Social selling training should be part of every company's digital sales strategy as the buyer's journey has changed significantly in recent years. To be successful at social selling, one must provide value to their network over an extended period by sharing relevant, quality content rather than simply blasting sales messages. Direct social selling involves engaging with conversations on social media and sharing articles related to a prospect's goals before eventually explaining how one's product or service could help. Indirect social selling is building one's own brand as an industry expert through consistently sharing useful insights so that one's network views them as a valuable resource rather than just another salesperson.

1. Social Selling Training.
To prosper in today’s digitally influenced market, social selling training and the use of
the social channels to sell should be part of everyone’s digital sales strategy.
Across the entire global sales community, social selling is being blended into the
sales process, tapping into the vast amount of insights that the social networks
provide to both buyer and seller. Probably the first time since John H Patterson
created his sales training methodology for NCR, sales people have to adjust their
skill sets as the now traditional forms of selling such as cold calling have an ever-
decreasing success rate. Preparing and learning the skills so that sales people can
harness the power of social selling to engage buyers is now critical, not a nice to
have.
The buyers journey has changed along with the profile of a typical business buyer,
their wants, needs, values and how they conduct business has altered completely
from 10, even 5 years ago. So social selling should be a genuine communication
channel to share insights, research, value and content long before engaging in any
sales conversations. Social selling is not a simplistic approach (how long does it take
to master other sales tactics – months, even years?) for sales people to spam sales
messages on Twitter, Facebook, on LinkedIn groups. Nor is it a means to use
marketing generated vanilla flavored sales messages to bombard a connection. Bye
the way, if you are already doing this – STOP. The moment any potential customer
gets these messages (and there is more than you think), any brand goodwill or any
credibility gets flushed away. The tactic of connecting and building a network of
connections just to send sales messages is NOT social selling.
If you were to take one takeaway from this article, it would be to truly build value over
time with your social network by sharing relevant, quality content that people find
useful and helpful. So, in time when a sales person reaches out with a personalized
social touch point to a prospect to engage in a sales discussion, the chances of
progressing a relationship will be greatly enhanced, and the research is now out
there to prove it.
Sales people need to learn the social selling habit loop, a daily routine to connect
with your social network community with news, articles, research, videos and
snippets of information. They also need to learn, Givers Gain, starting with ways to

2. connect your network together (as this provides value) and offering to help others
connect. A good example of this is that a sales person sees a message posted on
LinkedIn that says, “Where could I find some inspiration for a key note speech I have
to deliver?” Instead of posting of reply such as, I would be interested in this myself
or have you tried PowerPoint? (True reply!). Now, the sales person finds someone
in their social network that is a presentation expert and offers to put the person in
touch with them. Nothing in it for the sales person, other than to build their credibility
as someone who is a conduit, a connector who brings value by taking the time to
listen and connect their social network. To quote “Covey”, these are lodgements that
pay off in the longer term.
Selling is simply the act of communicating and commitments. Now, more than ever,
to be successful in sales, we need to understand that (a) selling is all about building
relationships and (b) providing value. With a well-planned out social selling program,
a business will gradually drive more sales then cold calling or cold email will ever
achieve.
Always remember that all selling is inherently social, so social selling is really nothing
new, but rather a new communication channel. So, look at social selling as an
additive process, a sales tactic to help you sell more effectively that will evolve over
time.
At the Digital Sales Institute, we try to encourage sales people to separate ‘social
selling’ into two main areas:
(1) Direct Social Selling and (2) Indirect Social Selling.
The direct side of social selling is utilizing the various social media networks like
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram to look for conversations
where one would share content/articles. A pathway to connect with people a
business wants to target or nurture a relationship with. Taking the example of a CIO
who tweets about their focus on reducing IT costs in the coming year. The sales
person in return now shares some articles or research on reducing IT. As the
interaction builds (assuming the sales persons product or service can help with
reducing IT costs), they can at an appropriate time, reach out with their first social
touch point – by sending a highly personalized connection request. After a series of
planned touch points, the sales person can now reach out to explain the value they
might be able to bring to the buyer’s goals. Please note: this is a shortened version
of the process but the point is to look for information about what prospects or
companies are doing or saying so person or business can be highly relevant to them
when they reach out via the social channels.
The indirect side of social selling has to do with a sales person building their own
personal brand so over time their social audience (connections and weak ties)
eventually value their insights, comes to view them as a valuable industry expert, not

3. just another weak sales person. However, it’s important to note that this does take
time and does not provide some instant results that some sales leaders think should
happen these days. The reality is social selling is all about adding value to a target
market, share not sell, help not hinder, be useful not useless.
We write these articles on sales to try to add some value by not just talking about the
theory of selling or business but actually giving you some useful tips on sales,
marketing and business (hopefully). On our social channels, we share suggestions
on what to do and how to do it. We also regularly post or re-tweet articles from other
sources not just about sales but about business topics that we think are important to
sales people and business leaders.
We practise what we preach, on a daily basis we review discussions in our groups in
LinkedIn or Facebook, we strive to provide honest answers to questions people ask
without promoting our business or telling them how wonderful we are.
To finish up, please take the time to think through the goals, expectations and vision
for any social selling program you plan to put in place. Apart from training, spend
time looking for articles, news and research you can use to connect with people
without interrupting them while at the same time position yourself as a thought leader
by sharing quality information that is relevant. This will help you or any sales person
in the digitally influenced buying/selling process, regardless of what you sell.