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#80: Listen as Tyler Lindley, host of The Sales Lift Podcast, discusses social selling in 2022. He looks at the everlasting presence of LinkedIn, the boom of video content on TikTok, and how other media like podcasting and private social groups can up your selling game.
Explore the human side of sales and business with host Tyler Lindley. Leaders in their field share a dose of inspiration through stories about life and business. Sales professionals provide tactical tips you can put into practice today. It all comes together to help you chart your path forward.
Achieve your goals on your terms — get inspired by stories from extraordinary people, elevate your performance with the latest outbound tactics, and find the lift you need to take your career to the next level.
The Sales Lift Podcast
Episode #80
Social Selling Best Practices in 2022 w/ Tyler Lindley
Hosted by: Tyler Lindley
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[00:00:00] Tyler Lindley: Hey Sales Lift Nation, it's your host, Tyler Lindley. Today have a solo episode where I'm going to be talking about social selling in 2022, and really digging in deep. But first a reminder, you can find this episode and all the other sales lift episodes@thesaleslift.com. That's the tag sales S a L E.
Lift L I F t.com. It's a for, to go there for show notes. And if you want to get in touch, if you need help with your sales, feel free to contact us there. Let's dig into social selling in 20, 22 social selling. What exactly does that mean? To me? It means that you are being human online and you're using social platforms to sell.
And we can't talk about social stuff. In 2022, without starting to talk about LinkedIn, LinkedIn is still the predominant B2B professional networking site view are a B2B seller this day and age. You have to be active on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn starts with your profile. Your profile is your opportunity to showcase your background, your skillset, and to tell a story.
I think that's, what's missing from a lot of profiles that I. Is that the LinkedIn profile is simply a resume, but it doesn't speak necessarily to your target audience. And I think that's where LinkedIn profiles can be really effective is when they actually speak to your target audience. So I want you to highlight some of the specific problems that you help your target audience solve, highlight some of the things that your company is doing.
Some initiatives and strategies that you're doing to help your target audience. It should be speaking to that targeted. First thing, you probably have to have your target audience in mind. Who is that person? What's your ICP, your ideal customer profile and your buyer personas. And then does your profile speak to those individuals so that when someone lands on your LinkedIn profile, they think, wow, this person really gets me.
And man, he's really talking about some things here. She's talking about some things that might help me out. Maybe I need to dig in deeper. You want to make sure your profile is speaking to your target audience. Also on LinkedIn, there's obviously posting where you can be creating content, photos, videos, text posts, polls, which I'm sure some of you have a love, hate relationship with LinkedIn polls because you see so many of them, but those posts are important.
Especially for sales reps. What I see a lot of sales reps do is simply just repost. Whatever their company has posted. The marketing team has put something out on the company. And as simply a copy paste or just a reshare of that company material, I think that can be effective. It's good to have your company's message out there on your profile.
So you have some activity. However, I like when sales leaders give their own spin on that content, add a little bit of context about why that material resonated with you or create your own organic content. Don't even use the marketing content that your marketing team. Create your own become your own marketing team, your own marketing engine.
You're the one having conversations with prospects all the time. You're the one that listens to all these gong recordings of calls. You understand what problems and pain points your product or service helps your prospects do is talk about those things. Start conversations around those areas. And you'll be surprised if you're connecting with people in your target audience, your potential buyers, your prospects, that can be effective content on LinkedIn, but it starts with publishing.
You have to have the confidence to actually write some of those. And post them and know that it's going to take some time to probably get some traction, but it starts with just having the confidence to pose. Just like you have the confidence to click, send, click, dial on a cold call, same thing on clicking post and publish on a LinkedIn post.
It's easy to do that when you're just reposting marketing material a lot harder when it's your own posts. So the more you do it, the better you get, I've been posting on LinkedIn for a while now. And initially I was tearing. Just like my first cold call I ever made in sales. I was terrified if you do it all the time, it becomes a routine.
It becomes easier and easier and your content gets better and better because you figure out, wow, what resonates? What doesn't, what links should I include videos? Should I include pictures? Emojis, what should I include in there? You'll find what works best for you. But posting often is helpful. One effective strategy.
C is hashtags, Samantha McKenna, who is a sales influencer sales expert on LinkedIn and Carl Ferrera do this really well. Samantha McKenna uses hashtag Sam sales and she puts that on all of her content. And she said, Hey, if anybody wants to learn about me, just go search hashtag Sam sales. And then all of our content would show up.
