Social Selling Success Starts with Training

Social Selling Success has to start somewhere. Martin Brossman, Greg Hyer and Elyse Archer talk with Barbara Giamanco of Social Centered Selling about how sales management and sales professionals can use social selling to be successful in sales.

We start the conversation by asking Barbara what it takes for a sales organization to achieve social selling success today. She believes it starts by recognizing that the world has changed. You have to shift your approach to adapt to the buyer’s expectations. The second thing is you have got to get training. It also starts with a strategy that outlines what you want to accomplish on social.

The foundation of a social selling strategy starts by defining the characteristics of the buyers. Personas keep sales on track and keep them from trying to sell to anything with a pulse. Secondly, you must have a social selling training strategy. Next you also have to focus on your messaging for each social platform you use. It’s not much different from the traditional sales approach.

Organizations will eventually decide to take training internal and address the gaps they may have in their sales training. But some organizations can be naive when they think they understand social networks and fail to achieve social selling success. Focusing on the LinkedIn social selling index score will likely lead you on the wrong path. Training must be measured by tracking engagements that lead to sales outcomes. Training cannot be an event. It must be ongoing and coached all year along.

One of Barbara Giamanco’s biggest pet peeves are pitch emails sent right after you’ve accepted a connection request. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot because it’s such a low quality way to make a first impression. It’s extremely hard to recover from if you try to come back around. Sales Management must stop letting their reps just check the boxes. Social selling is not a numbers game.

We also hear Barbara’s perspective on investing in training for new sales reps. We have heard of sales management holding back from providing sales training to new hires because they fear they are going to leave in less than 12 months. Barbara believes that we need to invest in new hires as an effort to get them on boarded, productive and retained longer through training.

Show Links

• Video: How to Set Up 2-Step Verification on your LinkedIn Account
• Password Tool: Last Pass
• 2-Step Authentication Mobile App: Google Authenticator for Android or Google Authenticator for iOS
• “Are these 5 LinkedIn Mistakes Killing Your Sales Opportunities?” by Barbara Giamanco
• ebook: Message Matters - Improve your sales message to generate better results
• LinkedIn ProFinder

Visit SocialSelling.Training to start your online training. Register and we will start your training off for free with two courses; Linking Profile Fundamental for the Social Seller and Twitter Profile Fundamentals for the Social Seller. In addition, we will show you how the path to social selling was blazed in our “Introduction to Social Selling” lesson. These courses are free and will be updated as changes are rolled out to LinkedIn and Twitter. Visit SocialSelling.Training to register today.

The Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales is sponsored in kind by North Carolina State University - Technology Training Solutions. Please be sure to visit to learn more about their professional continuing education opportunities so you too can sharpen your technology skills and remain competitive in your industry.

Audio Run-time: 38:57

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:57 — 53.5MB)

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