Social Selling Mastery

Chapter 3How Do I Drive Organizational Buy-in and Accountability?

If you hang out with chickens, you're going to cluck and if your hang out with eagles, you're going to fly.

—Dr. Steve Maraboli

I'm going to start with a very bold statement. The success or failure of your Social Selling Mastery program, especially its becoming scalable, is predicated on senior leadership buy-in! All the other elements within the ecosystem of social selling are smaller in value to this one, very simple statement. I'd be lying if I pretended that turning it into reality was simple; unfortunately for some of you, this will be very complex.

I find it unfortunate that many senior leaders I meet don't share my passion for innovation within their commercial go-to-market strategy. In reality, I estimate that 80 percent of all senior leaders whom I meet before launching a social selling program are either skeptical, frustrated their routine will be altered, or downright scared. Scared is the right word, especially for senior marketers, because social selling puts the digital marketing team under the same microscope as a sales department. Marketers are just not used to having weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings aimed at analyzing their production in which to turn their art into a science. Marketing isn't the only department from which you can anticipate pushback. The second potential red flag may come from your senior sales leaders, who many times view social selling as a widget, a thing, a pill that ...