Latest / Partnerships Unraveled / 017 - Social Selling vs Social Sales: The Key to unlocking the Channels

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017 - Social Selling vs Social Sales: The Key to unlocking the Channels · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:16
  My name is Rick van den Bosch, and I'm the CEO and founder at Channext.
• 0:19
  And I'm here together with Alex Whitford, VP partners at Channext.
• 0:22
  Alex, how are you doing today?
• 0:24
  Yeah, really well.
• 0:24
  Really well.
• 0:26
  Discussing one of our favourite subjects, social selling.
• 0:28
  So, yeah, I think it's going to be a good one.
• 0:30
  Yeah, I agree.
• 0:31
  We're very much on top of this with our team, of course.
• 0:34
  So very exciting to dive into this and what it can actually mean for the channel.
• 0:38
  Yeah, I think social selling, I think one, it's been brilliant for me, personally, I think it's been brilliant for Channext and I think it's very, very successful for lots of businesses out there.
• 0:48
  And so I really see it as a key opportunity driver for the channel to pick up and run with, to understand who can really benefit from it.
• 0:59
  Because I think what happens in any market when there's a wholesale change is there are winners who massively get ahead and then there's everyone else.
• 1:08
  So I think the early uptakers who really, really dominate this space, I think we could be talking about very, very different individuals and businesses in a few years time.
• 1:17
  How would you define social selling?
• 1:17
  Sure.
• 1:20
  So social selling is the sort of process of building a bit of a personal brand, discussing an area where you're an expert and really leveraging that to generate inbound demand for your products and services.
• 1:37
  So really building relationships via social media, indeed, creating content there, but also very important to notice.
• 1:45
  It's called social media for a reason.
• 1:48
  So the social part is very important.
• 1:50
  I see the people who are doing social selling in the best way are the ones that also interact with others on their profiles and their posts, but also are creating content themselves.
• 2:00
  Yeah, I think it might be Mr.
• 2:03
  Beast on YouTube who spoke about it's really easy to monetize an audience, but it's hard to build an audience.
• 2:10
  That's the bit that's difficult is I think lots of people get overly worried about, like, how am I going to build the perfect funneling process and whatever.
• 2:19
  And now you're seeing content creators, whether it's on YouTube or LinkedIn or Twitter, and they're monetizing really easily.
• 2:26
  I think The Rock is selling his alcohol for I think the business is valued at $3 billion.
• 2:33
  He's going to make more money from that than he's ever made from acting, but it's because he's managed to build a huge audience.
• 2:39
  So don't get too caught up on how you monetize the process, because the monetization is easy once you have attention.
• 2:48
  First, work on, like you say, being really active, getting your name out there, because I bet if you ran a sort of proportional analysis on who are the top creators in terms of engagement on LinkedIn and who's making the most money that would almost look like a one to one list.
• 3:03
  And it becomes so interesting because all of a sudden you can really build relationships at skill.
• 3:08
  Usually we only could visit them or call someone, but now you can work on multiple relationships at once and really finding that interaction through social networks, but also really expanding your network because it's not just nurturing the ones you have, but also because of the virality potential on social media platforms.
• 3:27
  You are very much introduced into other people's network as well.
• 3:31
  Yeah, I've been reading a lot about leverage because I think it's a really interesting business concept, which is the idea that most people work trade time for money and that ratio is therefore one to one.
• 3:44
  But there are certain activities where the ratio might be one to ten, one to 100, one to a 1000, one to a million.
• 3:50
  And content is that which is you can do one post and it does nothing, but you start to do 20 minutes every single day and you start to create content.
• 3:59
  And then once you have an audience that one post, the leverage is extraordinary.
• 4:04
  You can put one thing up and you're going to get thousands of comments and ultimately that then funnels down into significant revenue opportunities.
• 4:12
  And I think businesses need to be looking at this far more strategically than it would be nice if maybe some of our AEs and some of our BDRs did a bit of social.
