Tony Hughes, social selling expert, joined Will Barron on this episode of the Salesman Podcast to look at the importance of strategic social selling.
With the sales industry and the buyer’s journey being turned on its head right now, this is an episode you don’t want to miss if you want to still have a job in 5 years time.
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Resources:
Transcript
Will Barron:
Coming up on today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast.
Tony Hughes:
And people’s very roles become commodities. If you look at a simple thing like a helicopter pilot, which is a highly skilled, highly paid role, things like drones are putting helicopter pilots out of business.
Will Barron:
Hello, sales nation. I’m Will Barron, host of The Salesman Podcast, and welcome to today’s episode. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your attention tuning in. On today’s show, we have Tony Hughes, and we’re talking about strategic social selling, and the overall, overarching topic of the show is essentially why you need to evolve to keep your sales job. It’s an important topic, of course, and Tony gets quite deep into it. You can find out more about Tony over at rsvpselling.com. His book, The Joshua Principle, is available on Amazon. And with all that said, let’s jump into today’s episode. Hi Tony, and welcome to The Salesman Podcast.
Tony Hughes:
Hey, Will. It’s great to be on the show. Thanks for having me.
Will ⅓ of Salespeople Become Obsolete in the Next 5 Years? · [01:10]
Will Barron:
You are more than welcome. I’m glad to have you on. And I want to talk about social selling or strategic social selling, as you brand it. But before that, and to tee up the conversation, perhaps, I want to ask you about something that you quote on your website, and I’ve seen it elsewhere, and it clearly has come from a study. I think it’s a [inaudible 00:01:18] report.
Will Barron:
But do you really genuinely believe, regardless of what reports are out there, that a third of B2B sales professionals are going to lose their jobs over the next five years or so? And we’ll stick on this for a second, but this will tee up the rest of the show.
Tony Hughes:
So I know that sounds like a sensationalist claim, but I really do. And the reason I do is that everything over time becomes commoditized. The products and services that people are selling become commodities. And people’s very roles become commodities. If you look at a simple thing, like a helicopter pilot, which is a highly skilled, highly paid role, things like drones are putting helicopter pilots out of business. The role of being a flight engineer on an international airliner has all but disappeared. I think it’s the A380 is the only aircraft left now that has that third seat role inside the cockpit.
“The reality is the salespeople who embrace technology, all forms of it, to become much more efficient and use it to create leverage, to expand the reach of their network and build trust with people in advance of meeting, those people are assured of having strong futures in professional selling. But the people who wrongly and naively believe that their value is in the relationship that they have with someone are in for a really rude shock.” – Tony Hughes · [02:26]
Tony Hughes:
So I’m not alone. People like Andy Hall from [inaudible 00:02:11] predicted about 22% of roles in B2B selling will disappear within the next four years. But I don’t think we need to be terrified of artificial intelligence algorithms, social technology, the web. The reality is the salespeople who embrace technology, all forms of it, to become much more efficient and use it to create leverage, to start to expand the reach of their network and build trust with people in advance of meeting, those people are assured of having strong futures in professional selling.
Tony Hughes:
But the people who wrongly and naively believe that their value is in the relationship that they have with someone are in for a really rude shock, because I don’t think customers and prospective customers are bored and lonely and looking for people to have coffees and lunch and meetings with. They’re all busy. You need to provide value for them, help solve their problems, help them realise their opportunities, or you don’t have a reason to really be there and have a seat at the table.
The Future of Work: Salespeople Not Jobs Will Become Obsolete · [03:07]
Will Barron:
And just to clarify this, because I agree with everything you’re saying, and I find the whole topic fascinating, are you saying that there will be a third less B2B sales jobs or that a third of people will be out of those jobs, perhaps replaced by other people, because they would just be made redundant because they haven’t moved forward?
Tony Hughes:
Well, the types of roles would change. So I remember when I first got into the business world, a long time ago now, but my first job was in banking. Banks still employ lots and lots of people, but the types of roles they have are very, very different. They’ve moved people away from the back office out behind counters, to be out engaging with clients. And that’s true of every business.
Tony Hughes:
I personally believe that the focus on CRM is really moving away now to customer experience. So we need to be thinking about how we can create great customer experience for people. And that often involves simplification, automating as much as we can, thinking about how the client wants to engage with us. And increasingly, I believe that will mean fewer field salespeople, especially. So field sales roles I think are under real threat. You’ve got to be truly strategic in how you operate as a field seller to really justify the high cost of the role.
Tony Hughes:
So inside sales that’s outbound, bringing sales and marketing together, I believe that marketing managers or marketing directors need to be given sales quotas, because they’ve got to figure out how to transact commodities far more effectively. So it’s not that all roles will disappear. A lot of them will morph into lower value roles. So the older people in sales that are expensive need to learn to embrace technology if they want to stay relevant and protect their career.
