Social Selling With Tim Hughes

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Do you have a hard time driving more leads from your LinkedIn account? Are you spending most of your time on your social media accounts? In this episode, Tim Hughes, the co-founder and CEO of DLA Ignite, discusses the social selling strategy to influence buyers and change makers. People are looking for experts that can help them. Tim Hughes suggests three things to attract leads: Build a Buyer Centric Profile, Network, and Content. Learn more from these three things to attract leads for your business. Tune in to this episode now.

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Listen to the podcast here

Social Selling With Tim Hughes

Our guest on the show is Tim Hughes, the author of Social Selling. We talked about how to build trust, how to use social media, and most importantly, how to create a buyer-centric profile. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Tim Hughes, who is universally recognized as the world leading pioneer and innovator of social selling. He’s ranked number one by Onalytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top eight sales experts globally to follow. Brand24 announced that he was the sixteenth most influential person in marketing globally based on measured social media influence.

He’s also the Cofounder and CEO of DLA Ignite, and the co-author of bestselling books, Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers and Smarketing: How to Achieve Competitive Advantage through Blended Sales and Marketing. He has launched a second edition of Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers, which that’s been completely updated. Welcome to the show, Tim.

Thanks for having me on and spending time with me. I’m really excited.

I think this topic of influence is always something someone’s so interested in. More brands now are saying these earned impressions, people’s recommendations, and word of mouth, coming from someone that people trust are even more valuable than paid impressions. Before we get into all of this and how you became this influential social selling person, I want to hear your own personal story of origin. Did you grow up going, even before the internet was created, “I’m going to conquer this world,” or were you just the young boy at college that you could convince everyone to go to your restaurant of choice versus others? How did that all begin?

I’m a salesperson. I didn’t actually even know what sales was until I was in my twenties. I got into a graduate program at a company like many computer companies that were around in those days. It doesn’t exist anymore. I was in a technical role because I did Electronic Engineering. I made the mistake that a lot of young people make, which is I saw these technical people who were amazing and I thought, “I’m never going to be like that because it’s going to take me so long.” What we always do is measure things by 0 to 100, and we see the experts who are 100, and what we need to do is go from 0 to 1.

I was looking around for something else, and I could see these people out in the car park who had company cars. In those days, they just had started having mobile phones. There were these massive big brick phones. I thought, “I quite fancy some of that.” I went and started working. I got a job working with sales teams. When I was doing that, I really enjoyed it. I then moved into sales. I have now been in sales for several years. That’s my background, new business sales. I’m always the person that goes out and finds new customers and builds trust really quickly.

Let’s dive into that. I have worked as a sales keynote speaker with lots of different companies. I usually get involved. When they are already invited, they have done the RFP, they are in the door, and it’s between them and a competitor. This building trust quickly, especially for those people who have to cold call, I don’t think a lot of people think about cold calling as still a thing. Whether it’s somebody knocking on your door saying, do you want solar panels on your home, to all the medical sales teams that have to cold call on doctors and dentists, to try and get their attention? Let’s start with that because that’s one way of getting new business, and then there’s the other way of getting new business where you fill out a proposal, and you are invited to present. You cover both, I’m guessing.

In the past, I have sold to government organizations where you fill in RFPs. What you are trying to do is actually influence that early, so you are going out and you are contacting people. I started selling back in the ’80s when there was no internet and mobile, and you are just given a printout and said, “Go and call these.” That’s how I started. It was about making sure what you are doing is being able to come across as being the expert.

I started off selling payroll systems. I didn’t know anything about payroll and its technicalities. What you start doing, you start learning about it. You start learning about the verticals that you are selling into and stuff. What you do is feed off one conversation and take it to the next one. You take one conversation and use that as a way of asking questions. It’s that organic thing that takes place.

[bctt tweet=”Make your profile buyer-centric. Social selling is not about you.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What do you think is the biggest mistake people make when they are trying to build trust?

I wanted to set the record straight. As an organization, we have never cold-called ever. We have not ever made one cold call. We have never ever sent a spam email. We don’t have an email database. We deleted it in 2018 to be GDPR compliance. We have never placed an advert. What we do is we are an organization that teaches social selling, and therefore we see ourselves as the highest watermark in the industry. People want to see what good social selling is. They come to people who work for DLA Ignite because we are the high watermark of that. What we are doing is, if you think about what I did in the ’80s, going out and having conversations with people, but I’m doing that on social media rather than necessarily using the telephone to get it.

