It's time to catch up with our good buddy and social selling influencer Tim Hughes again. We previously discussed the 5 Pillars of Social Selling, this time we talk about organizational impact, change makers and Tim's new book.
Have a listen to the podcast embedded below, on iTunes or keep reading for a summary of our conversation. Questions by me, answers by Tim.
What do you do Tim?
"I don't like to use the word expert, but people quite often place that on me. I'm an expert in social selling and social media. I've been involved in social media now for seven years and I've been blogging on that and writing about social selling now for three years. My book is available on Amazon now; Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. All of the things that I've been doing over seven years has gone into this book. The book really is about how organizations, how salespeople, and how marketers can use social to sell, and use social, in effect, to generate leads and generate revenue."
How do you use social networks purposefully to build trust and a high quality community?
"The fact that people are now using mobile more than anything else, and people are spending more time actually researching things. There's research that came out recently which actually shows that sales buying cycles are getting longer because people are spending more time actually researching the products, and there's far more products and apps, and the whole thing is getting far more complex.
But the actual sales cycle is getting shorter. I don't want to sound ageist, but the research shows that if you're looking at people up to about the age of 40, those people, generally about 35% of them, rather than go to Google when they want to actually buy something and then go to a corporate website, people are actually going and connecting on social networks. So they're looking at social media, and they're looking at Twitter, and they're looking at LinkedIn, rather than necessarily taking Google or going to a particular brand's website."
How do you scale a social selling strategy across an organisation?
"A lot of people come to me and say, "I read all your articles, but my manager thinks that social's for kids and for taking pictures of your lunch, and that you can't actually use it to sell. What can I do?" That's a very common question that I get.
You can start actually predicting the way that the organizations are going to react to a work. People that read the book, and because of that, they can actually start managing or doing the things they need to do to start going on that journey. I don't think there's actually an accelerated route. Because usually what happens is that you start off with "it's only for kids" and then what you get is random acts of social."
- Read the full article: A Guide to Social Selling, with Tim Hughes
- Follow Tim on Twitter @Timothy_Hughes
- Visit Tim's site The Social Selling Network
- Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes