Phil Szomszor

Social selling should be beneficial to everyone, but also be mindful of other stakeholders - who should be able to help, but only if they are kept in the loop. Marketing can provide content, Comms can help with guidelines and possibly include you in their work, HR may want to ride on what you're doing to attract talent, and so on. Nobody really 'owns' social - but it definitely helps to play nice and work with others.

Direct messaging is the most under-utilised feature of LinkedIn (and just about any other social network). But don't try and do it all in one message, develop a sequence of messages that are personalized and take you further towards a sale. Bear in mind your contact may not be the ultimate buyer, so make sure you map out your prospect base within the organisation you are selling in to and give everyone attentio. If you're working with LinkedIn, the new Relationship Map is a handy tool to make a start with this.

It's one thing to come up with a message, but is it believable? Start with 2-4 things you'd like to be known for, then assess each of them against three criteria: 1) Does it address a pain point that your customers experience and identify with? 2) Is it something you are passionate about (genuinely)? 3) Do you have authority to talk about this? Based on experience, insight or reputation. Conventional wisdom says it's all about the customer, but you need 2 and 3 to really make whatever you say, stick.

Feels to me that the golden age of social listening has past, due to the proliferation of networks and tightening of access to data (e.g. the X/Twitter API). You cannot (yet) use LinkedIn to monitor conversations, which is still a significant drawback in B2B. However, if you understand the limitations and are careful around sentiment, which is more open to interpretation, they can be useful to get a snapshot of what people are saying about an issue or a brand.

There's a difference between using humour to be entertaining and using it to make your content more engaging. Both are viable and can work well in B2B. In the marketing world I work in, I know a few creators who put out comedic content. The purpose here is simple: to build their profile by making people laugh. They might be doing it to get speaker engagements or to sell a part of what they do, which is based intrinsically on humour. The other approach is to inject humour into everyday content, just to make it stand out. The key thing here is to focus more on the value and message of the content than the joke.

If you're social selling on LinkedIn using the Advanced version of Sales Navigator, don't forget about the reporting capabilities, where you can see the utilisation of the software and some topline performance KPIs. This helps to ensure consistency and will undoubtedly lead to some helpful conversations (remember this should be 'insight' not 'stick').