Will Barron:
Just one more on this before we dive into the idea of personal branding and social selling, if more roles are going to become commoditized, they’re going to become less viable, clearly, you might cut commissions from them, whatever happens. Are there going to be any new roles that are going to come about for people that are willing to push themselves and learn new things and break barriers? What new roles are going to evolve out of all this?
“If you’re working for some kind of startup or technology company where you’re really pioneering a market segment, the reality is that the reward for a pioneer is often a whole lot of arrows and they perish. It’s the settlers who come in later and actually prosper.” – Tony Hughes · [05:32]
Tony Hughes:
Well, the toughest role in selling, I believe, is working for some kind of startup or technology company where you’re really pioneering a market segment, where you are being an evangelist and educating people. I hope you excuse the metaphor, but the reality is that the reward for a pioneer is often a whole lot of arrows and they perish. It’s the settlers who come in later and actually prosper.
Tony Hughes:
So anyone who’s in a startup that’s wanting to change the way that customers think about the way they operate their businesses and solve their problems, they absolutely need sales people that can go and have those conversations. But then as things become an accepted technology or an accepted process, then it becomes more of a commodity. The margins get smaller, the competition becomes greater, and then every business has got to figure out how do we drive cost out of the equation here?
“The way that you sell, the way that you go to market, is far more important than what you’re actually selling because in the eyes of the buyer, when they have a look at the competitive landscape, you’re all pretty much the same.” – Tony Hughes · [06:10]
Tony Hughes:
And one of the mantras I have when I work with my clients is I say to them that the way that you sell, the way that you go to market, is far more important than what you’re actually selling because in the eyes of the buyer, when they have a look at the competitive landscape, they’ll go, do you know what, there’s a handful of people here that can provide something for us that solves the problem. And in our eyes, you’re all pretty much the same. You all come in and put up your analyst reports and make all your claims about being market leader and unique, but you can all do the job for us.
Tony Hughes:
So we need to differentiate in the insights that we have and the way that we deliver for clients, the way we manage their risk, and salespeople need to elevate the conversation. They need to learn how to talk the language of leaders, which is delivering outcomes, managing risk, and delivering on the business case. And salespeople that can have those kinds of conversations are going to do really well. And people that just want to build a relationship and provide information are going to really struggle.
How to Have Proactive Conversations with Senior Executives · [07:10]
Will Barron:
And how do we develop the ability to have those conversations and that expanded business acumen, rather than here’s my product’s featured benefits or the cliche sales stuff that we shouldn’t have been doing five years ago, nevermind now? How do we have those elevated C-suite conversations? Is it just experience and mentoring, or are there any resources that we can look to?
Tony Hughes:
So I’m going to recommend a couple of books in the conversation today. There’s a really good book called The Challenger Sale, published by Corporate Executive Board. The two authors are Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson. The book’s been out for about four years now. They just released the follow-up to that book late last year, called The Challenger Customer. But The Challenger Sale is really good because the thing that it says is it’s important to lead with a provocative insight when you want to go and work with a client. It earns you the meeting, it earns you the conversation.
“You need a provocative insight that’s going to earn you that conversation at a senior level. Because one of the big problems that salespeople have, especially for the ones that are going to lose their roles, is this law of selling, which is we all get delegated down to people that we sound like.” – Tony Hughes · [08:21]
Tony Hughes:
I’ve worked with a lot of organisations that have had a go at implementing Challenger, and not all of them succeed. It really is quite difficult. But it’s one of the things I focus on with clients is what’s your provocative insight, and you can’t do it in an arrogant way. It’s a big ask to go and walk into a client and try and claim that you know more about them and their industry than they do, but you need a provocative insight that’s going to earn you that conversation at the senior level. Because one of the big problems that salespeople have, especially for the ones that are going to lose their roles, one of the big problems they have is this law of selling, which is we all get delegated down to people that we sound like.
Tony Hughes:
So even if we can get that meeting, for example, with the chief financial officer in an organisation, the moment we start talking about tech or the moment we talk about lower level issues, they’ll think, oh, I’ll get you to go and talk with this person in my organisation. So we do want to get sponsored down to the organisation to help our champion gain consensus, because everyone needs to gain consensus these days in their buying decisions, so we still want to get delegated and still have access, rather than get pushed away.
Understanding Personal Branding From a B2B Sales Perspective · [09:05]
Will Barron:
Well, you’ve tied this up beautifully here, Tony, because definitely there’s a huge difference between coming up with a provocative insight when you are a, and I don’t want to sound like I’m diminishing the role here, but a salesperson, versus if someone comes along and they are an industry expert and they come to you with some crazy insight.
Will Barron:
You’re going to put more value naturally on that industry expert, which brings me very nicely onto this idea of personal branding and the other steps that go along with that to have, I guess, the overall goal of all this is perhaps to have more impact when you have these messages, when you reach out, and to drive engagement back to you and conversations, which then lead to natural sales rather than cold calls and weird, horrible slideshow PowerPoint pitches. Now-
Tony Hughes:
And we all know there’s a special place in hell for people that use PowerPoint on prospects.
