David Fisher [00:00:00]:
It used to be, hey, let’s work on cold calling. Let’s work on email automation. Hey, by the way, you should post on LinkedIn sometime. And that was it, versus, I would make the argument that we live in a multichannel world. We live in a world where the phone is still important, email is important, in person, events are important, and social is important and is just as valid as any of those. And the more you look at using social, whether it’s LinkedIn or other platforms, as one of your channels, that’s just as important. It then starts to get the attention and the value it deserves. And then you start going, hey, we need to run that training on it.
Heather Cole [00:00:39]:
This is Go-to-Market Magic, the show where we talk to go to market leaders and visionaries about those”aha!” moments they’ve experienced and also the pivotal decisions that they’ve made, all in the name of growth.
Steve Watt [00:00:50]:
And we don’t just mean revenue growth that goes up and to the right.
Heather Cole [00:00:54]:
But that’s nice too.
Steve Watt [00:00:55]:
We’re talking about how they improve their teams, their industries, their careers and their lives, because growth isn’t quite what it used to be.
Heather Cole [00:01:03]:
I’m Heather Cole.
Steve Watt [00:01:04]:
And I’m Steve Watt.
Heather Cole [00:01:05]:
Let’s uncover some of the magic that makes it happen. So, Steve, who are we talking to today?
Steve Watt [00:01:14]:
We’re talking to David Fisher. He’s Global Head of Social Selling at SAS. That’s a really big company, right? But he’s more than that. He’s an author of multiple books about networking and social selling. He’s a speaker. He spent many years as a consultant working with organizations around the world. He’s an absolute wealth of knowledge and insight into what it really takes to build a social selling program. And something that makes him so interesting, I think, is he has a different perspective from a lot of what you see and hear on LinkedIn. He comes at it from a perspective of how do you build an enterprise grade program, not just how do you, as an individual thrive on social.
Heather Cole [00:02:03]:
That’s great. You know, I read his posts all the time on LinkedIn and I can’t wait to have this conversation.
Steve Watt [00:02:14]:
David Fisher, welcome. Your friends call you D? I consider myself a friend. So, D, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here with us.
David Fisher [00:02:23]:
Dude, stoked. I’m ready. Let’s do this. I’m really excited for this conversation. Yeah, that’s great.
Heather Cole [00:02:27]:
So we start off with a lightning round question. They’re really quick questions with quick answers. So the first one is, looking back, what role really shaped you in ways that you didn’t expect?
David Fisher [00:02:37]:
I’ll go old school. My first job delivering the morning newspaper at twelve years old. Everything I’ve done since then has gone back to the discipline I developed having to deliver the newspaper every morning at 04:00 a.m.
Heather Cole [00:02:49]:
You’re really dating yourself there. Back when there were newspapers, you mean?
David Fisher [00:02:54]:
Yeah, I know I look like I’m only 27, but there’s a little gray here.
Heather Cole [00:02:58]:
So again, a look back question. What manager or mentor from your past really had the biggest impact on you, and why?
David Fisher [00:03:04]:
A gentleman named Marty Dimitrovich at a sales job selling Cutco cutlery. It was an in home direct sales job. Marty had worked his way up into being basically a regional president and part owner of the company. Very, very successful at that point. I was 19 when I met him. Probably one of the wealthiest people I’d ever met up to that point. And you would never know it. Just absolute humility. I remember saying, hey, I started an office. I was like, the money’s tight. I’d love to do some painting, and I don’t have money for it. He’s like, you go take care of it. I’ll take care of the bills. Just the knowledge that you could be very successful and humble like that, it was actually the road to success was really impactful.
Steve Watt [00:03:41]:
All right, let’s get into the main body of what we’re here to talk about. We’re here to talk about social selling. And not just how an individual is successful as a social seller, but more importantly, how you build a high impact program in a mid size or where you are in quite a large company. You joined sales, what, about a year ago, or a little less than that, and you’re really tasked with little less. And you’re tasked with really building a social selling program inside a really large sales team. And that’s a hard job. I know you’ve got tons of experience in this space. You’ve done a lot of training and consulting in other companies. You’ve written a whole slew of books about this stuff. But I think you’ve been there long enough now that we’re going to get some real good stories from you about what’s working, maybe what’s harder than you expected, what’s different from what you expected. I am really looking forward to this conversation. You ready for it? You good for it.
David Fisher [00:04:44]:
Let’s do this. You and I always are talking anyways on LinkedIn. Now, I get to do it real time. It’s awesome.
Steve Watt [00:04:50]:
Yeah. Well, speaking of LinkedIn, as I was prepping for this, what do I ask you here? And I started reading a bunch of rereading, a bunch of your LinkedIn posts, because the reality is I read your stuff every day, but I started rereading and I grabbed a few of them that I kind of want to feed back to you and ask you to elaborate on them. Okay. I think it’s going to be a good way to drive this conversation. A little while back, you said, “most people have about 250 people they need to influence. Everything beyond that is bonus. They don’t need huge reach. They need relevant and targeted enablement. They need the right people to see them.” And in a world where most LinkedIn gurus or whatever are telling you how to build this massive following and go viral and all this. You’re coming at it in a really different direction. Tell us why.
David Fisher [00:05:40]:
The idea that we need large reach and that we need to have a huge audience is really predicated on the idea that we have an offering that is very transactional. And it’s actually why the LinkedIn gurus often say this, right? Because they’re trying to get people to buy their course, try to buy their book, come by my online community and numbers matter for those individuals. And that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. But you mentioned I had 17 years of running my own consultancy, working with organizations big and small, one or two person consulting firms, up to some of the largest companies in the world. And what I really realized is for sellers, they don’t need to have thousands and thousands of connections and followers and huge reach for their posts. Most sellers have hey, if they can get a handful of deals a year, maybe a little bigger than a handful depending on their product and their solution, that’s a win. Some sellers, if they get one good deal a year, they paid the bills and then some. And so that’s why I do think this idea of having to have broad reach, there’s value in it. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to pursue for most sellers. For most people who are trying to do work on LinkedIn, it’s just that next level. That’s not even the second level of connection. As a LinkedIn, it’s like the 250 or so first level of connections that maybe you don’t know really well, but you kind of know those are the prospects, those are the customers, those are the people that you have to be in front of. Some sellers, if they get people that you have to influence. If you had a different approach than hey, why don’t you have 15,000 followers? It’s like get 1,000 followers and make sure that they’re the right people, the ones that you can move business forward with.
Heather Cole [00:07:21]:
I think that’s refreshing and I think it takes a lot of pressure off some of the folks that are in sales that are saying how do I do this? I don’t have this huge following. But I do have people who know me and I have people that are in my network.
Steve Watt [00:07:33]:
Yeah, it also I think it gets at something that you and I have talked about dee a few times is the idea that sometimes the most important people that you’re reaching are not publicly engaging. It’s those people who are lurking, those people who are reading. They’re connecting the dots between the topics you’re writing about, the content you’re sharing and the problems and opportunities they have in their business. And then when they’re ready, they know exactly who they want to talk to and they come into you as super high intent demand. But I think a lot of sellers, they lose their enthusiasm for it because they’re not getting massive engagement along the way. And that’s a real shame. I think you’ve reminded people of that a lot, haven’t you?
David Fisher [00:08:19]:
Yeah, I mean, it gets back to that idea of setting expectations for why they’re on social in the first place. And a lot of this stems from, I think, the beginnings of social media, whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, where you could get big reach, you could get people’s attention, maybe even those higher ups, if you’re in a sales role, like getting that CEO to pay attention to you on Twitter. But those expectations, I think, especially as the platforms have matured and evolved, are incorrect. They haven’t been reset. Even when we think about building a program, you’re not trying to get a bunch of people who are social media superstars. You’re trying to get people to be comfortable engaging with that network that they would have 20 or 30 years ago. They would have engaged at events, at conferences, industry trade shows throughout the year. Now they just have a place to connect with those people more regularly in the digital space. So, yeah, it is a different approach and I do hope it makes it more comfortable for people that they don’t have to become this social media guru to be successful. They just have to show up regularly and people will hear it, they will pay attention.
Steve Watt [00:09:29]:
Right on. All right, let’s shift into more the programmatic side of it like building a program within a large firm. So here’s the second of your posts that I’m going to read. Now, this one I condensed a little bit, but essentially you said individual social selling success is not the same as developing a successful selling program. A program is an interconnected web of sellers, marketers executives, engineers, developers, the rest of the whole company. It reminds me of the saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. My goal, you continued my goal in leading our social selling program at sales isn’t to have a few rockstars, it’s to empower all of our team to connect with their prospects, their partners, their customers more effectively. So tell us what the difference is here. This is a point you often make, is that it’s much different building a program at scale. So let’s dig into that to you and ask you to what it takes.