That doesn’t mean that we are anti-telephone. Sometimes people think and say, “It doesn’t work for us because we can’t do all of our business on social media.” I totally understand that. This is about using social media as a platform for you to get conversations. In the past, I used a telephone as a way to get through to people and start conversations. What I sell and what most people reading this sell, require us to have a conversation. What I’m doing is I’m using social media, and that allows me to have conversations at scale rather than doing it what I did way back in the ’80s.

Let’s loop back to my question because I think it still is relevant, your social selling and reaching out to people of let’s say, LinkedIn. I see one of the big mistakes people make is they ask people to connect, and then they try to sell them something in the same conversation. I’m sure you have examples of other mistakes like that.

The issue that we have now is way back from the 1980s, what we have always done is that we have used interruption as a way of selling. To make a cold call, I interrupt you and pitch. When I send you a spam email, I interrupt you and pitch. When I place an advert, what I do is I’m interrupting your day and basically pitching. Everybody thinks, “Therefore, that’s what you do in sales, you interrupt people.” They go to social media, and what they miss is in the title, social media, which it’s media where you are social. What you will find is that you have got a lot of people, for example, posting brochures. You research shows that nobody comes to social media to read brochures.

Everybody I talk to, I say, “Do you ever do this with your LinkedIn timeline? Boring.” “That’s interesting. I love John’s podcast.” “What’s he doing in that?” Everybody says, “I do that all the time. Don’t the organization do boring?” What you are doing is that this is not about going to social media and posting, this is about going to social media and posting to get a conversation. That’s fundamentally different. In this show, you introduced me before you started recording, and showed me your website and what you do. All of what you do there is a mechanism to create conversations.

That’s probably the best way to build trust, which is to have conversations.

One of the things about trust, what happens is that you like people who are like you. The other mistake that people make on social media is they think it’s about them, it’s about their company. The thing is, I don’t know anything about you or your company. What happens is I’m actually not interested. I’m not interested in what you are selling until I actually know you, maybe like you, trust you, and at that point when I understand that I have a need. Right now, all you have is you. Everybody goes to the market exactly the same way. What they do is that they say, buy my product because I’m great.

My background is in selling accounting systems in IT. All of the accounting system vendors go to market in exactly the same way. SAP, Oracle, Sage, and Xero all say the same thing. As a buyer, you cannot differentiate. What you can do, because we are really clever at this as humans, I can differentiate and say, “I just spent three minutes with John before I came onto this show. I think that John’s a really nice person. If I went out for dinner, I think he would be really interesting to talk to.” We were talking for 3 to 5 minutes, and I came to the conclusion that you would be interesting to talk to during dinner. That’s because as humans, we are really good at that.

Social Selling: Social Selling is not about understanding LinkedIn. It’s about understanding social media and what it’s like to be social.

I was going to elaborate on that and say trust is transferred. The fact that Hesha Abrams, who’s been on this show before, introduced us that trust gets transferred, “I think this is someone that would be a good guest on your show.” I read your book and bio, and I go, “Yes,” and then we start bonding. That concept of trust being transferred is something I wanted the audience to take away from this interview because you are big on that. Those warm introductions cannot be beaten in terms of social selling. If somebody is liking and comments on a post that you have made and you happen to know that person who liked and commented, there’s an example of social selling in action.

It’s about building trust and building it at scale. One of the things that you get a lot of people saying that they don’t do or they don’t like is, for example, posting something personal. Now, if you think about sales and the way that we have solved it for years, you say to a salesperson. How is it that you get the salesperson to trust you? You say, “I took them to the Super Bowl. We went out for a meal.” I said, “Did you take some brochures?” They say, “Don’t be so stupid. Of course, I didn’t do that.” I said, “What did you talk about?” “I talked about the fact that we like barbecues. We go to France.” “You are talking about yourselves?” “Yeah.” That’s how we bond, we learn about each other.

LinkedIn is a platform where you can learn about each other. One of the sales guys that work for me basically has just posted the fact that he’s taken his dogs for a walk. He’s English, but he lives in France. Now, if you have got dogs that are similar to that, you are going to look at that and go, “That looks fantastic. I can see it’s French the way it looks. I love France.” All of a sudden what you are doing is that you are bonding with that person. I won’t bond with someone posting a brochure or some brochure warehouse, or saying how great their company is. What I do is bond with you because I see that you are a human being.