Will Barron:
Definitely, definitely. So let’s talk about this idea of personal branding because it’s something that I’m not clear about from the sales perspective. From my perspective as a podcaster, talking about sales, clearly the bigger audience and the reach that I’ve got, the more engaged they are, it all adds up to more views, bigger sponsorship deals, and it seems more linear and straightforward.
Will Barron:
For the salesperson, the B2B salesperson that listens to this, I’m not a hundred percent crystal clear on where they should be. Can you give a little bit of an insight of what their origin should be, whether they should be going industry wide, whether they should be keeping it super niche and specific, whether they should be trying to just go deep with the C-suites of their industry, or whether they should be going wider? And then we can talk about content, publishing, collaboration and all that kind of stuff afterwards.
Tony Hughes:
Okay, so let me just say at the outset that although I use the term social selling, I do so because the rest of the world uses it as well. I guess it’s just a common tag that means something. I actually don’t like the term.
Will Barron:
I hate it. I’m glad you said that.
Tony Hughes:
I really don’t like the term. And I’ve added the word strategic in front, which is even more meaningless. But, so let me just say a couple of things here. The first is that people have always, for time and immemorial, they’ve always bought from those they know, like, and trust. And all business is done at the speed of trust. You can’t unnaturally accelerate a transaction with somebody if you haven’t earned the right to ask them for the order, if you haven’t built trust first.
Tony Hughes:
But the thing that’s interesting today is that 75% of buyers research the person that’s going to be selling to them or meeting with them before they either choose to do so, before they see that person face to face. And that really begs the question, when someone finds us online, what is it that they see? Do they see some Porsche driving, quota crushing, uber salesperson? I’ve even seen one person’s LinkedIn profile as a salesperson, and they had the term elephant catcher under their name. And my view is, well, if you’re a potential buyer and you’d research that person, I would cancel the meeting. I don’t want to be someone’s prey. I don’t want someone hunting me.
“75% of buyers research the person that’s going to be selling to them or meeting with them before they see that person face to face. And that really begs the question, when someone finds us online, what is it that they see? That’s why we need a strong personal brand that supports what we’re doing.” – Tony Hughes · [12:25]
Tony Hughes:
I want someone who can work with me and deliver me some value, help me deliver some outcomes, manage my risk, solve my problems. And I want to be in control as the buyer. So the first thing is because buyers research us, we need a strong personal brand that supports what we’re doing. Now, the reality for you and I, Will, is we are both publishers and we’re wanting to build big audience following. And therefore, what we do in social media is not at all necessarily what a salesperson would do.
Tony Hughes:
What they’re really wanting to do is they want to evidence their credibility. They want to show insight and they want to start to set an agenda about the conversations that they want to have with the person that they’re meeting with. And if they do that well, when they get to see the person face to face, they won’t need to talk about themselves and try and earn the right to ask questions. That job will largely be done.
“The top 10% of sales performers speak only one third as much as the bottom 90% of performers. So if you talk less, you sell more.” – Tony Hughes · [13:24]
Tony Hughes:
So Neil Rackham, whom I know and I’m a huge fan of, I’m a huge fan of, and his spin selling concepts are timeless and still valid today. But in Neil’s research he did years ago, back in the eighties, one of the things that they established was that the top 10% of sales performers speak only one third as much as the bottom 90% of performers. So if you talk less, you sell more. And if you have a really good, strong brand online, people will check you out. It’ll make it easy for you to then make the meeting and the conversation all about the other person, rather than talking about yourself.
Building a Personal Brand on LinkedIn · [13:45]
Will Barron:
And I want to get really practical with this for a second. Should B2B sales professionals, all things considered, be only and a hundred percent publishing on LinkedIn, or for the personal brands to grow, do they need to have an external blog or be looking on Twitter or elsewhere? Is LinkedIn the platform, just for ease of conversation and to get all the audience bought in on this, is LinkedIn where we should be looking at?
Tony Hughes:
So for B2B, the short answer is yes. The bigger answer is we should all go and be where our market is. So if we’re in B2C, then obviously a platform like Facebook is important, but the reason LinkedIn is so powerful is the first thing is it’s free. And if you’re in business to business selling, almost every single person that can help you be successful, customers, partners, advisors, everyone you need is an entrepreneur, businessperson, salesperson, sales manager, employer, everyone is in LinkedIn. So you need to go be where your market is. It’s free.
Tony Hughes:
But my first piece of advice is stop using your LinkedIn profile as an online CV and start to use your LinkedIn profile as a personal branding microsite. So think about what’s my brand, what’s my promise of value? And in your LinkedIn profile, rather than your title, you want to have your promise of value in that top line, under your name. And then in your summary, you want to have a summary in there. And in the summary, don’t talk about your work history. Talk about the value that you offer, the markets or the people that you serve, and also talk about the values by which you operate, because that starts that process of building trust.
Will Barron:
And is this the value that your company gives or the value you as an individual gives the prospect?
Tony Hughes:
That’s a really good question. Now, this is a little controversial. I say to all the people I work, and I say it in front of their boss, I say, LinkedIn is your piece of real estate. It is not your employer’s. It’s not your company’s. Do not ever start spamming, blasting, pushing, advertising, selling your company’s products and services in your LinkedIn profile. This is your personal branding microsite. Talk about your insights, the values, the way that you operate.
Tony Hughes:
And as you move from employer to employer throughout your life, you shouldn’t need to change what’s in this part of your LinkedIn profile much at all. If they want to see who you work for right now, they can just scroll down in your LinkedIn profile to see who your current employer is. And if they want to understand about your employer’s products, there’s a link to go to your company’s website, where they can see about that, but LinkedIn is about you and your values.
Tips For Highlighting Your Value on LinkedIn · [16:30]
Will Barron:
And I want to just dive into this a bit deeper, because this is useful. How do you know what your values are if you are taking your company and the products perhaps out the picture? And I agree with you on that a hundred percent. How do you know what values you give, how do you know what values that your potential prospects want, and how do you tie this all together in a succinct message? Clearly we could talk for days on this and we could go as deep as we like, but for anyone listening now who goes, oh, crap, I need to update my LinkedIn profile, what should they be looking to do with it on real practical terms?
Tony Hughes:
So I’m going to say something again which might sound very bold, but in my last corporate role, because three years ago, I left the corporate world and went out on my own, doing this on the back of a book I’d published. But my last role was managing director for one of the world’s largest customer relationship management software companies. And I was working with my own salespeople and our channel partners that we went to market with. And the thing I found, it’s a very competitive market. There’s over a hundred CRM companies out there in the world.
Tony Hughes:
But the thing that was happening is every time my people, and I would even catch myself making this mistake too, we’d go talk to a potential client and they would want to have a conversation about the features and functions of your product. Does it do this? Does it do that? Does it run in the cloud? Does it go on premise? All of these things. And the reality is those things the customer was focusing on have nothing to do with whether they are going to be successful or unsuccessful in their implementation.
Tony Hughes:
So I would use a circuit breaker. I would only say this if I was sure that they were committed to having a CRM. So I would anchor this conversation by making sure that they agreed that you have no chance of being truly customer centric. You have no chance of delivering great customer experience unless you have a CRM. But I would say, have you ever implemented one previously yourself? Or is there anyone on your team who has? Because the reality is that 70% of CRM implementations fail. So what is it about the way you’re approaching this that makes you think you’re not going to be part of the 70%?
Tony Hughes:
Now that would take people back. But what I would suggest to my salespeople that work with me, I’d say, put that kind of information in your LinkedIn profile. You’re now separating yourself from everybody else out there. All of the others are saying my product is all sunshine and light. It solves all of the world’s problems. Buy from me. Look at all the features and functions. Look what analysts say about us. Whereas you are going to be saying, I will help you as a client manage your risk and deliver your outcomes. I know what it takes to go implement these tough change management projects successfully.
Tony Hughes:
So you’re showing a value of, I want to deliver the outcome for you. I don’t want to sell you a product. I actually want to figure out whether you’re a good fit for me because you’ll damage my brand if you buy my product from me and you fail. So I want to see whether you qualify to be a client for me. Now, you don’t say it that way because that’s arrogant, but that’s how you need to feel. So what I would suggest is figure out how to get that to come through in your LinkedIn profile. Now you stand out from the crowd.
Will Barron:
So you are, and this is slightly cliche at this point, perhaps, but you are essentially pitching yourself as the consultant rather than the salesperson.
“Every salesperson needs to be a consultant. And you can’t solve their problem unless you understand what it is.” – Tony Hughes · [19:33]
Tony Hughes:
Yeah. Well, every salesperson needs to be a consultant. If you’re not solving a problem for somebody, and you can’t solve their problem unless you understand what it is. So we need what I call a hypothesis of value. We need to go to the client and not turn up and say, tell me about yourself and what keeps you up at night. Now, the first thing is, they’ll throw us out the door if they believe that we have not done our homework. So again, LinkedIn is important to do homework on the people that we’re meeting. If you turn up and meet someone in business and say, oh, so how long have you been with the company? And where were you before you started here? That just shows that you did no research. All of that information is in the person’s LinkedIn profile.
Tony Hughes:
So I say let the person know, don’t go into stealth mode in LinkedIn, don’t hide your profile settings. Let the person know that you looked at them, you did your research. That’s all part of showing that you are professional and that you’ve done your homework before you actually meet with somebody. So every salesperson needs to be consultative in how they operate. And I recently last year had our in-ground swimming pool renovated, and to my surprise, there’s a lot of different choices in how you can try and renovate a swimming pool. And a simple thing like that, the salesperson that I bought from was the one that took a very consultative approach. And he did it very genuinely and he helped me make a good decision with what I did.
