Common Sense in Selling B2B™

You can’t read a sales- or marketing-related blog without seeing something about social selling. There are tips and techniques, camps and courses, and even social selling consultants, both real and fake.

But as this new sales trend/methodology/process starts to take hold beyond just the cutting-edge techies and social media mavens, it’s starting to look less like a “new sales methodology” and more like a requirement for any salespersons’ toolkit.

Think about it this way: When a new way to sell (or gain a sales edge) appears, it becomes a part of everyday life, like telephones or email. First, salespeople relied on personal relationships and door-to-door sales to gather information and pitch their products. As business information services appeared last century, they helped to accelerate that process by selling information (no matter how stale or outdated) and the smart salesperson gained an edge by narrowing down who to call on and what or how to pitch. Eventually, everyone did it. When the internet appeared, it was even easier to find news, stock quotes, regulatory filings, and other helpful information, and it gave smart salespeople another edge – at  least until everyone else was doing it, too.

If I were to say to you today, “I want to help you learn telephone selling techniques,” you’d laugh me out of the room. Why? Because you’ve been doing that your entire career, as has every other salesperson.

Social networks, however, are relatively new. And it took a few years for smart salespeople to figure out how to leverage them for insights that helped move deals along. It also took a few years for people—you, me, your manager, your leads, their marketing departments—to all jump on the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and other (Yes, I use Google+. Don’t judge me.), bandwagons.

Now, the use of social networks is ubiquitous. Seriously, who do you know who doesn’t have a Facebook account or a LinkedIn profile? It’s a pretty small group. So using this information to help you sell more is an obvious, albeit new, part of your daily life and it’s going to be for a long time.

So while the term “social selling” is pretty popular these days, it’s not really a thing. If you want to achieve your quota and outsell your competition, you need to treat it as the thing, meaning it’s what will set you apart for now, but pretty soon, it’ll be a normal part of selling, not just a buzzword.

This article was originally posted to the InsideView Blog by Jason Rushin on March 18, 2015.