• 4:22
  It's like, no, how do you programatize this and how do you really drive success?
• 4:26
  Because the businesses that do that effectively will win.
• 4:29
  Yeah, I think there are many examples of like refine labs, outreach, et cetera, who are so active on social and doing it with many people and they are just everywhere on LinkedIn, right?
• 4:40
  Yeah, and exactly.
• 4:42
  Think of it as casting your net as wide as possible.
• 4:45
  If you've got one BDR, it's great for them as an individual if they're really active on social and you will see some level of return on that because that individual is.
• 4:56
  But if you embed a culture of being very proactive on social in the same way you would embed a culture of BDRs, picking up the phone and calling lots of people, you can embed this and programatize it and then that is going to help them as individuals because social selling is a skill.
• 5:12
  Some people are fantastic at it, they get reunited at it very highly because of it and some people aren't.
• 5:18
  But you've got to embed it as a process, teach people how to be successful.
• 5:21
  And if you do, if rather than having one BDR, suddenly you have ten, well, you're going to ten x your return.
• 5:27
  And I think we can attest that here from a Channext perspective because we've been doing it with six people for almost a year now and last year we actually built more than 60% of our inbound pipeline through social selling.
• 5:41
  So indeed, in the beginning it's worked to really set it up, but the effect is massive.
• 5:46
  Yeah, and not just that, right.
• 5:48
  I think 60% of inbound pipeline is great, but best closure percentage and best deal for loss to that's a bit from an operational perspective I get really interested in because it means not only are we bringing in pipeline, but that pipeline is closing quicker and more accurately, meaning that the operational cost of closing those deals is actually lower.
• 6:07
  And suddenly you start to go, hang on a second, that's that's amazing.
• 6:11
  We, you know, Feasibly, it doesn't cost us a lot of time, right.
• 6:15
  If we talk about the six people here, I think we've got whatever it was a million and a half years last, last year.
• 6:20
  It didn't cost us hours every day, we're talking hours every week, cumulatively, across the whole team.
• 6:28
  And yet it's responsible for the largest part of our pipeline and the best closure percentage.
• 6:33
  Maybe it's interesting to dive a little bit deeper into why is that closing percentage and the deal velocity so much higher?
• 6:39
  And also I think we've been reading a lot about dark social that you are building those relationships but people are seeing your content all the time, sometimes interacting, but not getting in market yet.
• 6:51
  But then all of a sudden because you've been building up that tension and you've been building up that story for such a long time, if they do a hand raiser and they say, I want to know more about your product, then they are already much warmer than when you have an outbound motion.
• 7:05
  Or maybe someone who first downloaded an ebook and then got into your funnel.
• 7:09
  Yeah.
• 7:10
  So I was trying to plan for the perfect analogy of how to explain this on mass and I think I've got it, which is imagine if car sales worked.
• 7:19
  Instead of you waiting for people to come in and ask for it to test drive your car, you called people and said, hey, are you interested in buying a car?
• 7:26
  Well, 99 times out of 100, no, I have a car.
• 7:30
  Why are you coming to discuss me?
• 7:32
  Well, that's what BDRs typically do.
• 7:34
  They call lots of people, they email lots of people, are you interested?
• 7:38
  No.
• 7:39
  And some might have a very, very good conversion ratio, might be 8%.
• 7:44
  That would be incredible.
• 7:46
  Well, that's the same thing if you're calling lots of people to ask for a car.
• 7:49
  No.
• 7:49
  And instead what you do is you drip feed content through TV and advertising and then when someone's interested in buying a car, they come into the showroom and go, I would like to test this car.
• 8:00
  Your conversion ratio for test drive to closure is then very, very high.
• 8:05
  Social sales works exactly the same way.
• 8:07
  You can't tell who's going to come and speak to you, but if you put enough content out there, people enter the buying cycle far later on.
• 8:15
  And that's why from a leverage model, it's so compelling because you just go, how do I get as many eyes on me as possible?
• 8:22
  And then they come in, not right at the right moment to buy.