I love that idea. Carl Frayer starts his with hashtag sales fam starts his LinkedIn posts. That way it puts me in the right mindset. I'm about to learn something cool from. Or from Sam, think about a hashtag that might help to tie all of your content together and then borrow from Sam and Carl on creating something where you can organize all of that content, make it easy for someone, a prospect to look up or whoever in your life, a potential job employer, podcast hosts.
Whoever's looking you up on LinkedIn, make it easy for them to find you and organize your content with maybe a hashtag. So another important part of LinkedIn is listening. Obviously we all listen on LinkedIn. Follow your prospects, follow the influencers in your space, use sales navigator and all the social listening tools on LinkedIn to make sure that you're listening to the conversations that are happening.
And that starts also with connecting with those people. So you need to try to connect with your prospects to make it easier to message with them on LinkedIn, obviously, and share things with. But make sure you're connecting with those folks. Make sure you're following them. Make sure you're watching what they post, what people in the industry are posting, whether that's personal stuff.
B2B. If they're listening to podcasts, they're posting polls. Like you want to be involved in the industry where your prospects live. And especially when it comes to LinkedIn, you want to know who's talking there. What conversations are they having? How can you add to the discussion? Because one thing we talked about posting earlier, it's not just posting, you can also.
Comment, you can also, like you can also reshare others posts of your prospects, of your colleagues, of industry influencers. So make sure that you are also adding to the discourse and it's not just simply I'll I've got to post something. Oh, what do I post? Just go and get involved in a conversation that already.
That's one thing with LinkedIn. That's a great way to get started, especially if you're nervous about posting and hitting, publish, just start by adding to the discussion, go in and add something and not just wow, or just a, like go in and add your 2 cents. Add how you actually feel based on your experience, you know, about your industry, you know, about your buyers, you know, about this space.
Go and tell others, go and get involved in those discussions, in that discourse, because there are a lot of discussions happening and there's a lot of sales reps sitting around lurking versus getting involved in those conversations. So remember on LinkedIn, have your profile geared towards your target audience, make sure that you're posting content or at least putting your own context behind company content that you're.
Consider using a hashtag hashtag something related to you or your industry also make sure you're listening and following those folks and then make sure getting involved in the discussion by commenting on other already existing conversations. So LinkedIn, obviously a key strategy. Another key piece to social selling in 2022 is video processing.
Video is obviously very important. I'm sure some of you have heard of TikTok, which is now I think the most popular website in the world, more popular than YouTube, which is crazy how astronomical and quick that growth curve has happened with Tik TOK and how many users they have. So take, talk to me.
Is being highly underutilized from a B2B perspective, I've gotten on Tik TOK recently. And what I love about Tik TOK is that it's easy to create video content on Tik TOK. And here's the thing you can post it on Tik TOK, or you can repurpose that content for other social platforms. So what I'll end up doing is I'll create Tik TOK content, post it there, and then also repurpose it.
On Twitter, repurpose it on Instagram reels, repurpose it, YouTube, repurpose it on LinkedIn. So you can create once on Tik TOK, one video and repurpose the heck out of that material, because it's just so dang, easy to create on Tik TOK. And honestly, the tick-tock video style where you've got text boxes, you've got music.
It's snappy, it's punchy, it's educational, or it's funny. I like to think that that is how people are now consuming videos. Very short typically can be as little as a couple of seconds all the way up to 15 seconds, maybe 30 seconds a minute. If you're doing a longer explainer type video. But tick-tock, to me is just such an easy way to create content.
It gives you an idea about what type of content people are looking at, and believe me, your prospects are on Tik TOK. You may not think that they are, but your prospects are on Tik TOK, especially some of the younger generations. And so it's good to start getting into that vein of how can I create content like this and video to me is the most personal human way to get in front of your prospect, whether that's creating a one to many video, like a Tik TOK style video that you might repurpose on those social.
Or whether you create that Tik TOK video, don't share it. And you just send it to one individual, one prospect in mind. Can you imagine if a prospect got a Tik TOK style video that was personalized to them? Can you imagine that I've seen some others do this online? And I think it's a very extremely effective strategy.
I can't remember who does it. It's not the ZoomInfo. It's one of the data aggregation tools. They do a really good job of creating these highly personalized videos. And just making it feel like a story in there, personalized to the prospect. You can do the same thing. You can create a tick-tock video.
That's personalized to your prospect. One guy on Tik TOK, max Cohen, a former colleague of mine at HubSpot. He is a HubSpot sales engine. He's posting HubSpot related Tik TOK content every day of the week. And it's really highly engaging because he knows how to make the tick-tock style content, but everything has a HubSpot lens.