David Fisher [00:10:29]:
To become an individual has a strong brand, is promoting themselves and out there creating content easily. Maybe they have some familiarity and comfort with doing that in the first place. There is no team to check in with. Right. I want to post this. I want to post that. I mean, I go back to myself in my time as an independent consultant. I just like, hey, here’s my brand initiatives for this year because I said so in this meeting that I had with me and the voices in my head. And this is what I want to say I’m going to go for it now by the way, there’s strength in that, right? The idea of going fast, there’s value in being able to not have to work with anybody and be that lone wolf so to speak. But you also can only go so far. And so what I think programmatically you’re trying to do, I talk a lot about aligning incentives and the reality is the bigger an organization gets, the more people are involved and different incentives. The sellers are like hey, I’m trying to close business marketers are trying to build brand or try to maybe move a certain initiative forward, get leads right, be in more of the demand gen space. The Ops team is trying to track all this. Your product team or engineering team is just trying to make stuff. Your executives are looking three years down the line what’s happening in the broader business place and also like the larger environment for you to really be successful in that world. I really see often my role as being the bridge builder. I want to talk to the sellers, talk to the marketers, talk to product people, what’s coming along, enablement, all of these different functions. They have a place at the table for social selling which a lot of times people think oh, social selling is we’re going to post that we have a new product. And something that you’ve shared a lot in your work Steve is that that doesn’t work. We really have to empower our people and to do that, we have to do that communicating that is easier said than done, right? Just because there is so much going on. So that’s why I often say, like, hey, if you want to get a program going where you’re moving a good chunk of your sellers forward, it’s not only about saying I know we’ve talked about in previous conversations, the mindset, skillset and tool set. But building the mindset, skill set and tool set of all of your team members in the broader context of all of these different needs and incentives throughout the organization. And that is not necessarily like a check the box answer but that is what you need to be thinking about if you want to really be successful. I feel in not only the social selling but the modern selling environment. That’s what it takes.
Heather Cole [00:12:52]:
On that note about how do you get them to do it and you mentioned enablement. We talk to a lot of enablement, leaders and practitioners here on Go-to-Market Magic. And this is part of something that there’s the core skillset and behaviors that they want to really reinforce. And they see this engagement like they really focus on how well do they present? How well do they cold call? How well can they engage in all of these ways? But we see social selling as something that they leave somewhat up to chance. They might give them a little bit of information in many companies, but they don’t really focus on it. Are you working heavily with your enablement organization? Do you see yourself as an enabler? How are you working with that group to make sure that you are driving this as a really important skill set and something that needs to be a focus?
David Fisher [00:13:38]:
Yeah, I actually am part of our enablement function. So there you go. We’re enablement. I work closely with our readiness people. But you get to something I think that’s really important. You said this in a way just kind of offhandedly because it is so offhand, it’s left up to chance so many organizations that it’s slowly changing, but it’s evolving. I think we at sales are doing a pretty good job at this. But it used to be, hey, let’s work on cold calling. Let’s work out email automation. Hey, by the way, you should post on LinkedIn sometime. And that was it. Versus I would make the argument that we live in a multichannel world. We live in a world where the phone is still important, email is important in person, events are important and social is important and it’s just as valid as any of those. And the more you look at using Social, whether it’s LinkedIn or other platforms as one of your channels, that’s just as important. It then starts to get the attention and the value it deserves and then you start going, hey, we need to run that training on it. Hey, it’s not enough for us to just do the tools right. We say mindset, skills, that tool set. We can’t just buy a sales navigator license and tell them to figure out we’re going to enable our sellers. One thing I found, not only in our organization, but in many, is sellers know that the world has changed. They get the frustration of trying to get somebody on the phone, right? Oh wait, you want me to make more calls? Great. But we got to your point. The nail improvement piece has to be there to support them. They want it deserves and then you start going for it. We have to give them that support. We have to give them the assets, the resources, the training, the coaching, all those things. That really it’s a change management issue. Not just, here’s a webinar, figure it out.
Steve Watt [00:15:13]:
What do you say to the seller who says, I don’t have time for this? Or perhaps to the sales leader who says, my people don’t have time for this?
