Social selling is a hot topic in the worlds of sales and marketing these days. At its most basic, social selling is a way to use social networks to establish and further relationships with influencers and decision-makers within organizations that are prospects for your products or services. By building a strong personal brand within the online places and communities that your prospects frequent, you can make connections and open doors in ways that traditional sales tactics like cold-calling cannot.
I recently participated in a great conversation about social selling on Game Changers Radio. One point I made during the broadcast is that the term “social selling” is actually a bad name for what we are talking about. Yes, at the end of the day social selling strategies and tactics can help sales people gain access to accounts and spawn relationships and conversations with executive contacts they may not have had otherwise. But if the implication of the term is that we are always “selling” in our online engagements, then we are violating one of the core principles of digital discourse: Authenticity…
