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Chapter 7Social Selling: Leveraging Social Media Without Becoming an Influencer

Social selling is all about leveraging the power of social media to promote and generate business opportunities. It's a strategy that allows you to utilize platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others to engage with potential clients and convert those interactions into meaningful offline conversations and sales calls.

Social selling is one of the main topics I speak about in live events because it's so easy and yet so confusing. The rise of social media influencers and content creators has confused what social selling really is.

Many think it's about sending lots of sales messages online or documenting your life online; others think it's about attracting clients with content. In reality, social selling is neither of those, and both of those. Social selling is about building relationships online through content, personal branding, and sales outreach—it's a hybrid of all three. People buy from people they know, like, and trust. (See Figure 7.1.)

When we look back to around 2018, social selling was still relatively new in the sales and marketing world. It's only in recent years that social media has become a viable tool for winning business and reaching decision‐makers who were previously inaccessible. The beauty of social media is that it enables us to connect with and reach a far greater number of people on a daily basis than we could ever do in person. The potential to connect with hundreds ...