Social Selling As The New Business Necessity

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Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. My guest today is Tim Hughes. I met him when I was in London, probably four or five years ago.

Tim is a CEO and Co-Founder of DLA ignite, speaker, and author of two books about social selling and sales-marketing alignment – you can check them out on Amazon.

Today we talk about social selling as the new business necessity.

In this episode:

• How has the buying process changed?
• In what ways buyers’ behaviors have changed? What are some of the specific changes that marketers and sales professionals need to make?
• In what ways is being on social is different from doing social?
• How can content help with social selling?
• What is humanizing content, and how to use it?
• How can a business pick the right social media channel?
• How can brands use their networks without abusing them?
• What is the role of employees in social selling, and how can companies empower them?
• What makes social selling challenging for corporations, and how can they overcome those difficulties?
• How to share and use corporate content on social media?

Quotes from the episode:

“First and foremost, social selling doesn’t take as much time as cold calling does. And it doesn’t take as much time as email. So for a start, you have efficiency savings. Some people think that somehow social selling is some sort of shortcut. It’s not. But the problem with cold calling is that nobody answers the phone, and nobody responds to emails with email. With social, you can connect to people, have conversations.”

“We often see that people don’t have a strategy in place. So understanding, why are we doing this and for what reason? Also, we can be empowering people in human resources. We can be empowering the CEO, but what we need to be doing is having a voice on social and empowering our people to be part of that conversation.”

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To expand your knowledge about modern social selling, check out some of my previous podcast episodes, blog post, and videos.

Podcast episodes

Social Selling Dos and Don’ts for Your Sales Team

Winning the War of Loyalty on Social Media – Customer Care

Social Selling: An Interview with Priscilla McKinney

Blog post

The Ultimate Sales Enablement Guide 

Webinar

How to Use Linkedin Sales Navigator for Social Selling Success

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with me! Today, we have a very special and awesome guest: Tim Hughes. I met him when I was in London, probably four or five years ago. And I was kind of in this very disarray distressed position that, that day, I couldn’t find my AirBnB. But I had a meeting with you.

So I rushed to carry my luggage with me and rushed to a coffee shop, and you helped me. And found the AirBnB plays and like, see me, like, you know, get a login, log in safely. Thank you so much, Tim. I am grateful for that.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More with me! Today, we have a very special and awesome guest: Tim Hughes. I met him when I was in London, probably four or five years ago. And I was kind of in this very disarray distressed position that, that day, I couldn’t find my AirBnB. But I had a meeting with you.

So I rushed to carry my luggage with me and rushed to a coffee shop, and you helped me. And found the AirBnB plays and like, see me, like, you know, get a login, log in safely. Thank you so much, Tim. I am grateful for that.

Tim Hughes: You flew in, we met, um, it was you, you, we met near Paddington Station in London. Then you said, “I need to find my Airbnb.” And I said, “well, I’ll come and help you find it.” H was sort of like, get on like this, on your mobile phone. I said, “I’m, going to stay with you until”– cause you, you could tell that you just got off a flight and you ere a little like—

Pam Didner: Uh, where am I? What am I doing here?

Tim Hughes: And Paddington can sometimes be a bit, um, can be a bit rough. So I said, “I’m going to stay with you until I can see that you opened the door into the Airbnb.” Because I’ve stayed in AirBnBs where you can’t get in. Yeah. I stayed in one in Amsterdam, where I had to break in.

Pam Didner: Oh, no.

Tim Hughes: Yeah. So once you got in the door, you were in, yes.

Pam Didner: I was very, very grateful for that.

Tim Hughes: Yeah. I’m a gentleman, you know, I need to—(Pam laughs)

Pam Didner: You are! Certainly! So a quick introduction about Tim: Tim is a CEO and the co-founder of DLA Ignite, an agency specializing in social selling, am I correct?

Tim Hughes: Uh, yes. So, where are we? We’re a consultancy that specializes in sales transformation. And part of that is enabling salespeople to transform, use social, digital, virtual selling, remote selling, call it what you will.

Pam Didner: So let me ask you a specific question about social selling. How has the buying process changed?