David Fisher [00:15:21]:
If their pipeline is awesome and they’re cranking huge growth, cool. Go for it. Don’t talk to me. But there’s very few sellers I’ve met who are like and sales leaders are like, man, we’re just crushing it. We just don’t have time because we’re just too busy writing a business. So what I say is, okay, do you want to increase pipeline generation? Do you want to improve win loss ratios? Do you want to move order size and deal size up. Do you want to decelerate or I should say shorten the sales cycle, accelerate the lead to cash? All of a sudden they start going, yeah, I want that, I want that. And you go, okay, can I have a little bit of your attention now? And that’s really all it takes is putting it in the terms that are relevant and important to them. I do think one of the things that is a bit of an albatross around the neck of social selling is that very naturally over the last 15 years it came out of marketing, right? So a lot of the social selling programs were run by marketers. And I love marketers hang out with many of them. But it’s easy for the sellers to discount and dismiss marketers because they just heard, hey, post this because it’s going to help us as a marketer, the more you can go, what do you need to accomplish? Oh, you need to connect deeper into accounts and multi threats so you’re reducing churn. Okay, great. So let’s look now at sales Navigator allows you to connect with and uncover the right people to talk to not only your existing points of contact, but broader ones. Hey, you’re having to do a sort of objections to even get meetings. Hey, let’s look at how posting content around those objections can help to handle those objections beforehand. When you do that, sellers and sales leaders are like, cool, I got the time right? But we have to speak in terms that are relevant to them. We talked about incentives before. The more you talk into somebody’s incentives, the more they’re going to listen. And in the past I think that didn’t happen.
Steve Watt [00:17:16]:
You mentioned a lot of different groups that you have to be a bridge builder between. I’ve got to imagine that in a firm the size of yours, there’s a lot of different measurement philosophies, a lot of different people in different groups value different metrics and somehow you’ve got to bridge that. How do you deal with perhaps revenue leaders who want to see this social selling payoff in revenue really quickly, marketing leaders who maybe care more about content consumption and referred traffic to the website, perhaps rev Ops, who cares a lot about attribution and everybody incentives before wanting this program to serve their metrics. How do you deal with that, by the way?
David Fisher [00:18:01]:
It doesn’t take a large organization to have that happen, right? You could imagine a 10% or 20% organization with somebody with each of those hats going, hey, I need this, I need this. Here’s what I would say with measurement. And I actually think that it is so important to measure results and to be able to get baselines and go, hey, is what we’re doing moving the needle on these? I do think that one of the important roles that somebody like myself can fill is the there’s an education piece right. And I think that what’s interesting still to this day. And Steve, you might encounter this. We could go on LinkedIn right now and ask, define social selling. What is social selling? If we ask that to ten people, we’re going to get eleven answers. So I do think that there’s an education piece not only about reporting, but just, hey, here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we can do. By the way, here’s what we can do, right? We’re not ecommerce. We’re not trying to get somebody to see our post and sign up for a contract right away. And maybe in some companies and organizations that’s appropriate. Great, well then social selling is defined differently in yours. So I do think that the social selling function, part of it is creating that understanding in the organization what it is, what we can do. And then within that going, okay, based on what we can do, how do we support, as you pointed, rev ops or the CRO or the marketing team and going, okay, where are the places that we can align to what you need? Also sometimes saying, hey, we can’t do that, or hey, maybe these are two conflicting goals that we have. Let’s figure out who wins. That’s when you start going up the organization and go, okay, if CEO says it, that’s it. And then you got to kind of, again, fit in with the larger, the broader needs of the organization. And one thing I do always tell people as well is to focus on both the quantitative and qualitative goals. I think we’ve seen this over the last, let’s say ten or 15 years where marketing has become very numbers driven and so therefore social some became very numbers driven. I think that’s great. I think it’s good looking at some of the numbers. But you and I both know dark social is big. It’s mentioned those lurkers, those people who are just reading all the time, you’re setting up the trust and the brand within their minds, but you would never know it. They don’t show up on any number, but it’s just as valuable. So be able to have those stories. That’s why I say the qualitative being able to have both, hey, we helped Pipeline improve this much. But let me tell you a story about how we got in front of a CEO at Company XYZ because of the posting we did. And those are both relevant. But go back to the idea of communicating. There’s a lot of talking to people. Some of them say, hey, we can do that. Let’s look at the art of the possible. And then also being the one who points out and goes, hey, I talked to three different leaders and have three different opinions. We’re going to fail, right? If we try to pursue these three disparate goals, let’s talk, who waits on this?
