Social selling is currently on a lot of businesses ‘to do list’ as a rising tide of companies come to the realisation that social media interactions are not only a very valuable way to promote information about products and services, it’s also an often over looked method to interact with potential B2B buyers, whilst learning more about their existing customers.

At the same time sellers and their senior executives are also increasingly realising that some forms of more traditional sales prospecting are not as effective as they once were. With buyers and decision makers not answering phone calls, inboxes being swamped with email, getting through to your ‘perfect prospect’ in order to interact, is more difficult than ever before. Enter social selling on LinkedIn.

Meet Mark McInnes. Mark was awarded the # 1 Social seller at the LinkedIn BOSS (Best Of Social Selling) event in Sydney in 2016. Having previously finishing 2nd in 2015 to his colleague from SalesITV, who has also won the award in 2014. The SalesITV social selling methodologies have certainly proven to be effective in the social space.

Mark has been able to leverage a combination of his 25 years of sales experience and the use of ethical persuasion on social media, particularly LinkedIn, in order to start conversations, which pertain to his and his client’s particular products and services. In short these interactions are then moulded into telephone calls, emails and face to face meetings. So much so, that at least 80% of Marks’ current customers are derived through or with the support of Social selling.

So What Makes Mark Different?

Most social media trainers are marketers. They talk about creating great profiles in order to attract people to your profile. Their theory is that an attractive and ‘complete’ profile will make others on social media ask you become their supplier. The reality is most people on social media end up measuring their activity and engagement through counting how many views, shares, comments or likes you get on a particular blog post.

Mark’s strategy is to take those likes, shares and comments and, using tried and tested ethical persuasion strategies garnered from years as a senior seller, turn them into phone calls, face to face meetings, presentations and on going business relationships. With a strong understanding of social media behaviour and LinkedIn the strategies are easy to learn, easy to replicate and outstandingly effective.

Rather than being a young Social media-marketing executive Mark is an experienced, long time seller. Mark uses tried and tested ‘engagement’ strategies coupled with the powerful search functions of LinkedIn to ‘socially’ listen and then ‘surround’ prospects, then when the time is right, the indicators are there to engage through the offering of critical insights or the provision of added value to his prospects. When combined with a strong LinkedIn profile and using a few LinkedIn specific strategies sellers are typically more effective and comfortable opening new business conversations.

Want to gains the tools, strategies and knowledge required to turn your social activity into sales? Dates and locations for Mark’s upcoming workshops will be announced early next week. Stay tuned!