Tim Hughes: The buying process has changed a hell of a lot. Before the pandemic, a lot of people were online. Um, but the whole thing is accelerated. I mean, you must’ve seen, there’s some research that McKinsey came out with last summer, which said that there’d been ten years worth of digital transformation in three months.

Pam Didner: Like compressed in three months in three months. Yes.

Tim Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that we’ve all seen that. And, um, I don’t know if you follow Simon Kemp on LinkedIn or your listeners. Simon Kemp is a great guy. He produces some research around social media. Um, so Simon and Kemp, K-E-M-P.

Pam Didner: Simon Kemp, ok, got it.

Tim Hughes: So, um, Hoot Suites and, uh, We Are Social pay for it, but Kemp produces it, and it comes out every quarter, and it says it’s a state of the nation of social media at that snapshot. And he gets all bits of data from lots of different places. There’s a report on it. It’s free.

Pam Didner: That’s a question I want to ask. Is it a free or paid version?

Tim Hughes: It’s not gated. And if you get, go to Simon Kemp’s profile, you’ll, you’ll find it on his LinkedIn profile. So there are now 4.33 billion people, which is 55.1% of the world’s population, active on social media. So these are not people that just signed up. They’re active. There have been half a billion new users of social media over the last 12 months. That’s 16 and a half new users every single second.

Pam Didner: Yeah. I mean, that has a lot to do with the current situation. Would you say?

Tim Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. We’re sitting at home, you know, I’m, I’m not flying out to Portland to meet you or anything like that or you coming to London. And the buyers in B2B aren’t used to sitting at home and going online and buying stuff. And this is how we buy now. I mean, even my 83-year-old, you know, 12 months ago, we had to teach you how to use Zoom, but now she’s a Zoom champion.

Pam Didner: Now she’s a pro!

Tim Hughes: He’s a pro. She’s got a wine group where money drives around and drops the bottles on the doorstep, and they do wine testing over Zoom. That’s the change that’s taken place that we’ve seen in society, and it’s changed business. We expect to go online and research stuff, and if companies aren’t online– and I don’t mean a website because websites are ok,

Pam Didner: But that’s your minimal website.

Tim Hughes: But the website tells you how great a company is. That’s not what you want if you’re going to buy something. Right now, 40% of people are using social media for search rather than Google. You know, we’re going online. We’re looking for insights. You know, from a B2B perspective, if we’re going to go online and spend a large amount of money – you know, 50,000 to a hundred thousand dollars – we’re going to go online and make sure that we’ve got the right product or service that is going to fit us. We’re going to go and look at the salespeople. Are they the type of people that we want to do business with? We’re going to check them out. We’re going to see what content they’re sharing. We will see whether we’re in their network, and all of these things have a massive impact.

Gartner recently said (I mean, there’s a fantastic webinar that they just produced) where they said that the salesforce needs to go where their buyers and their prospects are, not where their buyers and prospects used to be. And this is the case. We’re now on digital, social selling, and digital selling is now a given.

And it’s about whether organizations are making money and what I’m talking about, generating revenue and profit from it. And that’s the importance of seeing it strategically.

Pam Didner: So obviously, the buyers’ behaviors have changed, which impacts the company, how they should market themselves, how they should sell themselves. So from your perspective, what are some of the specific changes that you think the marketers and sales professionals need to make?

Tim Hughes: A lot of people are saying to us, “We’re on social.” And when you look at their profiles, they’re not. And so what we,

Pam Didner: They have a social profile, but they are not active on the platform.

Tim Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. So they’ll have their LinkedIn profile will be a CV, which isn’t social.

Pam Didner: This is not social. Yeah.

Tim Hughes: Social, your LinkedIn profile is in effect your website, that’s open 24 hours.

Pam Didner: It’s a starting point.

Tim Hughes: But a lot of people will say, “oh yeah, we’re all over social.” So what’s that? Well, somebody in marketing posts something every two weeks, and an email goes around saying, “can you please like it?” And I doubt that’s generating anything for the company. All organizations should be able to say. We are generating this percentage of our revenues from social selling. They should be able to measure it, and they should give a figure for it.

Pam Didner: You know, but it’s very hard. Social is just one of the touchpoints, right. And that there are multiple attributions in terms of a customer journey. Right? They might be on social. They probably go to your website and talk to their peers before they even make a decision. And, uh, the customer buying stage or how people sell their product often, the customer journey is not linear. So how do you quantify in terms of the sales revenue that’s associated or contributed by social?

Tim Hughes: I think that’s important to look at attribution. There are two things that we would certainly look at measuring first is business. That’s generated by social. I coach sales teams. Um, I’m a salesperson. I’m not a marketer. We can very clearly say, “We approached this person over social. We had a conversation, uh, we’ve taken it to a call, and they’ve asked for a proposal.” So when we put that lead into the CRM, we put a campaign code and said it was again social.

There may also be sales, which are influenced by social. So I’m currently working with a supply chain software company that gets RFP – so request for proposals. They just arrived. They said to me, “for every sale, there’s probably a hundred people that they need to talk to.” And it is just completely impractical to either email them, or cold call them because, first and foremost, it annoys people when you do that. Um, so, you know, how do you start a relationship and sell multimillion-dollar deals by annoying people? You don’t.

And so what they’re doing is that they’re going out and connecting to people, having conversations and then building relationships. And then what we can say is that it’s been influenced by social. But typically, the buying process is non-linear.

Pam Didner: Yeah. So with that being said, on the B2B side specifically, um, do you think the B2B side or B2B marketing or the salespeople needs to be active on Facebook? Or more kind of like a consumer-centric type of social media platform? In general, on the B2B side and the sales professional, especially they tend to be, um, if they need to be active on one social media platform, LinkedIn.

So what is your thought that with the limited resources and, uh, especially time–like they cannot be active on a five-10 social media channels–do you have any suggestion about what they need to do and how they should.

Tim Hughes: Yes, I think first they need to go where their clients are first and foremost, that’s probably on LinkedIn. Second, that’s probably in Twitter, if they sell IT and they’re selling to IT people. Those people will be on probably will be on Twitter.

Um, but the thing is, is that this isn’t necessarily about them. It’s about their bias. I wrote an article five years ago but how to get C-level meetings using Twitter. And, um, the person I used as the case study for that, he was telling me that certain people aren’t on certain platforms. So he was trying to get hold of this Human Resources Director. She wasn’t on LinkedIn. She wasn’t on Twitter, but she was on Instagram. So there may be a situation where you say, “well, I don’t have time to post on Instagram”, which is fine, but you need to be on it because what you’re doing is that you’re looking to find the individuals and then striking up a conversation with them.

Now she posted pictures of two dogs and liked to walk them in the park. She had two Labradors. And so there, there is an opportunity there to see somebody and see what they are interested in and then strike up a conversation.

Pam Didner: I thought you were going to say, “she has two dogs. She walks in the park, and you find out where the pocket is and you kind of stalking her.” No, I’m kidding. (laughs)

Tim Hughes: But at the end of the day, you know, what we’re doing is, is let’s think about how we’ve sold in the, in the analog world. You know, when I first got into sales, I said to the salesperson that was mentoring me, I said, “when I go into the room, what do I do?” And he said, “what you do is you look around, and there’ll be pictures on the wall–fly fishing, Formula One, or whatever. You go in, and you say, ‘oh, you know, I like fly fishing. The key thing about five fishing is that the water’s always got to be you can’t fish in brown water has got to be clear, stuff like that.'” And then you’d go, go away, and build an understanding of flyfishing because this is the connection you have with people.

And it’s something that we’ve always done. And because what we try and do is as humans, we try and find this commonality. Because if there’s a commonality–we went to the same school, we grew up in the same town–when that happens, we start knowing someone, liking someone and trusting them. And it’s the same whether we meet face-to-face or if we do it on social.

Pam Didner: So, social selling can be time-consuming. You have to research to strike that very authentic conversation and also interactions. And that creates a challenge in terms of scalability. So it’s very hard to scale. So what is your suggestion on that?

Tim Hughes: Firstly. Yes, well, sales take time. Um, but first and foremost, social selling doesn’t take as much time as cold calling does. And it doesn’t take as much time as email. So for a start, you have efficiency savings. I think some people think that somehow social selling is some sort of shortcut. It’s not. But the problem with cold calling is that nobody answers the phone, and nobody responds to emails with email. So. At least with social, you’ve got an ability to, um, connect to people, have conversations.

But what I would challenge you around is scalability. The fact of the matter is I can, and I do daily. I can connect to, um, you know, LinkedIn will allow me to connect to a hundred people in a week. I can connect to people probably 80, 90% of those a hundred per cent of those hundred people will connect to me. And I will then have conversations with those people.

So my ability to scale and increase my ability to have conversations is far greater using social than email or cold calling. But yes, you’ve got to put some time in. But you know, um, there’s was it 85,000 seconds in the day. Time we have. Is it about priority?

Pam Didner: No, I agree with you. No, you hit the core, the bottom line. You have to do prospecting and reaching out, right. You know you can use a different tactic like cold calling, email marketing, and be on LinkedIn, and there’s a different way of doing it. Pick the one that you, from your perspective, that makes sense. And social selling does make a lot of sense in terms of digital communication.

But the reality is it does take a lot of time and effort to make that happen, and that you have to manage your time. You have to play with it. In terms of scalability, you have to look from that perspective in terms of what are the key accounts that you want to go after?

Tim Hughes: What we’ve done is we’ve created a methodology. Traditionally, there’ll be people that will teach you how to use LinkedIn. There may be people that will do hints, hints and tips. We don’t see that as a viable strategy for an organization. Most sales organizations have implemented some sort of sales methodology, and they understand that sales are a process.

Pam Didner: For mid- and the enterprises, yes.

Tim Hughes: What we’ve done is we’ve created a methodology that will sit alongside a Holden or an Informentus, or whatever, and provide a digital framework for people. And we’ve also created a playbook. So what happens is that people know that this is what they do when they get up on a Monday. So that takes the thought process of, “oh my God, what do I do today?” and we make sure that there’s a very clear process. Or if you do this, you do this. You do that. You do this. Um, and that means that people know that they know what they need to do on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

There are three things that you need in social. The first is you need a great profile. So the buyer centric-profile. So it’s not about you. It’s about your buyer.

Pam Didner: Your buyers, right.

Tim Hughes: And it’s about understanding what the buyer is looking for. The buyers, looking for an expert. That buyer is looking for someone who’s going to guide them. The buyer was looking for insight. The buyer is looking to be educated—all of those things.

It’s also about building a very wide and varied network. So in effect, you take your analog territory. And what you do is that you, you put that on digital. And because we know the number of people buying – the buying groups have got bigger and bigger and bigger – Gartner says ten. This supply chain company I’m working with says it’s 100. What we need to be doing is connecting to those people in those particular accounts. But the thing is, if you’re not connected to those accounts, the likelihood that you’re going to spread your influence is minute. So you need to have connections.

We see that there are three different types of people. Some people will, could buy from you. Some people could refer you like, um, “I’m not interested in buying my brother-in-law is, is just about to buy. “And the third, third type of people or people that are willing to take your content and share it through their network.

Pam Didner: Broadly, yeah, share it with their network.

Tim Hughes: And I know that you’re, you’re one of these people where you’ve got dedicated people that you know, that whenever you post something, they go. “Pam’s a brilliant person. I’m going to like that. And I’m going to share it through our network.” So immediately what you’re doing is that you’re sharing your influence, not just through your network, but your network’s network and, and that’s very, very powerful. And the third thing you need is content.

Pam Didner: Yeah.

Tim Hughes: And here we are creating a piece. (Pam laughs)

Pam Didner: Yeah, talking! Like a podcast itself is a piece of content. And what are the couple of things that companies can do right now to make a change? And, uh, to accommodate the new buying behaviors.? What can they do internally to help to maneuver, you know, that mothership to make changes, uh, in both sales and marketing or even product marketing organizations? 

Tim Hughes: Um, well, I, I think that what they need to do is first and foremost is recognize the change and what they need is a strategy. This is not just about somebody in marketing posting something every two weeks. This is about having a strategy and then enabling the people to be on social.

We see a lot of people that are scared of it because, oh, you know, “what happens if someone says the wrong thing?” Well, you know, it’s a bit like we were taught lots of things in life like diversity and inclusion and health and safety and all of these things because we need to understand what good behavior is and bad behavior is.

So we also need to make sure that when we empower people–well, when we tell people we’re going to be on social–it’s not just a case of “off you go.” We’re going to empower you. I will tell you about what you should be doing and what you shouldn’t be doing.

Pam Didner: You provide the necessary training.

Tim Hughes: Yeah. And importantly, we need to get senior management involved because this is a change. You know, there’s a habit change, and there’s a mindset change. The key thing is, is that the leaders have to be there saying, “this is the way that we’re going to go.” Otherwise, everybody will go, “well, if they’re not doing, I’m not doing it.”

Pam Didner: I’m not doing it. Yeah, exactly. So obviously, the customers are changing, and you need to change as well. The number one is getting exactly. Sponsors to sponsor your initiative. The second thing is that you need to have a readily available tool for your internal stakeholders to use. And the third is education, education, education. Educate them on the benefit of it, how to use it and why they can get it. So I understand that. That makes a lot of sense regarding what the organization’s brains can do to support that.

So with that being said, on the flip side, what are some of the mistakes you see out there? Things that tend to happen to say during the planning stage you’ll do the execution?

Tim Hughes: We often see that, uh, people don’t have a strategy in place. So understanding, why are we doing this? Yeah. And, and for, for what reason? And also have a situation where this is about empowering – well, it doesn’t necessarily just need to be salespeople. But we can be empowering people in human resources. We can be empowering the CEO, but what we need to be doing is having a voice on social and empowering our people to be part of that conversation. And then making sure that they’ve got the right skills that they’re, in effect, using the right etiquette to be working on, on social.

And, and we see, uh, I’ll tell you a story. We did some work with a life sciences company based in Cambridge, in England, near Cambridge University. We did some work with them, and the head of marketing said, “I posted something on Twitter, and it wiped a billion dollars–so a billion dollars–from our market cap” And he said, “I didn’t get fired. I’m using that as a, as an example, because I don’t want you to be scared.” And one of the biggest issues is that in the past when I worked in corporate, you know, one day, you’re not allowed to talk to the press, you get fired…

Pam Didner: I understand, especially there’s a PR crisis. There’s this, uh, we have PR if you have a problem with your products, right? In general, the PR teams are entitled, or it can be the voice of the media, but the employees tend not to.

Tim Hughes: But there is a difference that we’re empowering people to talk on social and what we need to be doing, therefore, is giving them the right skills, but we also need to make making sure that we’re getting over to them, that they don’t need to be afraid. This is the right thing. This is the same as, as I said, with health and safety. If we put up a ladder, we need to know how to put it up so it doesn’t fall over and die.

We’re working in social, in an environment where we know that we have senior management support. We also know that we’re doing the right thing.

Pam Didner: Yeah. I mean, I understand your point of view, but I also understand corporate’s perspective, and it’s very hard to train like, oh, thousands of your salespeople to actually say the right thing or how to say it properly. So in the crisis mode, I can understand why the corporation decided or took a very conservative approach like, you know, “Let’s not talking about it. You might incur liability for the company.”

Tim Hughes: I get that. Um, we can train thousands of salespeople, but the thing is that if you’re not talking, you’re invisible. So, what corporations are saying is, “we want to be invisible to our clients, and we want to be invisible to our clients every day.” If you go down that route, you need to write a business case because you will lose money and market share. And that needs to be taken into account if they decide to go down that strategy route because that’s not how the market works anymore.

Pam Didner: I hear you. But like I said, I can see both sides and understand that the corporation takes a very conservative approach, especially on certain PR crises. And they made it very clear that in place, don’t talk about it. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that you cannot engage on social. There’s plenty of, uh, topics that you can talk about. There’s plenty of content that you can share? You can always focus on addressing your audience or your prospects pain points. And that’s usually a very good starting right.

 

Tim Hughes: Yeah. So what we’ve done is that we’ve done research based on what content works and what content doesn’t work. And it’s very easy to do this. Anybody can do it because what you do is look at content on social media and see how many people have liked it. So that’s a barometer to whether people like it or not. Um, so if you look at adverts, nobody likes those, so nobody likes them.