Heather Cole [00:20:46]:
So not in this particular company, because I don’t want to call anybody out, but which organization within do you see being either the most resistant or having the most disparate opinion about what social should be versus what it really is? Is it consistent? Is there people that have in a particular function that tend to have more of either old fashioned or view that doesn’t really align with modern social?
David Fisher [00:21:11]:
Great question. I want to rely more on kind of my experience as an independent consultant, seeing a lot of different organizations. No, it’s not organizational. It’s all mindset. And you can go to an organization that has just a marketing leader or CRO that’s just super forward thinking and really excited about it and gets it and gets the interplay of sales and marketing in the modern world, and then you go to the next organization and the marketing leaders, hey, we’ve done it this way every time. Webinars. All we’re going to do is webinars. Webinars it. Can we use social selling to promote our webinars? We’re just going to do webinars. That’s it. And you’re like, okay. And at that same way, you could find one thing I always find amusing is people are like, veteran salespeople do not adopt social, and they’re not good at it. That, by the way, please don’t take that out of context. That’s what other people say, not me, because it’s not true. I’ve actually seen better in salespeople who are not digital natives who are learning these skills throughout their career. Sometimes they’re just doing an amazing job because they have the business acumen, they have the relationships, they understand the power of building value before they move business forward, and that they’re crushing it. Likewise, you could see that new seller who’s a digital native, but maybe not as conversant in the sales world. So I’m comfortable engaging for us to paint with broad brushstrokes like, oh, this organization is always the problem. It’s not quite true.
Steve Watt [00:22:32]:
Yeah, I’m with you there. It’s about the individuals. It’s about the mindsets. I’ve seen exactly what you said there, Dee, where people will tell me, oh, well, we have a number of older sellers. They won’t take to this, but our younger sellers will. And then as we work with them to build that program, it turns out, no, totally wrong. It’s the inverse of that. It’s that it’s individuals. Some older sellers take to it beautifully, some younger sellers take to it beautifully, and people across all age ranges push back. It’s individuals. I think a lot of do you have a growth mindset? Are you eager to learn new ways of doing things, or are you stuck in your ways? That’s not about your department, and that’s not about your age either. It’s all up here, isn’t it, D?
David Fisher [00:23:14]:
Yes.
Steve Watt [00:23:15]:
All right, let me throw a third one at you here.
David Fisher [00:23:17]:
Oh, yeah, we got a third one. Let’s go. All right.
Steve Watt [00:23:19]:
So you were talking about your house. Now you live in an older home that’s been needing some work, and you posted a little while ago about the “unsexy.” You called it “unsexy” but important repairs you have had to make to your house. And then you paralleled that to building a social selling program and a lot of other business lessons as well. So here’s what you said. We might want to build that fancy home theater, but it’s often the less visible work that ensures our long term success. Teams and organizations, you said, skip over the boring work that will actually keep their business healthy for the long term. That’s what we need to focus on if we want to build real success. What were you getting at with that post? What kind of things are you seeing that we’re overlooking and making a mistake by doing so?
David Fisher [00:24:08]:
So go back to the idea of what is social selling. So for many organizations, the idea would be, oh, we need a social selling program where we can create some content and our sellers will post it on LinkedIn. Yay. And that’s sexy because it’s visible, it can be seen. And by the way, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But what is that unsexy worker? I often call it the underwear projects around the house where it’s like buying underwear, you got to do it, but it’s not fun. And usually you’re not going to show it off. I think for many organizations, it is some of the things we’ve talked about, it’s having meetings together, and often these are just conversations where you’re like, hey, marketing leader. Hey sales leader, tell me what you’re trying to accomplish. What are the pain points that you have and what should we be tracking and doing some of that synthesis, right? And going, okay, now I’m going to talk to this person, this person. Hey, I just heard these three different answers. Let me put it together, then communicate that out. Creating effective dashboards and baselines for the organization, right? Instead of trying to run, walking and crawling first, right? Saying, hey, instead of going, here’s how we’re going to develop this content initiative. Do all of our people have good LinkedIn profiles? How do we help them? Where’s some training or enablement we can supply for just, again, stuff that isn’t always the sexiest. We often don’t think about our LinkedIn profiles at all. See, if you don’t have access conversation on LinkedIn, everything’s based on that, right? So I always tell people that doing your LinkedIn profile, making it customer focused and customer centric, it’s not sexy, but hey, people are going to decide whether or not to interact with you based on it, so you better spend some time there. It’s stuff like that. Hey, let’s have a good content program, or content, I should say content platform. Right? How are we going to communicate between marketing and sales? There’s usually some technical stuff there, for example, that well beyond even my technical knowledge. I’m lucky that we have an amazing Team Tesla. That figures that. Out for me, but where’s the communication links? How is that happening? Those are the things that, again, you keep crawling, then you start walking and then you start running. And again, they’re not exciting, but that’s actually what leads to the success down the line.
Steve Watt [00:26:13]:
As you approach the one year anniversary of joining sales with this big mandate. What’s been harder than you thought it.
David Fisher [00:26:22]:
Was going to be? Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I would own brand is promoting them. It was really harder than I thought it would be because I had some pretty eyes wide open. It was an experience. Again, I had a chance to be exposed to some pretty large organizations. As an outsider, I kind of knew what I was getting into, I think. Not that this was harder than I thought, but what is both an exciting lift but also challenging is having such a large organization. I run the global program and truly understanding the needs of different parts of the organization, different parts of the world. Again, that’s the fun thing about my job is getting to work with the team members throughout the world. And not everybody has to have that extreme of an example to know that when you’re supporting a program. This, again, is going back to the idea of what’s the challenge by it. It’s just not everybody needs the same thing, right. There is not one prescription for success. And maybe this one team needs help with more of that prospecting through Sales Navigator. One part of the team needs help with building brand. Maybe the marketing team needs some support here. And there’s a lot of moving parts. My days are not boring at all.
Heather Cole [00:27:34]:
Steve and I were having this debate at dinner last night and saying, if you were going to start with one particular group, you have to scale this. And you’ve got thousands of sales reps globally. And it’s a big thing to really get your arms around. If you were going to start with one group, who would you start with? And I said, absolutely global enterprise, what place of the table? And Steve said, I’m not so sure about that. I think there’s a lot of traction that you can make initially with your kind of sellers that may have 50 to 100 accounts that they’re working on. So what is your thought process around that? And love to hear what you did and maybe you made incremental movements with everyone. What is it, where do you go and how do you start?
David Fisher [00:28:16]:
You’re both right. I’ll be very diplomatic about it. I do think that one of the places that I started and am continuing to evolve into work in is making sure that everybody has access to that baseline information. Right. So I think there is kind of a level set. Just say, hey, does everybody have access to the basics that they can get to it? And then what I’ve found and this maybe is more particular to a larger organization like us. My focus was finding the champions, finding the people who were bought in, not because I wanted to help accelerate their work, although that’s part of it, but because I knew that they could be the ambassadors. Right. The larger you get to in any organization or any program, I can’t do it all. We have a great social selling program that we’re building and a team we’re building. We literally have thousands of people around the world, and even if you had just had hundreds, you can’t do it all. So finding those people that not only get social selling, but get the impact that it can have on others and are excited about helping other people. Right. Again, I’m sounding like a sales and alien person here. That’s what it is. How do we help others? Because if you’re just one voice, doesn’t matter what team you’re working, there’s not magic in that. It’s, hey, if I can get a couple of champions in each of these organizations, in each of these regions, in each of these, whether it’s enterprise or SMB or whatever it is, that’s where then you start to branch out. Because I do think a program success is not about taking that top tier, and I think it’s really, hey, help. Again, I’m sounding like a sale. It’s kind of the 60% in the middle that, hey, if I could show you how to be a little more efficient, get some more opportunities, hit your number a little easier, a little more quickly, that’s really where it is. And those 60%, yeah, one person can’t do it, three people can’t do it. Ten or 20, 30, that could do it. And so that’s been a big thing for me as my focus on we have something called the Global Social Selling Action Council, where I connected with sales and marketing and people around the globe and was like, hey, let’s work together. That’s been a lot of fun. I think that you got to kind of not get pigeonholed into one group, because at that point, they’ll go, what happens if you went to just Enterprise? Everyone else in the organization goes, oh, yeah, well, they’re special. It’s not going to work for us. You got to kind of share the love a little bit.
Steve Watt [00:30:29]:
D, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really interesting conversation. Continued success as you build this powerful program at sales, and we’ll look forward to connecting with you again.
David Fisher [00:30:40]:
Hey, Steve. Always a pleasure, my friend.
Steve Watt [00:30:46]:
What were your big takeaways from that one?