• 8:25
  You're still talking, but you're talking a high double digit conversion percentage as opposed to low single digit.
• 8:33
  Yeah, I think that's a great analogy and it also comes very close to the market data where usually about 3% of your ideal customer profiles or sorry, of about 3% of your total addressable market is usually in market and the other 97% is not.
• 8:51
  So you need to make sure that you are continuously marketing to that 97% as well.
• 8:56
  And that's done by content, by educating them until they are in market.
• 9:00
  Yeah, and look, I know some really talented we work with really talented BDRs and they do a fantastic job, but almost never do people go, hey, you sent me an email six months ago and now I'm reaching back out.
• 9:14
  Whereas people all the time go, oh, I did test drive that car six months ago, I'm not ready to buy yet.
• 9:19
  But actually I liked it so much, six months later I come back and that's the benefit of building a brand, is we get it all the time, where someone will send me a DM and ask me a question and they go, I've been following your content for ages.
• 9:31
  And I go, You've never liked to post, I've never seen your name before.
• 9:34
  But they follow it quietly, I can ask a question and then I answer it and we might even have a quick chat.
• 9:40
  And then months later they'll come back to me and say, hey, just following up here, I continue to read your content because you're always in their mind because they're seeing your content all the time.
• 9:50
  And so from a leverage perspective, content is, I think, one of the best levers you can pull because suddenly you're putting a small amount of time in on a daily basis, right?
• 10:00
  Want to create content, one to post content and want to be active because it's a media platform or it's a social media platform and that little amount of time that you do consistently at the end of the day adds up to huge, huge changes.
• 10:14
  It makes me think of a research I read about people who are on LinkedIn that there's 1% who actually publishes content there.
• 10:22
  There's about 9% to 10% who is active.
• 10:25
  So they are logging in very actively, they are liking, they are commenting, etc.
• 10:29
  And there's 90% who are they call them the Lurker, so they are continuous.
• 10:34
  They're also a lot on LinkedIn, but not very active in interacting.
• 10:37
  The example that you just gave is something that really resonates a lot with me because I've seen it so often where you think indeed, like, hey, someone you never saw before, but they have seen so much of your content already and without you noticing you are already building that relationship.
• 10:53
  Yeah, 100%.
• 10:55
  And I love it because people get back in touch.
• 10:58
  I haven't spoken to for years, hey, I've been following your content for months, it's really good.
• 11:03
  Or I implemented this strategy and it worked.
• 11:05
  And that's great because there's a nice little dopamine hit there.
• 11:08
  You feel that you're helping someone.
• 11:10
  But the thing that I love about social is offer free value and you will get value back.
• 11:17
  And the more I get sort of entrenched in business, I realize that you are just hunting for win wins all the time.
• 11:23
  How can I provide value to you at no cost?
• 11:26
  How can I just be helpful and then later on value will come back to me?
• 11:30
  The problem with doing that on a one to one ratio is it might not come back to me quickly enough.
• 11:35
  Right?
• 11:35
  Or maybe I need a deal this quarter and you're not able to help me now.
• 11:38
  I've just expended effort helping you.
• 11:41
  The great thing about Social is because of that leverage model, because I'm able to help hopefully thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, some percentage of those will also want to come and help me and monetize whatever we're building and that there is such a fantastic model to generate win wins at scale.
• 12:00
  Yeah, I think that's the beauty of social.
• 12:01
  It's a lot about giving and then afterwards receiving as well.
• 12:05
  Yeah.
• 12:05
  And look, the thing is there's a few ways to gain attention but the two major ones are be interesting.
• 12:12
  But I find that's shortfall, right.
• 12:14
  You get lots of these sort of quasi celebrities who are maybe a bit annoying and people like watching them for a bit and then they just drop off because at some point it just gets boring or continually provide value there's.
• 12:27
  The reason that these amazing podcasts stick around is because if you listen every week and you go oh I really got something for that podcast, you are more likely to continue to listen.
• 12:36
  Right?
• 12:36
  And that's why Joe Rogan got to sign his 200 million dollar Spotify contract because he's continually providing value of some sort, whether that's entertainment, insightfulness, learning, whatever it is.
• 12:47
  And so my advice to people on Social is be as either entertaining or insightful or teach people or help people provide whatever value you can provide.
• 12:57
  Find your voice and over time you'll build an audience that's very sort of committed to you and then worry about monetizing it.
• 13:04
  I think people far too often jump to the end when actually they just need to focus on the first bit.
• 13:10
  Yeah, I think find your voice is crucial because then you become authentic and that's where you build the relationships eventually.
• 13:16
  I was just thinking, what kind of role do you see for Social selling within the channel?
• 13:21
  Because we've been giving a lot of examples now for a lot of direct sales and we also have a direct sales team ourselves here, of course, but how could we leverage that maybe more in a channel surrounding sure.
• 13:32
  So I think the first thing to understand about the channel is the channel is a direct organization.
• 13:37
  Just done at scale, the channel should work exactly the same way as a direct organization.
• 13:43
  But instead of having a team of ten salespeople, you can have a team of thousands.
• 13:46
  Right now there's a lot of work in managing a thousand people versus managing ten people.
• 13:51
  And so you've got to put systems and processes in place to manage thousands of people.
• 13:56
  But effectively you're getting that growth lever of a thousand versus ten.
• 14:00
  And so you should approach social selling the same way.
• 14:02
  How can you educate partners to social sell effectively, how can you social sell to help partners?
• 14:09
  And those are the two sort of areas that I would focus on.
• 14:12
  How can we get people to social sell to end-users effectively?
• 14:16
  That direct organization, but you're getting the benefit because the revenue is going to flow up.
• 14:21
  Or how can you social sell to partners to give them information about your product or information around how to sell your product more effectively, information on how to win, tying into you, keeping them interested, keeping them entertained, keeping your product front of mind.
• 14:36
  That second piece is very interesting because indeed we've spoken a lot about how important partner mind share is.
• 14:42
  So making sure that you are top of mind that if they talk to an end-user, they start talking about you.
• 14:47
  And if you or your channel team are already very active with social selling, you continuously come on the timeline of all your partners.
• 14:54
  So the partner mind share on top of mind is really increasing in such a way.
• 14:58
  Yeah, there's a guy, I apologize if I get his name wrong, I think his name is Tom Ashcroft on LinkedIn and he just shares Microsoft tips and he's built a huge following around how to deploy Microsoft teams effectively and how to manage it.
• 15:11
  And he just built an amazing ecosystem in the channel space because partners were going, oh, I didn't know that.
• 15:18
  And it was just his volume, he'd share a tip every single day and suddenly that put Microsoft front of mind, suddenly that put his consultancy business front of mind because he's then the expert.
• 15:28
  But you can understand that that just starts with I'm just providing value and from there we can then work out how to do it more effectively.
• 15:36
  But partner mindshare is critical.
• 15:39
  And so if you're entertaining or if you're providing insights on a daily basis and people go oh yeah, they're going to feel more confident to spec your product or they're going to feel more confident to come and ask you a question if they're stuck.
• 15:52
  And I think for most of our listeners, their competitors are not doing social selling.
• 15:56
  So if you are very active there and you show there that you have the right value towards your partners, then that's a very big differentiator in your channel strategy.
• 16:05
  Yeah.
• 16:05
  My advice to anyone is start today because if you're not doing it in two to three to five years time, this will be the norm.
• 16:13
  Everyone will be doing it.
• 16:14
  And then we're going to have to find a new way to differentiate ourselves.
• 16:19
  Right now is the time to start and provide value.
• 16:22
  Because in two years time, once you've built a really good audience, that's going to change your life as an individual, but also the business's success.
• 16:29
  Because suddenly you've got this audience that you can drive in a certain way, you can help them, you can provide more value.
• 16:35
  And that will be the key differentiator between you and your competitors.
• 16:40
  And I think there really starts with showing the right example with your channel or partnerships team so your partners will see that you get more and more active and that will have an effect on the top of mind.
• 16:51
  And then the second piece is how can you leverage your partners and work together there that they will start social selling?
• 16:58
  Because that's where it gets very interesting with what you just said.
• 17:01
  You don't have ten sales people, you have 1000.
• 17:04
  What if you could actually activate those 1000 salespeople with social selling and you start going to market together?
• 17:11
  Yes, it's harder than in a direct organization, but if you figure it out, the effect is enormous.
• 17:18
  Yeah, and I think that's always the thing.
• 17:19
  Whenever I speak to people who are interested in building partnerships or interested in building channel, the first thing I tell you is it's more difficult, but the upside is much bigger.
• 17:29
  And that is the way of leverage.
• 17:30
  It's always more difficult to do something that's high leverage, but the upside outweighs the amount of effort that goes in.
• 17:36
  If you get it right, it really goes right.
• 17:38
  And so, yeah, if we could, as Channext, rather than having six people doing social selling, have 600, we'd take that bet every single day.
• 17:47
  But we don't have a channel team to be able to do that.
• 17:49
  Vendors do.
• 17:50
  And so there's two key ways that you should tackle the profile to go and get partners.
• 17:56
  First, find partners who already social sell and target those.
• 18:00
  Second, educate partners on why social selling is important and how to do it effectively.
• 18:04
  Do those two things and suddenly you can scale the amount of content that you're delivering through social media.
• 18:11
  Yeah, that first point is an interesting one.
• 18:13
  What I also see in a lot of hiring strategies nowadays with companies is instead of social selling is a big part for many companies.
• 18:21
  But instead of training everyone from the start, they're already looking for specific people who are already active on social media.
• 18:30
  And you could do the same thing with partners.
• 18:32
  You can literally look into which partners are already very active on LinkedIn and try to target those to get them into your partner program.
• 18:40
  Yes, it's one of my favorite ever stories of sort of how social works and how amazing it can be.
• 18:46
  There's an Instagram page called House of Highlights and it shares like, basketball content.
• 18:50
  And the guy sold it to ESPN and now works for ESPN because it was a CV.
• 18:57
  That's what it was.
• 18:57
  They were like, well, why should you work for ESPN?
• 19:00
  Well, I got 10 million followers and this is how dedicated I am to what I do.
• 19:05
  Your LinkedIn is a living CV, so it can help you and people absolutely are going to hire.
• 19:11
  So be active, be helpful on LinkedIn.
• 19:15
  It's going to help you in your career.
• 19:17
  That's the whole give value now, get value later.
• 19:21
  I also got a tip for our listeners.
• 19:23
  If you want to find out which partners are active in LinkedIn Sales Navigators, you can research companies and then find all the employees that have posted in the last week, for example.
• 19:34
  And in such a way you can quickly scroll through whether there are many people active or only one, et cetera.
• 19:40
  And it can help you a little bit when you are targeting new partners.
• 19:43
  Yeah.
• 19:44
  And the nice thing is, if you target partners who are pro social selling and you come to them and say, we've got a social selling strategy, here's how we're going to help you, they're going to be like, yeah, fantastic.
• 19:53
  Because people are always looking to increase the scale, increase the efficiency of their activities, and so they're looking for like minded people.
• 20:02
  And FYI, the people who are active on social, they're social creatures, right?
• 20:06
  That's the idea.
• 20:07
  They like to network, they like to discuss these things.
• 20:10
  And so, yeah, you're going to find a great amount of synergy with them.
• 20:14
  And so target those people first because that's your low hanging fruit.
• 20:18
  Yeah.
• 20:19
  And I think the second piece in what you said is about education around it.
• 20:22
  And then we've seen multiple customers launch a social selling program for their channel partners in the last year.
• 20:29
  Where would you start?
• 20:30
  Let's say some of our listeners are thinking about, I want to start social selling together with my partners.
• 20:36
  How would you start building that social selling program?
• 20:39
  So I'd split that into three processes.
• 20:42
  So the first process would be educate them on why social sales is powerful.
• 20:46
  Send them this podcast.
• 20:47
  I'm sure we've done a great job.
• 20:49
  But first you want to get them to understand why social selling works and how it can increase the partner's revenue.
• 20:55
  Put the partner first in that story.
• 20:58
  Once they're bought into social sales is powerful.
• 21:01
  The second step is you've got to educate them on how to do it.
• 21:04
  Right.
• 21:04
  Now, there's two ways you can do that.
• 21:07
  One, you can provide all the content for them and make their life really, really easily.
• 21:11
  Ideally, automate that entire process so there's very little heavy lifting from that side.
• 21:16
  That's a good place to start.
• 21:18
  And then the second is give them social selling courses, right?
• 21:22
  Get them to understand how to be successful.
• 21:25
  And if you do both of those things well, then they're going to be able to distribute your content very, very effectively and automatically.
• 21:32
  But also they're going to be able to put their own unique spin on any of the content you provide.
• 21:37
  And if you get those two things right, suddenly you've not just got the low hanging fruit of the existing partners who know how to social sell, but you've got people bought into the power of social sales.
• 21:47
  And they're going to primarily be talking about your products and your brand, because you're the one who's distributing content to you.
• 21:55
  And I think if you start with that why, then you really show them what impact it can make on their revenue growth and the growth of their business.
• 22:02
  And once you have that imprinted in their minds, then you can indeed really start building on okay, but what's needed to excel at social selling?
• 22:09
  And I think what I like what you said is that education part and the courses, so to say, we've seen multiple customers give multiple workshops around specific things within LinkedIn.
• 22:19
  So one workshop can be completely about how to create the ultimate LinkedIn profile.
• 22:23
  The other one can create how.
• 22:25
  It can be about how you create good content or how you expand your network and connect with new people or how do you write good comments or why is it so important to do so.
• 22:35
  And by doing that, you go like layer and layer deeper where you really teach or educate your partners on how to excel at social selling.
• 22:43
  Yeah, and if anyone in the channel has any specific questions, definitely shoot me a LinkedIn DM.
• 22:48
  And we get them all the time around how to build social selling programs.
• 22:51
  But absolutely, I know it's a passion of ours because we really think it's going to be the key differentiator that allows people to make rapid accelerations both in terms of their own career progression, but also rapid acceleration against their competitors.
• 23:06
  Yeah, I agree there.
• 23:08
  And I think when I think about it, then you have where you see that partner, then you have the why.
• 23:12
  You have the how.
• 23:13
  But then still the partners are always lacking time and resources.
• 23:16
  And that's as well, where you need to think about what can you do to enable your partners to start with social selling and to start publishing content there.
• 23:25
  And what I've seen a lot is that in that content creation piece there's a lot to win because usually there's no one who can talk better about your specific product or solution for an end-user than you as a vendor.
• 23:38
  So if you provide your partners with the right content, that's easy to co brand for them that's easy to edit, to add their own tone of voice, et cetera.
• 23:46
  Then you start giving them more leverage indeed where they can actually utilize that content and share it with their network.
• 23:53
  Yeah, 100%.
• 23:54
  One of the things that I see vendors do really well is they'll share a really big win and they'll discuss like, oh we just closed this customer and here's why it was so good and here's how we radically improved this end-user's life.
• 24:07
  And then you just are able to share that through everyone's social medias.
• 24:12
  And what people will do is then put their own unique spin on that article.
• 24:16
  Oh, this is great.
• 24:17
  Maybe this should also work in the finance vertical and not just healthcare or we'd love to see how this feature did this and how it changed this.
• 24:25
  And suddenly you've got your message being cascaded but you've given everyone the opportunity to add their own unique spin on it which makes the content creator's life easier because sometimes you can get writing block and you think, oh my God, what am I going to post about today?
• 24:39
  But also you've cascaded a really, really strong win for your brand that's going to drive the mindset into two types of people.
• 24:47
  The end-user, because they're going to imagine you in their tech stack and the partner because they're going to imagine closing that deal themselves.
• 24:54
  And that's great because you're getting mind sharing two key people in your channel.
• 24:59
  And the feedback I got from a lot of partners, what they absolutely love is that it both activates their existing network so they get recurring revenue and people who come back to buy things with them, but they also expand into net new customers.
• 25:13
  And that's what partners love.
• 25:13
  Of course.
• 25:14
  Yeah.
• 25:15
  Look, the partner is just as selfish as we all are, right?
• 25:18
  They want to grow their base.
• 25:18
  They want to sell more.
• 25:20
  They want an easier life.
• 25:21
  Social sales is just as powerful for me and you, Rick as it is for the vendor as it is for the partner.
• 25:25
  And so what they want is the most effective way to get there.
• 25:29
  And automating content is a huge first step.
• 25:32
  Telling them how to be successful and teaching them and coaching them through that is the great second step.
• 25:37
  And if you can bundle those two pieces really, really tightly and then do it at scale, you're guaranteed to succeed.
• 25:45
  Yeah, I agree there.
• 25:46
  And I think what do you think from their perspective?
• 25:49
  In what role is there for automation?
• 25:50
  What should you automate within social selling.
• 25:53
  And whatnot you almost want to automate as much as you possibly can, right?
• 25:57
  Because you want to not have people in charge of creating content if they're not able to do it effectively.
• 26:05
  Now, there's always going to be the 1% who are fantastic and frankly, leave them to it and they're going to do it without you.
• 26:10
  But for most other people.
• 26:12
  They just want to be able to put a bit of flavor into something that's already created.
• 26:17
  So don't leave people responsible for creating reams and reams of content because unless that's really part of their day job, they're going to struggle.
• 26:26
  So automate that bit and then let people put a barrier around it or put their own unique voice on how to take that to market because they know how to do that bit the best.
• 26:35
  So you're all playing to your own strength.
• 26:37
  The vendor is creating the content that they live and breathe and the partner and the individual social seller is using their language and their voice to then communicate it to their audience.
• 26:48
  I think what's interesting there as well is what I hear a lot from vendors sometimes that they worry about, does my partner have enough followers on their company profile, for example?
• 26:57
  But that's why it's so crucial to actually start working on that with the salespeople or the owners, for example, of your partners, because they usually have a massive personal network, right?
• 27:07
  Well, yeah, it's really funny you don't realize this, but over years of working through LinkedIn, you've actually garnered your perfect connections.
• 27:16
  So if I look at all of my connections, well, they're all channel people because I've spent my entire life working in the channel.
• 27:21
  And so that then means that when I want to talk about something channel orientated, I get a great amount of feedback.
• 27:26
  If I want to talk about, I don't know, astronauts well, I don't know any Astronauts, so I've got a terrible audience for that.
• 27:32
  That's why creating content and distributing it to salespeople, well, who are their connections and users either existing or potential.
• 27:40
  And that's great because you're going to take your content to exactly the type of viewers that you want to see.
• 27:46
  And that's why social media ultimately is going to be the most powerful form of marketing.
• 27:50
  And it really is, right?
• 27:51
  Because if you look at Meta and Facebook and all these businesses, the reason they're so highly valued is because that's what they are.
• 27:58
  They're marketing engines through social media.
• 28:00
  They're just getting the top line.
• 28:01
  So yeah, I think now we talked about education of the partners in terms of social selling.
• 28:07
  We talked about content, we talked about automation.
• 28:10
  And then how do you measure whether it's successful?
• 28:13
  Well, the data is critical, right.
• 28:15
  And really the benefit of social is there's really good data available there's the leading measure of how many views are you getting?
• 28:23
  Then you can track like engagement metrics, which will be how many as a percent, how much of people engaging, liking, commenting, sharing?
• 28:31
  If you're hitting about 5%, you're doing pretty well.
• 28:34
  Anything over that, you're doing very, very well.
• 28:36
  And then ultimately you want to see revenue improvements within your partners.
• 28:39
  And I think we're going to do a separate podcast or listening soon around how you really try revenue performance to social but today let's just discuss the leading metrics.
• 28:50
  The ideal situation is that you have some level of automation and data management that allows both the vendor and the partner to be able to see macro data performance, not just on an individual basis, but on a company basis, because then you can really start to a B test the type of content that's doing very well.
• 29:10
  So one of the things that we've seen is that if a hardware product is marketed on its own versus a hardware product that's marketed with Microsoft Teams, accredited the Microsoft Teams one does better.
• 29:21
  Well, that's really useful information for the vendor and the partner and all the social sellers within the partner to know because they can double down on that content.
• 29:31
  So what you want is that two way data flow, but not just data analysis so that you can improve over time.
• 29:38
  The only caveat I'd put in there is don't overthink it.
• 29:42
  I see people get sort of analysis paralysis all the time and they're planning the perfect content and blah, blah, blah.
• 29:48
  Just get your first post out, get into the cadence of posting.
• 29:52
  Alex Hormone talks about this all the time.
• 29:54
  Content is like going to the gym.
• 29:56
  I can't tell you which day you'll get fit, but I can tell you if you go every day, after enough time, you will get fit.
• 30:02
  So just worry about posting initially and then as you get further into the process, you can really start to optimize from there.
• 30:09
  Yeah, that's definitely with social selling, you just have to start.
• 30:13
  And that's the same message to your partner, like don't overthink it.
• 30:17
  Indeed.
• 30:17
  Because we're always worried, like, what would people think about what we're posting, et cetera.
• 30:22
  But starting is what it's all about because then you start building the data both on the macro level.
• 30:27
  I think that's the interesting thing as a vendor, if you do it with many, many partners, you have a whole load of networks that you can analyze actually, but at the same time also on the micro level where you can help specific partners in optimization, et cetera.
• 30:41
  But just get started.
• 30:42
  We have a whole bunch of partner people in my team and it's funny, I always give new sales people the same message every time they start, which is your first call is going to be terrible, your next call is going to be terrible.
• 30:56
  And that's okay because the whole point is it's a process of development.
• 31:00
  So don't overthink your first post, don't overthink your second post.
• 31:03
  Just get posting and after a while you just get better.
• 31:07
  There's no, oh, my first post has to be excellent.
• 31:09
  Well, the benefit of social is if it's not excellent, it doesn't reach a whole bunch of people, which means no one saw it anyway.
• 31:14
  So just keep posting and after a while you will get better because it's a skill.
• 31:19
  And so, yeah, my advice to everyone individual partner and vendor.
• 31:24
  Have a real thought around how do we build a social selling strategy and then really implement it and optimize.
• 31:32
  Absolutely.
• 31:32
  But don't worry about optimizing day One don't worry about Optimizing day 30 just continue to go and after a while you'll really get into the flow and that's when you start to become one of those top one percenters.
• 31:43
  Because then they've put repetition and optimization together and that ultimately leads to the greatest output.
• 31:49
  Yeah, I think really build it as you go there.
• 31:52
  I think.
• 31:52
  To summarize for our listeners for today, if you are thinking about actually building that social selling program, then it starts with education.
• 32:00
  Then you need good content to enable your partners with It automation and then data to measure what's working and continuously optimize.
• 32:09
  And if you get those four pillars right, you're off to a really good start to do social selling with your partners.
• 32:14
  If you enjoyed listening today, make sure to follow us and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode.
• 32:20
  Do you have any questions or ideas for topics we should discuss?
• 32:24
  Send the DM on LinkedIn to Alex Whitford or Rick van den Bosch.
• 32:28
  We love to chat about partnership with you and for you.