So he's doing a great job of telling the HubSpot story, but using Tik TOK in that creative video style. So definitely follow max Cohen, who is doing a great job of doing some B2B style tic doc professional videos that are more business oriented HubSpot. But he's doing it in a fun creative way. To me, Tik TOK should be edutaining edutainment.
You can educate, but you have to also entertain. If you can find that mix of both that's I think where the magic happens also, like I mentioned earlier, repurposing, the content is really, really simple. You get these videos, you can add captions to these videos. You can add in the text boxes and it just makes it really easy to use.
So definitely don't sleep on Tik TOK. It is not just for. Young kids, a lot of folks are using it. I think that it's an effective strategy and that everyone needs to be considering how they're using Tech-Talk. In addition to Tik TOK and creating those style videos. There's also video card loom cloud app dub on zero.
These are all video prospecting. I am a huge fan of video prospecting. I'm a huge fan of you getting your face into that email, even if it's just the thumbnail that's embedded in the email. I am a huge fan of that style of content. And I think that it's highly underutilized. So the more that you create video content, the more you get comfortable creating those tools.
30 62nd videos. The better your video will be to your prospect. Click publish, create a tick tock video. Even if you don't publish it on there, it'll make your video cards better. It'll make your loom videos better. You want your videos to be edutaining edutainment, educating, and entertaining. Showcase your personal.
And there is no other place like video and video prospecting for B2B sellers to showcase their personality this day and age. It is the way to cut through the noise. It is the way to show them a little bit about who you are. My podcast is a great example. I do this podcast via audio and video because I want to have some video elements that I can reshare.
On social platforms that might be just as engaging that little 32nd clip might be just as engaging in this as a long form audio podcast. Think about all the different ways that you can use video. The more you click publish, the more videos you create, the better you're going to get no matter which platform you're using, whether you're dropping in at anytime.
Whether you're posting it on LinkedIn, whether you're actually just creating a personalized tick-tock video for a prospect, you need to be using video this day and age. And it's a big part of social selling. Let's talk a little bit about podcasting. Podcasting is such an important medium this day and age, and it's such a tool to figure out what conversations are happening in your space.
So I want you to think about what podcasts do your prospects list. Are there industry related podcasts that are happening right now. And if so, are you listening to them? Who are the guests on this podcast? What are the topics who are the sponsors? What are the conversations you need to be listening to those podcasts you need to be trying to get involved in those podcasts.
Now getting involved can mean creating your own. You could create your own podcast. I think all B2B sellers could have probably success creating a podcast, talking to their prospects, bringing them on as. Bringing on industry experts, just starting more discourse around topics that your prospects might find.
Interesting. You can also join someone else's podcasts. There's already existing podcasts. You can try to go be a guest on this podcast. Think about some topics that you really know a lot about in the space. And then you can go and guess and talk about those on someone else's podcast at a minimum. You should just be listening.
Cause we, as B2B sellers can use that information. As we nurture our prospects, we can use all of those conversations. Those quotes create a little quote card, give it to one of your prospects, create a little clip of 30 seconds. Something that you think they might find valuable from a podcast. Send it to them even better.
If that's your own podcast or that's featuring you because now you're positioning yourself. As an expert in this space and someone they can listen to and likely learn from remember edutainment. So think about how can you get on some of those podcasts or should you be creating your own? So at a minimum with podcasting, make sure you're listening to the ones that are happening in your space and make sure you're pulling from that wealth of conversations and information.
Make sure you're pulling out necessary things to move deals forward, to educate your prospects on things going on in your space, on the problems you help them solve, and then consider joining someone else's show. Or starting your own podcast so that you can showcase some of your thought leadership in your industry.
So podcasting to me, very important part of social selling in 2022. Next step. Want to chat a little bit about Twitter? Those are the two main platforms that I'm on. LinkedIn is the main one. And then Twitter. To me, Twitter's a little bit less noisy than LinkedIn, LinkedIn. There's a lot of people, especially when you've got a popular post or someone that has a ton of followers, the comments in a LinkedIn message get really busy, really quick.
So it's hard for you to actually stand out and. Actually build relationships with folks because there's just so much noise on LinkedIn on Twitter. There's also noise. But for me it feels like it's catered a little bit more towards me. And there's less people that are active on Twitter, actively joining in on discussions.
So I think that people just posting on Twitter naturally tend to be a little bit more off the cuff. I think it's a little bit more personal. I see a lot of people re purposing their Twitter content for LinkedIn. However, those, some of those countries. On Twitter. And a lot of it is driven by that discussion.
And by that discourse, you'll find that Twitter is a little bit more text-heavy there's not as much video. There's no polls. A lot of it is text-based. Twitter is a place where I go for news. It's a place I go to learn. And then it's a place to get involved in conversations. If you find that some of your prospects are heavy on Twitter, they love Twitter.