Heather Cole [00:30:48]:
That was a great conversation. I love it because one of the things that he said know, it’s not about going in there and boiling the ocean and trying to get everybody on board all at once or to make incremental changes or to start with a specific group. I liked that approach at the end where we were talking about how you find your champions. You find the folks that are either doing it well or already bought in and you use them as extend marketing and making sure that those folks are not only engaging with your organization but helping to engage the rest of the field.
Steve Watt [00:31:21]:
Yeah, that’s such a smart point and I mean, it’s vital an organization as large as his, but I think it’s a good lesson for all of us, even in smaller organizations as well. You can’t force this. It’s got to be all carrot, no stick. You can’t force people into social selling because as Dee said, it all starts with mindset. So before you start trying to change a lot of mindsets, find the people who’ve already got that mindset and really enable and empower them and then let them be the examples that starts to pull more and more of their peers in.
Heather Cole [00:31:58]:
And it’s interesting because it really applies to enablement as a whole too. Because you find no matter what you’re rolling out, whether it’s a new methodology or new narrative, any of those things, it’s getting people that already have bought in or getting people to buy in that can then extend the message. And it’s a wonderful reminder of this is the way, no matter what it is, this is the way we need to think about it. If you really want to get further engagement in the field, you can’t do it alone and you can’t inflict it. There has to be somebody saying I want to do that because I see somebody else doing it well and having success.
Steve Watt [00:32:30]:
Yeah, they’re going to want in on it too.
Heather Cole [00:32:31]:
Yes.
Steve Watt [00:32:32]:
Another great point he raised is about finding the stories and sharing the stories. I’ve seen social selling leaders go wrong in a number of cases where they’re so data obsessed that they disregard the importance of the quality of the stories. And sometimes that’s tremendously powerful. You find those stories about the person who’d been trying to break into a particular account for years and never got there and now through social, they’re in a conversation with the CMO or the CRO or the people who found that a champion left one of their customers and brought them into their new employer because of the relationship that they’ve nurtured on social, you start finding and sharing those stories within the firm. That can really help to light up some new people.
Heather Cole [00:33:23]:
Yeah, and it can be finding ways to measure it is one thing, but understanding the qualitative is just so important. Because there are those nuances I love. You talk about it a lot, the lurkers out there that you don’t even know you’re influencing, but they’re out there watching and listening and learning all the time, and they’re learning from you. And that’s something that can’t be measured. But it can be told in stories after the fact.
David Fisher [00:33:48]:
Yeah.
Steve Watt [00:33:48]:
We could do a whole episode on social selling measurement. And I think the big theme would be you can’t measure everything. There are absolutely things you can and should measure, but if you think that that’s going to capture the totality of it, you’re going to miss a lot because those people do, especially people who are high up in senior positions in large firms. They seldom publicly engage. They read, they watch, they learn, they’re connecting the dots, and then they come in as the highest intent demand you have ever seen. And your win rate is high, your sales cycle is short, and you’re like, where did this come from? Well, the reality is you and hopefully your coworkers have been drip nurturing these people for months or more, but you didn’t know it and it doesn’t show up in your data. So I think it’s
Heather Cole [00:34:44]:
And that brings us to the point of do you need tens of thousands of followers? And is the point of a social program to actually build the go to market organization’s followers? Or is it to find the right folks that you want to be talking to, influencing, getting your message out, getting your brand out to? And I love that he talks about get the right people. It’s not about necessarily a numbers game in most B2B.
Steve Watt [00:35:11]:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen sellers lose their way by chasing virality and chasing network growth and losing sight of what they do and who they do it for and why it matters to their customers and their prospects. And they start posting some funny videos or things and they start getting a lot of followers and then that’s all they do. They become like a meme account instead of becoming a professional seller. And I think that was a really good reminder that nothing wrong with having a large network, there’s nothing wrong with having some fun, there’s nothing wrong with purposely growing your network. But don’t lose sight that it’s probably only a few hundred people. Ultimately, you need to be seen and heard and understood by them and that’s what’s going to drive the biggest outcomes for you. Right?
Heather Cole [00:36:03]:
That’s fantastic.
Great conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
Steve Watt [00:36:13]:
And check out gotomarket-magic.com for show notes and resources.
You want more conversations like these, but live and in-person? Join us at Shift. Shift is the annual conference for go-to-market leaders in San Diego. This year it’s October 23-26 and it’s going to be fantastic. Go to seismic.com/shift for registration and more information.