As you move up, basically what we then find is, is its corporate content. Again, you’ll find that very few people like it. If you look at the likes taking place, it’s probably within the company, and they’ve been told to do it. Those people probably have don’t understand how they grow the network. Therefore it has limited ability to be seen by anybody. Therefore, in effect, most organizations are talking in an echo chamber so that it’s a cost to the business rather than a profit.

Then what happens is that they move to maybe advocacy. The problem with employee advocacy is that it’s corporate content, again, being put out by employees. Again, all that is is push marketing. It’s no different from what people have been doing since, uh, 40 years ago.

Now I saw the other day, there was some employee advocacy tool, and someone had put it out, and one of the sales guys had put out some posts about how great is employee advocacy tool is. No one’s interested. No one’s interested in the company or the product. He had no likes, and therefore why you’re doing it?

Um, but what we find is that what people like is humanized content. Now you don’t post humanized content all the time. When someone comes to your LinkedIn profile, they need to know what you stand for. So I invited anybody who was watching this to come to my LinkedIn profile. See what I’d stand for. Have a look at the content that I’m putting out there. It’s helpful that we won’t tell you anything about the company.

I actually–we’ve put, we’ve put where we’ve written thousands and thousands of blogs in the last five years–we’ve told everybody you, if you collected all the blogs, you could set up your social selling agency and work out how to do it. Um, because what we’re doing is that we’re helping people. This is not about telling you about how great we are.

Pam Didner: I understand the humanized content part of it. Unfortunately, in the corporate world–by the way, I’m not speaking for corporate, I’m just saying some of the dilemmas that corporate business professionals encounter–they feel the hands are tied. They have a couple of content, and, uh, they feel obligated to share.

And my recommendation on that from time to time, especially, uh, you have to share the corporate content. You just like you, you use a word, and I want to say that again, but I want to interpret that a little bit differently to humanize the content. You have corporate content that you can share, but write a copy that has your perspective. Does that make sense? You can share that piece of content. That content is corporate and says, “Hey, my company publish, publish this white paper. And it has a couple of things right there. And I think it’s very critical for you to know, but other things were not covered here, but I also think it is very important.”

So from my perspective is ok to show corporate content. I tell some of my clients that when you show a couple of content, don’t use the typical copy coming from the employee advocacy program. Because they write a copy for you, and you can copy and paste. That’s an easy way out. Right. But if you want to engage with your clients, find the nuggets in the corporate content that’s useful. And then write a little copy that makes sense for your buyers.

Tim Hughes: Absolutely. And there’s, there’s nothing wrong in sharing corporate content. You’ll find that people aren’t interested, and all the research shows that. I mean, there’s even this research from the dynamic signal that shows that nobody’s interested incorporate content. And you can measure that by looking at the likes and comments, but the likes and comments, the gold. The likes and comments on, on, and on social media are aware that if you post something in someone like likes, that’s an opportunity for you to have a conversation and conversations and drive sales.

The thing is, if you’re going to post corporate content, you need to put your spin on it. If many people post that, all of my networks from that particular company are posting the same content. So it may be great content, but what you’ve done is you’ve turned it from corporate great corporate content into corporate spam. And that’s one of the mistakes that people make.

Pam Didner: Yeah, I was going to say, you can always have a mix of content that you share. And you can share the corporate content. You can also share that you can also share some of the content. So it’s mixed. Yeah.

Tim Hughes: Yeah. So we talk about 411, about the type of content you need to spread out during the days and the weeks. The thing about humanized content is that humanized content is the thing that gets you the most engagement. And engagement is what you want. And the reason for that is that if someone likes or comments on something, that means that you’ve got a commonality. It means that you’ve got an opportunity to go to that person and say, “let’s have a conversation.”