Consultative Selling and Why it Works · [20:54]
Will Barron:
And you as clearly expert in the sales field, published author, all this, did you see him as a salesperson or did you see him as a consultant, even though he was clearly a salesperson?
Tony Hughes:
He was clearly a salesperson. I engaged with him as a salesperson, but I did business with him because he adopted a consultative approach.
Will Barron:
Sure. Okay. And I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, Tony, but is there a difference between the consultative salesperson and someone who is truly a consultant? Is there a difference between the way that they should go about work? Because the small amount of consulting work I’ve done is based around the premise of come in and tell us what’s wrong. That’s where the value is, versus the salesperson is and fix it for me, because I’ve not got the time or the energy or the resources. Is there a difference? Because we talk about the consultants of sale. Is there a difference between the two approaches when we dive deeper into it?
Tony Hughes:
There absolutely is. And one of the big differences is the consultative salesperson is wanting to lead to the value that they offer, whereas the true consultant is able to be far more flexible because what they’re really offering is their ability to be a mirror for the person that they’re working with and enable change within that organisation.
Tony Hughes:
But for example, if you sell a customer relationship management software system and what the customer really needs is marketing automation rather than CRM, then if you take a pure consultative view, it’s not going to lead to prioritising what you offer them. So it’s not about manipulating anybody, but it’s taking a consultative approach and asking questions that lead to the value that you can provide and have a hypothesis of value that starts to set the agenda around what the focus should be in the conversation
Should Salespeople Be Creating Content on LinkedIn? · [22:40]
Will Barron:
Interesting. Okay, next question I’m going to ask you is as controversial as what it gets on The Salesman Podcast, in the sales industry, it’s something that I’m asking a lot of people, I was unsure whether to ask you about it because it’s a massive rabbit hole and we’re constrained on time. On the LinkedIn profiles, should everyone listening be creating their own content, their own posts, or should they be building that network, adding people, and focusing on the engagement and perhaps sharing other people’s posts through status updates rather than post their own content? Which is the way forward, because it might change, but in 2016, right now, which is the best way to go about it?
Tony Hughes:
So the answer is they need to do all of it, but they should not be writing posts and selling time. Now, I’ve written nearly 300 posts I’ve published in LinkedIn and built an audience following, I think as of today, it’s taken about 18 months, but well over 60,000. I’m publishing posts to attract an audience. A salesperson is not. So the post that they need to write, they may only ever need to write three posts.
Tony Hughes:
And I’ll just give an example of this. I’ve worked with people in the recruiting industry, and a common objection that a recruiter will get when they’re phoning a hiring manager to try and get a meeting is the hiring manager will say, “Look, if I had coffee and met with every recruiter that rang me, I’d never get any work done. I’d get so many of you people calling me. You’ve either got a good candidate or not. Send me a CV.”
Tony Hughes:
So that’s a common objection that they get. And I used to do it to recruiters. Now, the recruiter wants to go build a relationship because they know that people do business with those they know, like, and trust. They want to build a relationship, but the relationship is of no value to the buyer until they’re already delivering for them. So what I say is you should start to write some posts for two reasons. It’s going to be the best sales training that you as a recruiter ever have, and it’s going to help you create an authentic narrative that overcomes this objection.
“The great, great salespeople avoid objections rather than try and overcome them. So if you know a common objection that people have, address it as soon as you get into a meeting with them.” – Tony Hughes · [24:42]
Tony Hughes:
And if this person is one of the 75% that’ll check you out before they meet, this will overcome the objection because I believe that great, great salespeople avoid objections rather than try and overcome them. So if you know that’s a common objection that people have, what you need to lead with is you, the hiring manager, need to invest 20 minutes with me so that I can save you 12 hours of your time and so that I can dramatically de-risk the highest risk part of your role, which is hiring the wrong person. And we can all hire people and I can put CVs in front of you on the basis of skills, qualifications, and experience. That’s easy.
Tony Hughes:
But the reason you have to fire people out of your team is that they’re not a good cultural fit. Now, it doesn’t matter what’s on your company’s website about vision, mission, and culture. I need to know what your values are and your culture that you instil in your team. So if you’ll invest 20 minutes with me so I can understand the culture, what culture fit means, I can screen out for that as a criteria, as well as the other obvious things. And I’ll define value in the fewer number of CVs that I get you because I will respect your time. So if you give me 20 minutes, I’ll save you 12 hours and I’ll dramatically de-risk the process for you. When can we meet for 20 minutes?
