The social selling horror

“… You sell a product A for 4 monetary units …”. When I think back to my time at business school and later when I studied business administration, this sentence comes to mind. A sentence that aptly sums up the entire field of sales knowledge. I was almost not taught more sales knowledge in six years. After all, I could monologue for hours about the coincidence of supply and demand, the advantages of different pricing strategies or the different phases in the product life cycle. But how selling at X monetary units should work, how to hold one’s own against competitors who sell similar or identical products, or how to identify the right contact persons in a company in the first place, all this I was only able to learn practically in various professions.

Why am I telling you all this? Because a new buzzword is currently doing the rounds: social selling. It is considered the new miracle cure, the magic wand of successful selling. And from my point of view, it is sheer horror!

Different social selling promises, one common message

Anyone who frequents platforms such as LinkedIn will hardly pass by the numerous advertising promises. “Learn social selling in 90 minutes”. “Determine social selling potential in one minute.” “Cold calling is a thing of the past, social selling is the present!”. Or, “Can it be that you are afraid of visibility? Don’t miss any more opportunities!” I would like to sum up these promises with one word: Horror!

The message that such posts have in common is simple: with my or our help, things will get better. We understand what you need to do so that you can sell more easily from now on. We understand the algorithms, we understand the people, we understand you. One word comes to mind: It starts with H and ends with orror!

Like many things in life, sales and the sale of products and services is complex. Products that require a lot of explanation cannot simply be sold at the push of a button. And even with simpler products, the whole thing is not child’s play. Neither in real life, nor in the social media world through social selling. There are many reasons for this, one of which I would like to discuss in more detail:

The need of the potential customer

Have you ever heard the term “need”? “Need is the sum of concrete wants endowed with purchasing power.” Let someone say that a business degree does not teach sales knowledge. Let’s take a look at the two essential terms in this simple definition:

• Wants
• Purchasing power

“Wants: 1. micro theory: desire arising from the perception of a lack. A distinction is made between natural and social wants and basic wants. – 2. market psychology, work and organisational psychology: cf. motive.”¹

“Purchasing power: 1. general: sum of money available to an economic subject per unit of time. 2. economic theory: purchasing power. – 2. economic theory: purchasing power of money; cf. monetary value (no, I’ll spare you that now and here).”²

“Motive: 1. drive of behaviour. – 2. components of motive: a) Activating component: drives that activate and direct behaviour triggered by disturbance of biological equilibrium (see emotions; no, we won’t dive deeper here either). – b) Cognitive component: Conscious or volitional process of goal setting involving perception and interpretation of alternative courses of action, i.e. a conscious striving towards goals; in motivation theory, the affiliation of the cognitive component is controversial.”¹

So one difficulty in selling is meeting people with need. If you hear someone on social media musing about the importance of people’s wants as an essential element in the sales process, you know immediately that he or she is simply skipping half the issue: Money. Budget. Dough. Without financial resources at their disposal, the wants of potential customers are relatively useless to salespeople.

Interestingly, other aspects are also negated in relation to needs: you must be able to meet the need in a defined time frame, with the appropriate service or product, in the required quantity and at suitable prices and conditions. And of course, points such as trust and competence, sympathy, customer approach and language, perseverance, market knowledge, the communication of benefits, knowledge of the competition, as well as presentation and negotiation skills also play a role. Or to put it in business language: “… You sell a product A for 4 monetary units …”.

The reverse approach

One of the tasks of cold calling in the 90s of the last century was to identify the right contacts for a topic.In those days, this was done by calling the telephone switchboard and asking around for the right people for the issue.In those days, this was done by calling the telephone switchboard and asking around for the right people for the issue. People used data records that telephone directory publishers sold on CDs. People went to trade fairs and collected business cards. In fact, not everything was better in the past than it is today.

Today, identifying potential contacts is much easier because a lot of data can be found on publicly accessible platforms on the internet. However, this is already the end of the easy road in social selling. Friends tell me, for example, that they do not accept any contact requests on LinkedIn because people only want to sell something anyway. In addition, there are unspeakable (and unfortunately many) messages that are so flat that the recipients legitimately wonder whether such an approach can work even once in 1,000 attempts. Here, too, a word comes to mind that you know by now: Horror!

What can work in terms of social selling is a reversal of approach: You don’t look for people with needs, but people with needs find you.

And how does that work? In two ways:

• You produce useful content that addresses people with needs. Unfortunately, this is anything but easy, as this content often only achieves a low reach; surveys that ask about your preferences for coffee or tea and the most banal life lessons, for example, are currently much more popular on LinkedIn. Nevertheless, producing useful content for your target audience is the right thing to do. In many areas, sales is a marathon and not a sprint, and if you don’t want to win 100 customers at once with your products or services, but one customer at a time, then that’s perfectly fine.
• You place advertisements. Advertising that is offered to people with a defined role AND who are in a need situation. You offer these people a whitepaper to download or participation in a specific-concrete webinar. With a clear focus on need.⁴ Compared to continuous content production, just one targeted whitepaper or webinar with practical support can make a big difference. The important thing is that your advertising reaches people with a need that you can meet.⁵

A final tip

Selling is complex. In real life as well as on social media. Shortcuts only seem to exist. If you allow yourself the fun and sign up for various social selling webinars, you will quickly notice a few things:

• Many people mean well, but are also just boiling water.
• Promoting recorded webinars as live webinars is not a good idea.
• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) also applies on platforms like LinkedIn, but people are very happy to ignore it.
• Issuing invitations to interact at the beginning of a webinar and then gushing like a waterfall for 30 minutes is an approach that will NOT win customers.
• Next steps in the sales funnel only make sense if you have first checked whether the person who has registered has actually taken part in the webinar.

This list of horrors can easily be extended.

For social selling, I would like to give you a final tip – in addition to the two points “useful content” and “target audience-specific advertising”: On social media, there are the silent readers and the active contributors. You will find a lot of information about the contributors that will help you to identify a possible need. For the silent readers, this is much more limited, but you will still often find various information such as their current position, the companies they follow or interest groups they have subscribed to. This information provides a basis for getting to know each other. They provide a way to enter into a dialogue. Please do not confuse this entry point with a request for a sales pitch, as this is bound to fail at this stage in the vast majority of cases. Connect with people who you think might have a need for your products or services at some point. Because this really helps with social selling. It is a foundation that people with need will find you (again) on social media exactly when the need becomes acute.

Notes:

[1] [2] [3] Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon, Betriebswirtschaftlicher Verlag Dr. Th. Gabler GmbH, 12th edition. Here you can find the German business encyclopaedia.
[4] What is the difference to “usual” advertisements? Ideally, you focus on a specific situation in which your target persons with needs find themselves. No “learn social selling in 90 minutes blah blah”, but real support and a concrete, binding offer.
[5] If someone advertises a social selling webinar and claims to have cracked the platform’s algorithm, it’s best not to sign up. Why would someone advertise if they have cracked the algorithm?

Michael Schenkel has published other articles in the t2informatik Blog, including

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