Those that love Twitter are into Twitter and they have conversations there. So find out where your prospects hang out. Maybe it's on Twitter. Maybe it's. But Twitter to me is just a little bit less noisy. If you find a prospect that is active on there, you can get involved in that conversation. And maybe it's a little bit easier to stand out then on other platforms that are a little bit more noisy.
So Twitter, I think is an interesting platform, but any of these others could be as well. Your prospects hang out on Twitter, Facebook groups, right? It could be Instagram. It could be on Tik TOK, whatever social platform they're hanging out on. That's where you should be hanging out on. But to me, Twitter is an interesting one.
I found some success, having starting some conversations with some people that I want to talk to. The last thing I want to talk about today for social selling in 2022 is private social groups. So there are a lot of private social groups that all have a slack group usually attached to them, or some type of discord or Facebook group element attached.
But some ones that I'm involved with from a B2B selling standpoint are pavilion rev genius. Audience and income with Justin Welsh. A lot of these groups have slack groups. They have webinars, they have educational content courses that you can get involved with. Cohort-based online courses. A lot of them have slack groups and they're talking about all kinds of stuff in there.
So for me, private social groups are a place to learn as B2B sellers. We need to always be learning and honing our craft. So you can go in there and learn. You can go in there and they're talking about a lot of topics there. They might be talking about a topic related to what you sell. Some tech stacks, some sales tech stack that they're using.
They're talking about. They talk about CRM tools, there's conversation about sales process and sales development and sales leadership, sales management. So whether you go in there to learn, or maybe if you're involved in actually selling product or service, that's inside of one of these spaces, go in there and add to the conversation, add to the discourse of what's happening in there.
To me, private social groups are great for number one. To networking, meeting people, either in your space or people that you can learn from and the sales and number three there's opportunity in there. People are actively asking questions. I need help. I'm looking for this. I need someone that can do this.
And whether you're on there or you have your friends on there, whoever's on there listening to those comments. You need to get involved and try to find some of opportunities. I think a lot of people are posting in those private social groups, not necessarily posting that publicly. They don't post that on a public forum, public, social media, LinkedIn, or anything that they might post it in a private social group where there's a more limited number of people and people that are typically experienced in that.
So don't sleep on getting involved in some of those private social groups. They're great for networking. They're great for education. They're great for just having conversations and meeting people. I've met some great friends through some of those private social groups that become more than just people that I learned from.
They become friends. It's a great way to meet people because everybody in those groups has something in common with. Likely selling, but there might be some private social groups related to something to your industry. So it could be also an opportunity to meet more prospects as well. That is another arena that I think is really important for social selling and 2022.
So to recap, here are the important themes that we touched on for social selling in 2022, LinkedIn is still. Important. And it's still where you need to devote a ton of energy. So making your profile great posting using hashtag listening on there, getting involved in conversations, video prospecting is the second thing we talked about, whether you're on Tik TOK or not creating video Tik TOK style, video content on whatever video platform using.
Getting that content in front of prospects helps really cut through the noise. Third bucket podcasting podcasts are blowing up. They're really popular. They're going to remain popular. We're getting into the long tail of podcasting. We're going to have these niche topics. Definitely podcasting is somewhere.
You should be involved thinking about getting involved in someone else's podcast, starting your own, or at least listening on podcasts or listen to what your prospects listen to. Twitter was the other one, great conversations happening there and finally, private social groups. So those are the five key themes that we touched on.
I would say, get involved in all of those things, because your prospects are also involved in those areas. And to me, that's what social selling. Social selling is us getting involved in public conversations where our prospects are also involved. And if we can go in there and show value, we can go in there and show some expertise.
We can go in there and edutain, educate and entertain. We can get in front of our prospects and we can start conversations with them. And at the end of the day, that's all social selling is social selling is us listening and getting involved in conversations that are taking place online so that we can hopefully interact with more of the people.
That we can help with our product or service. So don't sleep on social selling, make sure that you're doing these things. I really, really appreciate you joining the sales lift podcast again today. And remember to check out the sales lift, the sales lift.com T H E S L E S L I F t.com for all the show notes.
And if you need to get in touch, if I can help you with social selling at all in 2020. Please, let me know otherwise I'll catch you all next week. Have a good one.
Thank you so much for listening to today's show, you can find all the links discussed and the show notes@thesaleslift.com. That's the T H G sales S a L. Lift L I F t.com have questions for me. Email me@tyleratthesaleslift.com. We look forward to seeing you back here next week, and we hope today's show brings you the sales lift.
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