Tony Hughes:
So you’re proactively getting on the front foot about that objection. And what I say to them is, write posts about that, go and do your research, find out how often are people fired because of poor cultural fit. What if someone’s in an IT project delivery role and they hire the wrong person, and as a business administrator, sorry, as a business analyst or as a project manager or as a technical consultant, what’s the cost to a project of a mis-hire?
Tony Hughes:
Because I know in sales, if you have a team of sales people carrying $2 million numbers and you hire the wrong person into this B2B enterprise selling kind of environment, you just cost yourself a million dollars of revenue if you hired the wrong person, because they’ll miss their number, you’ll need to manage them out. You’ll need to get another person on board. And on top of losing a million dollars of revenue, you’re going to damage your personal brand internally, and that person’s going to damage the company’s brand with your clients.
Tony Hughes:
So there’s a huge cost in hiring the wrong person. So if you feel passionate about it, you write some posts about it, now you have an authentic narrative that you can go and take. So they shouldn’t be writing posts every day, but they should get two or three or four or five posts in there that adopt the opposite position, the positive opposite position of common objections that they get, and also posts that show insight. So this person goes, wow, I’m not sure whether I’ll meet with this person, but look at the insights that they show. This person’s worth meeting with.
Tony Hughes:
So that’s why you want to do it. And then as far as the cadence of regular sharing content, you do that through updates in LinkedIn, which will also push it out to Twitter. And you can use simple tools like Buffer is something that I recommend. There’s a free version of that. So you can basically, if you’re on any website, you find a great piece of content that your audience would care about, you just click the Buffer button, There’s other tools to do content curation, but that’ll push it out to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. It’ll push it out to all of those kinds of platforms for you, even Google+ or as many social accounts as you’ve got, and you can work with other people’s content easily.
“Buyers want to deal with professionals, and professionals stay current. So, it staggers me that sales people claim that they’re in a profession and yet they don’t stay current.” – Tony Hughes · [27:53]
Tony Hughes:
And again, it staggers me that sales people claim that they’re in a profession and yet they don’t stay current. They don’t read. So buyers want to deal with professionals, and professionals are staying current. So if you’re sharing the latest interesting information, your market will end up saying, you know what, I’m too busy to go and source all of this stuff every day. But if I follow Mary, she seems to find all of this great content that’s relevant to me. And that’s one of the reasons why salespeople should seek to specialise in either a vertical industry, as far as the markets that they’re prosecuting, or if it’s a horizontal thing that they’re doing, that they should become experts about that particular domain so they can share insight.
Tony Hughes:
And also in LinkedIn, this is the power of it, is as you find people that have great content for your audience or for your clients or potential clients, connect to them in LinkedIn, let them know that you’re sharing your content. And again, when people research you and click on you, they go, wow. People that looked at Tony Hughes have also looked at Neil Rackham. They can see there’s common connections. They go, wow, well, Tony Hughes must be credible if Neil Rackham is connected to him and he’s endorsed his books. So this power of association becomes really good. And when you finally get in front of somebody, it’s this relaxed conversation where you can focus on the buyer rather than trying to push anything at them.
Will Barron:
Tony, you’re on a roll there, so I didn’t want to interrupt you, but you’ve given the best answer to that question of any guest that’s been on the show. And I appreciate that. And I’ve never really even thought about it this way before of this format of the posts that you produce are answering, or essentially pre-qualifying leads that are going to check your profile. It’s super useful because it’s scalable, it’s free, other than your time. You’re getting all the fringe benefits coming in and they see you as an expert.
Will Barron:
So the conversation that you have is a more high level one just off the very bat. I really enjoy this because I think there is a, because everyone has an ego, of course, I think there is a pull to do a post of top five ways XYZ in your industry, which doesn’t really help anyone. It might be entertaining. It might get thousands of views, but it’s not really adding anything. And it’s taking up the time that you could have done a post, which is going to have influence, which is going to affect your bottom line. And clearly, egos aside, that’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to smash targets and make those commissions, and live lives that we want to live off of the funding that provides.
Driving Inbound Leads From LinkedIn · [30:15]
Will Barron:
And something else that’s kind of, I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, but we might be leading towards it perhaps. Should we be aiming for inbound leads to come in from this content? Or is that for marketing? Is that nothing to do with us, or should we be trying to build, especially if we’re going vertical within the industry, should we be trying to build a little ecosystem that travels with us from company to company?
Tony Hughes:
So I’ve personally had lots of business come to me because of my activity in LinkedIn, but what I’m doing is not something I would expect a sales person to go and do. So they may jag the odd lead, but this is not why they should do it. This is all about them using LinkedIn as a research tool and as a personal brand building tool and an agenda setting tool. We need to stay away from the interrupt and push, the blast and spam model of anything that we’re doing. That’s the way we modernise selling, is to be a person of great values and value in what we offer people.
Tony Hughes:
So I don’t personally believe the LinkedIn strategies about creating inbound opportunities, although it can happen. The number one reason you do it is to have a personal branding microsite and support what you’re going to do. And then you target your clients and you use LinkedIn as a really good research platform. And I’m a big advocate of Sales Navigator. I think all organisations should buy Sales Navigator for their people. And one of the reasons an organisation should buy Sales Navigator is that without Sales Navigator, if your people have just got their own individual LinkedIn accounts, they’ll be connecting with as many of your potential clients as they can. And when they leave your organisation, they’ll take those first degree relationships with them.
Tony Hughes:
Whereas if you get Sales Navigator for people, when your people leave the organisation, you turn that navigator licence off and they’re not taking those relationships with them. So Sales Navigator lets you get exposure, because you know, there’s the three degrees of connection inside LinkedIn on the paid versions. There’s only two degrees of connection on free. But Sales Navigator gives you 25 fully cracked open searches of the entire LinkedIn database. There’s 440 million members of LinkedIn, as we speak at the moment. But you can get those cracked wide open searches, but you can search and research as if people were first degree connections, using Sales Navigator, and that protects the company’s intellectual property when people leave.
Changes to Expect After Microsoft Acquires LinkedIn · [32:31]
Will Barron:
And final one before I ask a couple of questions I ask everyone that comes on the show, Tony, do you feel, or do you know, even perhaps, that there’s going to be any immediate changes with Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn? Is there anything in the next 12 months that’s going to hit us or change on the platform?
Tony Hughes:
Yes, I got some views on this. So the first thing that is guaranteed to happen relatively early, so the first thing is I believe Microsoft will leave LinkedIn alone for at least a year, which would be a good thing. LinkedIn does not have a good track record with acquisitions. If you have a look at Nokia and Yammer and even Skype for Business, I’ve got some question marks about what they’ve actually done there. I’m a big fan of Skype.
Tony Hughes:
But the first thing is I think they’ll leave it alone for a year. The next thing we’ll see is we’ll see an increase of advertising inside LinkedIn. They’re paying a lot of money, 26.2 billion, so 26,000 thousand million dollars they’re paying. So they need to recoup that investment. And I think we’ll see increased advertising. That started about a year ago in LinkedIn anyway, but I think that’s going to ramp up.
Tony Hughes:
I believe if LinkedIn’s really smart, sorry, if Microsoft is really smart, they know that they bought the world’s most powerful database. That’s really what they purchased, the world’s most powerful publishing platform. Although there’s 440 million members of LinkedIn, there’s about 1.2 million members actively post content, but it’s a very powerful publishing platform.
Tony Hughes:
And Microsoft is really all about the productivity of the business person and office worker. And LinkedIn is really about the productivity of the recruiter and salesperson and entrepreneurs. So I think if Microsoft can bring LinkedIn into platforms like Skype, if they can enable people to collaborate with their own collaboration tools and bring those into the LinkedIn platform, it’s going to be incredibly powerful. But to me, the massive opportunity is to unlock the value of going beyond social selling, beyond CRM, and to really think about the platform and enabler for incredible customer experience.
Tony Hughes:
So you even imagine if you had a potential client and you send them a calendar request and then you organise a Skype meeting, for example, but then you can click a button and you can see their LinkedIn profile and you can see all of their background. You can see their face before they even come on camera. These really simple things can really transform the experience because people form a view within a second of seeing someone’s face and meeting them. So the more we can make those interactions more powerful and have relevance and context, it’ll be transformative.
Tony Hughes:
So they’re paying a lot of money, but I think one plus one can equal three if they do this well. And what I’m really waiting to see is how are they going to improve the integration between the world’s most powerful person database and human engagement platform for the business world? How are they going to integrate it with their own productivity tools, but make CRM far more effective for people?
Closing Questions · [36:31]
Will Barron:
Interesting. Interesting. I feel like, having pretty much zero knowledge on the whole thing, other than anecdotally from guests coming on the show, I feel like they could just make the ultimate CRM and cut everyone else out. I don’t know if they can do that, whether there’s laws or legislation in place to prevent it a little bit, but it seems like they could just cut everyone else out of LinkedIn. And they’d, again, have that resource that no one else could leverage. And I think instantly they’d have one of, if not the world’s most powerful CRM. I’m interested to see what happens. And with that, Tony, I’ve got a couple of questions I ask everyone that comes on the show. The first one, who do you think is the world’s greatest salesperson?
Tony Hughes:
Wow. The greatest salesperson to me, living at the moment, it’s probably Elon Musk. Now I know that sounds strange because he’s not a very good sales guy, but he is passionate about his vision and mission to change the world at many levels. And he’s been an evangelist. He’s got people on board.
Tony Hughes:
I mean, the launch of the Tesla three recently was the most successful launch of a motor vehicle in the history of the world. They took orders for 12,000 million dollars worth of cars. So they had 320,000 orders where people paid a thousand dollars US. Interestingly, not one salesperson involved in taking those orders. People just put the order on the website. But it was him up on stage, just talking passionately, as much as Elon Musk can, about what he’s doing. So he’s very authentic.
Will Barron:
He’s amazing. I read a post about him the other day and it, I kind of know a little bit about his story, but it unravelled it further in that he was successful before he went to PayPal, made a load of money from PayPal. But while he was there, he decided he wanted to put a man on Mars. And I thought SpaceX came way after all this.
Will Barron:
And then you look at what he’s doing, so he’s founded SpaceX, founded Solar City, which is a hundred percent solar power generator for the grid in the States and elsewhere. And now he’s looking, I don’t know which way around, it is either Solar City’s looking to buy Tesla or Tesla’s looking to buy Solar City, and he’s got a share in both. So how that works, I’m not sure, again, legally, but he’s building a vehicle and the means to power it and spaceships, which eventually will become solar powered, I imagine, so that when he lands on Mars, he’s got all the technology to suck in energy from the sun, all the Tesla battery power to run some kind of space station on the surface of Mars.
Will Barron:
And it’s just mind blowing that one guy, clearly it’s not one guy, he’s got a big team behind him, I’m sure, and he’s working with the right people. But it’s just his vision and how all these pieces are coming together, I don’t even think I could predict in 10 years time what he’s going to be doing then. It’s absolutely crazy to me. And I think looking back in 10, 20 years time, we’re all going to be talking about him, like no one else at this age, I think.
Will Barron:
I mentioned him to my dad and I’m saying, “Dad, he’s doing all this.” My dad’s kind of like, it’s interesting, but doesn’t really care. I think there’ll be a point where he’ll be so mainstream, he’ll be beyond the Richard Bransons of things. And I’m just obsessed with his story and I’m looking into it more and more. So I’m glad you said that, and I’ll leave some links in the show notes to this episode as well for anyone that wants to learn more about him. Because I think going back to his personal branding, his insights, his agenda, they are so overpowering, overpowering and so exceptional that his inability to sell and his lack of charisma become redundant because they’re such powerful, powerful movers.
Tony’s Advice to His Younger Self on How to Become Better at Selling · [39:30]
Will Barron:
And Tony, I’ve got one final question for you, so I ask everyone that comes on the show. And that is, if you could go back in time and speak to your younger self, what would be the one piece of advice you’d give him to help him become better at selling?
Tony Hughes:
Gee, that’s a really interesting question because I wish I was the older version of myself when I was younger. So I would just say don’t try so hard. The thing we’re selling is that we think we have to influence someone. We have to manipulate them. We’ve got to cause them to make a decision. To me, selling is about having a great work ethic and great values and find people that are a good fit.
Tony Hughes:
So I’ve been in professional selling now for three decades. I started in radio paging, if you can believe that, back in the days when mobile phones were just coming to market. But I just work harder than anybody else, but it’s really a case of go and find people that are a good fit for what it is that you offer. And then you’re closing them. You’re asking them to take that next step and do business with you because that’s genuinely the best thing for them as well. So have a really good work ethic, but just relax, trust the fact that you’re looking for people that you can help.
Will Barron:
Would another way to frame that perhaps be rather than [inaudible 00:40:41] try so hard, would it be bet to frame it perhaps as make it easy?
Tony Hughes:
Yeah. And don’t push yourself and beat yourself up either. Selling is a soul-destroying tough profession. I’ve seen many people been that have been chewed up and spat out by it. You’ve got to be kind to yourself. You’ve got to nurture yourself. You’ve got to be a reader. But you’ve got to be a true believer in the value that you know that you offer people, both at a personal level and for the company that you work for. A lot of people overlook that. They go and chase the money. But be a real believer in the difference you’re making in your customers’ lives, and that gives you some purpose and meaning in what you’re doing as well, not just something that makes money.
Parting Thoughts · [41:20]
Will Barron:
Good stuff. Tony, for everyone who is intrigued, and we’ll have to have you clearly back on the show to dive into the in between steps of what we talked about. But for everyone who wants to know more in the meantime, where can we find out more about you?
Tony Hughes:
So there’s three places to find me. You can find me in LinkedIn. So just search for Tony J Hughes, H-U-G-H-E-S. You can find me at my personal website. It’s my website for my public speaking business. So tonyughes.com.au. And my sales methodology website is rsvpselling.com
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. We’ll link to all of them in the show notes for this episode over at salesman.red. And with that, Tony, thank you for the conversation today. Thank you for your insights. And thank you for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.
Tony Hughes:
Will, thanks for inviting me. I’m a huge fan of what you do. Thank you.
Will Barron:
And there we have it. Tony, thank you for coming on the show. Tony’s actually booked in for another show before the show even aired, that’s how much I want to speak to him again and dive into this further. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out [inaudible 00:42:20] show, which heard yesterday all about masculine emotional intelligence. That was an interesting one. And it does have relevance to sales, I assure you. And with that all said, I’ll speak with you all again tomorrow.
