Tip #1: Social selling is not personal branding, but it can help

Let’s eliminate a common misconception about social selling straight out the gate, shall we? That misconception is that social selling is synonymous with personal branding: and it most certainly is not. However, the two are symbiotic.

Let’s use an analogy.

Social selling is the car. You drive the car and it takes you from one place to another.

But how useful is your car without gas?

It’s pretty useless, right?

That’s what personal branding does for you. Personal branding is fuel for your car. Your personal brand is a significant contributing factor as to what makes your social selling strategies work.

Without a personal brand, social selling is much more difficult and will more than likely yield negative, time-wasting results: which is one of many reasons people steer away from the concept.

Having a personal brand doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be the world’s savviest content creator. Many successful personal brands have been built simply by leveraging social media and networking events as journals of experience or places to “grow in public.”

Don’t overcomplicate it and be yourself because it is in fact personal branding, after all.

Tips #2 & #3: LinkedIn’s inbox is awful, here’s how to deal with it

As someone who makes income through LinkedIn, my DMs have quickly replaced my email inbox. Many social sellers, savvy or newbie, will tell you that their inboxes are a pain to manage. How do you deal with it?

Tip #2 might come across as a surprise to many. However, please do not use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to send and receive DMs as a social seller. You’re going to want to silo all of your conversations into your primary LinkedIn inbox.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. I just told you it gets messy and I also just told you to effectively make it messier. I promise there’s a point.

By siloing your conversations into our traditional inbox, you are more equipped to stay on top of high-priority conversations with business partners and prospects. LinkedIn Sales Navigator hangs out in a place so separate from your traditional inbox and news feed that it is quite easy to forget about.

Sales Navigator is so siloed that when you send a connection request via LinkedIn’s “normal environment” with a note, it shows up as a DM in your inbox: thus allowing you to track who accepted your connection request much easier than in Sales Navigator.

Furthermore, here’s Tip #3. Don’t open messages that you aren’t ready to read or take action on. If you’re not able to take action after opening: mark the message as unread so that you don’t forget to come back to it. I can’t tell you how many times this strategy has saved me many meetings booked as a social selling BDR.
 

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Tips #4: Voice notes are your asynchronous cold calls

Most humans can see or hear. Humans are also animals, at the end of the day. What does that mean? We’re scientifically proven to respond well to pattern disruption and visual-audio communication. That’s why story-telling and plays are considered some of the oldest art forms in human history.

How does this translate to social selling? Quite easily, in fact. On LinkedIn’s mobile app, you can use Tip #4, which is to send voice messages (also known as voice notes) to people that you’re connected with. Keeping these short and digestible is super easy because LinkedIn only allows you to send voice notes that are up to 60 seconds in length.

Don’t worry about being on a mobile app while your prospects are on their laptops or desktops as LinkedIn allows for them to receive and listen to these voice notes on any device that can relay audio.

Tip #5: Use video prospecting, but do it right

Okay, each and every single one of us that has done video prospecting has probably fallen into this trap. Before I tell you what this trap is, I would like to say that if you claim to have never fallen into it, I won’t believe you. It’s human nature, after all.

What’s the trap? The trap is re-recording your video prospecting message over and over again; thus wasting your time and energy.

Listen, I get it. You want to look great and have zero moments where you stutter over your words. However, just like in a cold call, you’re going to trip over your words sometimes: and that’s okay.

Check the first time you record a video prospecting message to ensure that the audio recording is working, but after that: hit send every single time without review.

Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of your time judging yourself in unnecessary ways that are harmful to your mental health and damaging to your efficiency as a social seller.

I prefer to use the native video recording feature on LinkedIn’s mobile app as it reduces the clicks necessary to view the video: but feel free to use third-party tools, as well.

Tips galore

We could go on and on about the ways you can make social selling faster and easier for you and your team. If you want more tips and strategies to reduce the chaos and increase the success of your social selling strategies, keep following Outplay and Evan Patterson on LinkedIn for more.

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