Episode 218 – Timothy Hughes – Why You Need To Be Famous For Something…
The Science of Social Selling: How to Build Trust and Grow Sales with Tim Hughes Sales and marketing revolve around interacting with people, but simply delivering a pitch often falls short. Instead, conversations are the key to building trust and growing sales, and social selling relies on this approach. By leveraging social media, social selling allows for genuine conversations with potential clients without resorting to spamming. Pitching and automation are often perceived as spam. They trigger a fight-or-flight reaction from customers, not sales and piss them off. In this episode, Tim Hughes will share insights on how to use your presence and behaviour on social media to build influence and make connections that grow relationships and trust, which leads to conversation and commercial interaction. Tim Hughes is universally recognised as the world leading pioneer and innovator of Social Selling. He is currently ranked Number 1 by Onalytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top 8 sales experts globally to follow, and Brand 24 announced recently he was the 16th most influential person in marketing globally, based on measured social media influence. He is also Co-Founder and CEO of DLA Ignite and co-author of the bestselling books Social Selling – Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers – 2nd edition and Smarketing – How To Achieve Competitive Advantage through blended Sales and Marketing. He has recently launched a second edition of social selling – techniques to influence buyers and change-makers, which have been fully updated—all three books published by Kogan Page. Let’s jump in! Key Highlights from the Episode; [00:00] Episode intro, a quick bio of the guest, Tim Hughes [03:30] Why Tim is drinking green tea and different add to tea drinking routine [07:22] The story behind Tim’s ranking as the number in social selling and sales [13:03] Social selling: Tips on how to be comfortable selling on social media [18:34] Something significant that Tim has been working on recently in his business [22:39] Embracing change and bridging your sales gap by doing it differently [25:30] Tim’s perspective and insights on what he sees LinkedIn doing next [32:18] How to connect with Tim and get hold of his books [32:53] The best place to begin and the best book to start with on social selling [34:04] Golden takeaways from the guest that you can implement today [36:37] Tim’s next green tea dream location and the book he will be reading [38:14] Wrapping up and ending the show Notable Quotes * Anybody who uses any form of automation and connects people to a pitch on social media is spamming. * Conversations create sales, and social selling requires you to have conversations by using socials as a mechanism to get a conversation.* If you spam people, the first thing you get is a fight-or-flight reaction, not sales, and you piss them off. * Social selling on-call outreach has a far better response than cold calling. Resources Mentioned * Social Selling by Tim Hughes: https://www.amazon.com/Social-Selling-Techniques-Influence-Changemakers/dp/074947801* Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin: