Social Selling Mastery

Chapter 10EngageTouching “Every Deal, Every Day” with Social Media

If you don't shoot, you can't score.

—Wayne Gretzky

Selling is like a sport; your success can be distilled to two questions:

1. Did you execute the right volume of activities?
2. Where can you improve the probability that these activities translate into positive outcomes?

Ineffective social sellers, and 99 percent of the so-called social selling experts in my industry, spend way, way too much time socially listening and very little time socially engaging in sales conversations. Selling is just like hockey; you need to shoot the damn puck on net to give yourself a chance to score. Taking one to two shots a game is just not going to do it. In that same vein, I've heard countless sales professionals state that:

1. “InMails don't work.”
2. “I tried connecting with that buyer and he never connected back.”
3. “I left a comment on her article but she never called me.”
4. “I've retweeted their content many times and I get nothing.”

The Wayne Gretzky in me, the guy who's spent more than ten thousand hours mastering my sales craft (and still has a lifetime of learning to do), snickers every time I hear one of these excuses. If one of Gretzky's coaches had deterred him from spending extra time behind his opposing goalie's net, he may have stopped his groundbreaking behind-the-net tactics. In the late 1970s, a few coaches probably thought his tactics were a terrible strategy because the game of hockey had always been played in front ...