Blog: Social Selling

October 26By Podcast, Social Selling, Video Leave a comment

Social Selling with Lindsey Boggs - Ep. 076

Lindsey Boggs Shares Her LinkedIn Sales Connect 2015 Experiences and More!

Social Selling was the main topic of Sales Connect 2015, the Social Selling LinkedIn Conference held in Las Vegas in October. Lindsey Boggs had quite the experience. Not only is she an amazing sales person, she’s pretty good under pressure. Well, if you think standing next to Shaquille O’Neal, sinking two free throws and raising $10,000 for the Boys and Girl Club all within the span of three minutes is easy, think again.

Lindsey Boggs welcomed Martin Brossman and Greg Hyer into her home in Raleigh, NC. She works from home for the Indiana based ecommerce marketing automation solution provider, SmarterHQ, as the Director of Sales. She leads a sales team and supports their social selling activities using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Saleforce.com

In this episode, you will discover her three “P’s” of social selling; Personalization, Persistence, and Patience. You will also hear about her presentation from Sales Connect about getting 50% response rates on her InMail outreach and what moments delivered incredible value to attendees. And of course, you will hear about how Lindsey sunk two free throws and raise $10,000 for the Boys and Girls Club of America. We actually included the 3 minute experience in the video and audio productions of this episode.

Here are Lindsey’s slides from her session.

If you’d like to connect with Lindsey Boggs, please visit her LinkedIn profile and follow her on Twitter.

Audio Run-time: 32:25

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:25 — 29.7MB)

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October 20By Podcast, Social Selling Leave a comment

Insights from LinkedIn SalesConnect 2015 w/ Kevin Thomas Tully - Ep. 075

Martin, Elyse and Greg kick off Episode 75 with some news about recent updates from LinkedIn. First, at Talent Connect 2015, LinkedIn announced a new employee referral app that would help employees discover and recommend co-workers for internal positions. This appears to be a subscription application designed for larger companies.

Greg and Martin recall Episode 40 where they discussed using social selling to land a job. They may be an episode to review if you’re looking for an internal promotion or lateral move.

LinkedIn rolled out the new Groups update. There were a lot of concerns about all groups being set to private, but Greg pointed out that following the update the Linking into Sales group was set to standard rather than private as mentioned in the email he had received from LinkedIn.

Greg brings up Twitter and how they will be laying off up to 350 employees and how they have rolled out Twitter Moments. Twitter offers an incredible opportunity for B2B sales professionals. Those in sales need to take a serious look at this social network to connect with B2B buyers.

Episode 75 is a milestone for the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast. So why not bring back a guest who has affectionately been referred to as the “Alec Baldwin” of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast, Kevin Thomas Tully, Vice President of Social Enablement at rfactr. Kevin has appeared on the show several times before providing his insights on creating a social selling routine. Today, he brings us his insights from the 2015 LinkedIn SalesConnect conference held in Las Vegas.

Kevin discusses his first visit to Las Vegas and his thoughts on the significance of the LinkedIn Social Selling Index score, what he thought of the conference sessions and experiences meeting some of the social selling notables.

Greg and Martin mentioned they are launching a new Social Selling Training site for you to have access to deep social selling training. 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.

Thank you to our sponsor: NCSU-TTS is an in-kind sponsor of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast. To discover the adult learning and professional education opportunities available please visit http://www.linkingintosales.com/ncsutts.

Audio Run-time: 49:49

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:49 — 45.6MB)

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October 12By Podcast, Social Selling Leave a comment

LinkedIn Social Selling Index with Anna Stevens - Ep. 074

LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index score is a new tool for sales professionals to use to help them understand the impact of their social selling activities on the professional social networking platform. And it can be a little difficult to understand, especially when it comes to improving your score.

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman talk with Anna Stevens, a LinkedIn consultant based in in Atlanta, GA to talk with us about how the LinkedIn Social Selling Index score works and why it will become very important to sales management. Enjoy this episode and be sure to read Anna’s post, “Five Aspects of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index to Conquer Today.”

In addition, there are a couple news items we shared at the top of the show. We discussed the impact of LinkedIn Messaging and how there’s no archive to reply to invitations, the LinkedIn Class Action Lawsuit about Invitation reminder spam and the upcoming changes to LinkedIn groups.

In the world of social selling apps, Sales Prodigy has released an update that integrates with Nimble. Also, Greg received a demo of SocialPort by rfactr and thinks you should check it out if you need to curate approved content to your sales team and track it’s effectiveness in your CRM.

Thank you to our sponsor: NCSU-TTS is an in-kind sponsor of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast. To discover the adult learning and professional education opportunities available please visit http://linkingsales.wpengine.com/ncsutts.

Audio Run-time: 50:12

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:12 — 46.0MB)

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September 22By Podcast, Social Selling Leave a comment

Social Selling Blab with Julio Viskovich of rfactr - Ep. 071

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman blab with Julio Viskovich of rfactr about social selling and how critical is it for sales people to have approved content curated for them by Marketing.

This episode of the Linking into Sales Social Selling podcast was recorded using the live video chat platform, Blab.im. Blab is a fast rising video chatting platform that competes with Google Hangouts on Air. Martin and Greg did a test run the night before and found it very engaging.

The discussion includes some questions from the audience including how to define social selling, the importance of social selling training and the metrics you should be monitoring to determine the effectiveness of your social selling program.

Audio Run-time: 54:17

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:17 — 49.7MB)

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August 31By Podcast, Social Selling Leave a comment

Social Selling Enterprise Adoption 2015 Update - Ep. 070

Greg Hyer, Martin Brossman and Elyse Archer speak with Peoplelinx CMO, Michael Idinopulos, about their social selling tool and their 2015 social selling survey regarding enterprise adoption.

Elyse Archer is a new addition to the podcast. She is a sales coach and a digital marketer. Greg and Martin feel that her experience would be a great addition to Linking into Sales. Look for her to join Greg and Martin on future shows.

The Peoplelinx platform recommends the right actions for a sales person to take when it comes to the relationship with the prospect or customer. Peoplelinx is not a replacement for the sales professional. Rather, they enable the sales person with data that leads to a positive outcome. There is a proprietary predictive AI under the hood that does a bit of behavioral learning based on previous engagement results.

In the 2015 State of Social Selling Survey:

[list][list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]73% of B2B Sales professionals think that social has value for selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]31% say it’s part of their sales process. [/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]26% understand how to do social selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]More in their 30’s and 40’s are having difficulty with social selling than millennials and boomers.[/list_item][/list]

 

Is there an issue within Sales Management encouraging social selling activities? Possibly.  It appears that the main challenge is that sales management doesn’t know enough about social selling to train or measure performance.

[list][list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]Only 22% of B2B employers encourage social selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]11% of B2B sales professionals get employer paid training in social selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]6% of employers measure social selling activities[/list_item][/list]

 

Does social selling training actually help the organization? We think the results are pretty clear. Those that get training outperform those that don’t.

[list][list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]38% of B2B Sales teams that don’t received social selling training say they had recent business influenced by social.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]74%of B2B Sales teams that did received social selling training say they had recent business influenced by social[/list_item][/list]

 

Please visit Peoplelinx to get the full State of Social Selling 2015 report.

Audio Run-time: 25:35

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:35 — 23.4MB)

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August 18By Podcast, Social Selling Leave a comment

Social Listening with Mik Lernout of Sales Prodigy - Ep. 069

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman talk with Mik Lernout of Sales Prodigy about social listening for social selling. Sales Prodigy is mobile app available for iOS and Android. The app notifies you when someone you are following on Twitter tweets an update that includes a keyword or hashtag you are following. In addition, the app will scan articles shared in tweets to see if the keywords or hashtags are mentioned.

Mik Lernout is originally from Belgium and has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for the past few years. He came to Vancouver to work for a startup in a tech role and found himself on the road with sales people. During this time he developed a deep appreciation for the people and the profession. This experience led him to create an application that helps sales people with social listening on social networks like Twitter and Instagram.

During the recording, Mik announced that Sales Prodigy would be releasing an integration with Hootsuite, the social media management platform. This integration will create a feed of those tweets you see in the Sales Prodigy app in your Hootsuite account. Look for the app to be released before the end of August 2015.

Greg and Martin understand how important social listening is for social selling. This episode should help you understand the value you can pull out of Twitter with an app like Sales Prodigy. It’s a great app for both inside sales teams and outside sales pros.

Audio Run-time: 49:17

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:17 — 45.1MB)

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS