation at the time, how it was becoming more about data, automation, technology and personalization through multiple channels and through social media. Through that lens she saw these buyer changes sooner than most sales people, and why those changes would become so important to sales as a whole.
Today she explains that social selling is about researching your buyers, and then becoming relevant to them and building really meaningful, deep relationships with them. These factors will ultimately drive revenue.
To succeed you need to know your buyer, be where they are, and be visible and valuable to them. Buyers are increasingly spending more time on social platforms, so social selling is about finding and creating your digital presence, showing the world that you are someone who has business acumen and has solved problems for your customers – problems that your potential clients are dealing with.
Jill explains you must develop your online network through LinkedIn, because if your network is your net worth and someone can't see that network on LinkedIn, then your network doesn't exist.
It's also about becoming visible and valuable through content that is interesting and relevant to your customer, not you! Chances are good that your buyers are putting massive content out there through podcasts, YouTube videos, tweets, and sharing content on LinkedIn. Since they are out there on the digital web, you need to learn to be, too.
When I asked Jill to share the biggest mistakes or misconceptions that she sees organizations have about social selling, she gave me three:
1. Companies are not addressing social selling at the organization level.
2. If a company is addressing social selling, they are doing so by buying LinkedIn Sales Navigator and calling it social selling.
3. Companies are saying more is "more better": do more mass emails, send more useless and impersonal invitations to connect on LinkedIn, share more impersonal content to the masses. It's a lot of irrelevant "more."
Since Jill is a primary reason we have marketing automation today, I asked her to give the original intent behind it. She says originally marketing automation's intent was to be able to convert an inquiry into a customer more efficiently and faster.
On this episode, Jill explains why those early days of marketing automation have now gone awry, and why it's more like a spam cannon today than a tool to turn an inquiry into a customer. She also gives a few things you should do right now to embrace today's digital age.
Listen in for all of that and more from the energetic social selling guru Jill Rowley on today's edition of Grow My Revenue!
For full show notes and other resources, please visit: http://www.ianaltman.com/podcast/jill-rowley/
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