So let me give you an example. One of my team put out a post about Led Zepplin on a Saturday. He put out a post. “Well on Friday night”–he and his wife, I love, we love Led Zepplin “Friday night, I finished work, and I go and join the family for the weekend. She will put led Zeppelin on. I know I need to finish up what I’m doing, and I will go and do that. What’s your favorite led Zeppelin song? So, everyone, we’re putting in Kashmir Rock’ n Roll, um, Stairway to Heaven and stuff like that. And I know he got, I don’t know, 18,000, 20,000 views, um, you know, 150/200 likes. But all of those likes and comments are an opportunity for you to have a conversation with that.

So all your first connections on LinkedIn that have commented, you can go and say, oh, on Monday. “Wasn’t it great talking about Led Zeppelin at the weekend? Oh, you know, I love When the Levee Breaks. Isn’t Led Zepplin IV one of the greatest. Why don’t we get on a call and have a chat?”

Pam Didner: Yes, it’s a conversation. You use social selling. You use that. The people who start answering a question use that as a conversational opener to further conversation with them.

Tim Hughes: Absolutely. Now, as I said, what you need to do is make sure that you’ve got different types of content. If someone comes to you, they need to know what you stand for. But what you’re doing is that you’re using different content and that the humanized content is what you will do when, in effect, to prospect.

Now, going back to what we said before, one of my colleagues put out, uh, pictures of him and his son on the beach and from that, he got 84 leads, five C-level meetings, two proposals, and one purchase order. And that took him 10 minutes to do. It was now, going back to what we were saying before. That’s not social selling, taking a long time. There is no other demand generation method out there that will get you six C-level meetings, two proposals, and one purchase order in ten minutes. It’s not possible.

Pam Didner: I’m not necessarily in agreement that it’s 10 minutes. Yes, maybe it is very easy for some people who come naturally to identify humanized content to share, but for a lot of sales professionals, it’s non-natural to them?

Tim Hughes: No, but, but, but giving them, but if you give them a methodology—

Pam Didner: We have to communicate that it takes time and is a skill set they have to learn over time. But I do agree with you. Social selling is a tactic, a way to do it.

Tim Hughes: But if you train them in a methodology and give them the skills, over time, they will build the ability to do that themselves. And just think about it if you give them the methodology. You give them the skills and you said, and have a thousand salespeople, a thousand salespeople, having that number of conversations, having that number of C-level meetings even if they only got one that would be transformational to that organization and that pipeline and the profit and the revenues that they would make.

Pam Didner: Understood. I believe social selling is one of the trends that salespeople, even marketing people, should possess. But I also want to make sure everybody understands it takes time and effort to get it right, just like every other selling method and methodology you follow. That’s all.

Hey, very good. Tim, it was great, great conversation with you.

Tim Hughes: Thank you.

Pam Didner: And going back and forth, and you are incredibly passionate about social selling me too. And there are a couple of things like we are coming from a slightly different point of view. Still, we all agree that being very savvy using the social media platform is one of the key skill sets. It doesn’t matter whether you are a sales or marketing professional or any business professional you should possess in the future.

So with that being said, um, I want to end it with the one silly question, and you can pick one of the questions to answer. First of all, what is your most useless talent, or did you have a ridiculous goal in your life?

Tim Hughes: Um, I think my partner would tell you that I have many useless talents. So I collect vinyl records. And I’ve been doing that before they became popular, but my useless talent is to kind of spend money on vinyl records.

Pam Didner: I think that’s very classy, by the way.

Tim Hughes: Thank you. They’ve suddenly become popular. I don’t know why, but I have about 2000.

Pam Didner: know why? Let me tell you why I have two boys, and they are 21 and 23. And, um, uh, so they are Millennials in a way. And it’s very interesting that a generation, they like things that are a little bit retro.

Tim Hughes: Ok.

Pam Didner: The youngest one liked the stuff from the 80s and his perspective. That was one of the great times in terms of music and some the fashion. I was like, “What? Seriously?” But the vinyl and the album, I think it’s that sense of classiness. Represent the old time, the timelessness, that retro effect. And he, by the way, he loves vinyl. I can see.

Tim Hughes: I’m amazed how, um, uh, younger people seem to be, um, seem to be into it, but yeah, so I’ve had it for years, but, um, it’s suddenly become popular.

Pam Didner: Hey, thank you so much for coming to my show.

Tim Hughes: You’re welcome.