The #1 Reason Most Salespeople Aren’t Getting Any Results from Social Selling

What is social selling? It’s one of those terms you probably hear a lot but may not be able to define. At Sandler Training, we define social selling as: “Using online networks and resources to add more prospects, opportunities, and information to your sales pipeline.”

Many confuse social selling with social media marketing. They think it’s about getting thousands of online followers, LinkedIn connections, and Twitter followers, blasting out messages, and getting people to buy based on the call-to-action in those messages. While it’s possible, it’s an aspect of social media marketing — which isn’t very scalable if you happen to be in a company with 500 salespeople. It’s unlikely that 500 individual salespeople will each be industry experts with thousands of followers. Expecting them to generate business from total strangers by leveraging the power of a compelling tweet? Not very realistic.

What is possible, however, is using social media to add people, opportunities, and information to your network. If you look around, you’ll see that’s what the most accomplished sales professionals are doing today.

Read the rest on the HubSpot Sales Blog.