I have a story about that in action, and then I’m going to ask you to share a story either from the book or what you worked with companies on. I was up for speaking at the Olympus medical sales convention, their kickoff meeting, and it was between me and another speaker. During that process, I saw that one of their VPs at a division had reached out to connect with me on LinkedIn. I accepted the request, and then I started looking at some of the posts he’s made. I instinctively just started liking and commenting on a couple of things I resonated with.

Later he told me that when they had the big meeting and they looked at my book and the other speaker’s book, our videos, and all the other things that he raised his hand, and this is always what you want is somebody to be your inside brand ambassador saying, “I really think we should pick John because I’m trying to teach my sales team to like and comment on the doctor’s social media posts. He did it to me. He walks his talk if he comes in, and encourages our team to do that.” I thought, what an amazing story of social selling in action that got me a speaking job. I’m sure there are other examples of that human connection that you might have to share.

We have got lots of examples. One of those is one of my sales team posts a picture of him and his son on the beach. It happened to be during COVID. It was his son’s sixteenth birthday. There was a lockdown. His son wanted to be out with his mates getting drunk, but he, unfortunately, had to go with his boring dad and they live by the sea and he took some photos. I just wanted to get the figures right. Off that post that he posted, he got 165 likes, 37 comments, and 18,000 views, which is pretty okay, and you would have seen lots of things like that on LinkedIn, but the thing is that behind it is a methodology.

That methodology allowed him to harvest that post to get 124 leads, 6 C-level meetings, 2 proposals, and 1 purchase order, and it took him 10 minutes to do that. Now, there’s not one single piece of demand gen out there that allows you to get that level of traction and results by doing something in that shorter time. That’s just an example of where people are using social media as a mechanism to get meetings and conversations that turn into commercial interactions, so sales.

Now, I think a lot of people reading are going to be wondering, is that post on LinkedIn or Instagram, or does it matter?

That particular post was on LinkedIn. One of the things that we talk about is the need nowadays to understand how to walk digital corridors and have digital conversations. What you will find is that a lot of people will teach you about LinkedIn. It’s not about understanding LinkedIn, it’s about understanding social media and what it’s like to be social. What that allows you to do is to pick up that skill and say, “I need to get in contact with the head of human resources. They are not active on LinkedIn, but they walk their dogs, and they have got two Labradors, and I know that they are on Instagram.”

[bctt tweet=”It’s about building trust and building it at scale.” username=”John_Livesay”]

How do I go across to Instagram, and basically enable me to have a conversation, so I don’t go to the person and say, “Buy my product because we are great.” Everybody says that. It doesn’t differentiate you. What you need to do is to do something different. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram, it allows you to walk that digital corridor and have that digital conversation. That’s fundamentally different from, “How do I hack the algorithm on LinkedIn,” which actually doesn’t help you.

What I’m hearing you say is it doesn’t matter what platform you are using, be yourself on all of them. Would that be accurate?

What you are looking for is to be your authentic self. In a world where everybody goes to a market and says exactly the same thing. The only thing that differentiates you is your experience, who you are, and what you believe in. That’s the thing that differentiates you as a salesperson.

In our pre-chat, I was talking about you being in England and I have a King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. I shot a short video of me with a baseball cap on taking my dog out for a morning walk. As I was narrating that, I said, when I took my dog to dog training, the trainer asked me, “Are you walking out the door first or is the dog?” I said, “I guess he walks out first and I follow.” He said, “No, you are making a mistake. Dogs are pack animals. You must be the first person out the door to be the leader of the pack” I just had this thought of, “How gay am I, as an openly gay man, that my little King Charles dog is butcher than I am?” That was me being authentically myself.

Dogs actually like hierarchy. You going to need to be a butch, John.

This dog is butcher than I am because he’s walking out the door fast. That was two minutes, and it was a cute little video. That got so many other fellow dog lovers to comment and connect with me. There are lots of ways to be authentic. I thought you’d like that story.

For those that are reading this to understand, if you post pictures or videos about your King Charles Spaniel all the time, they are going to assume that you are a dog walker. The same as if you are posting pictures of yourself on the beach, they are just going to assume that you spend all the time on the beach. When someone comes to your LinkedIn profile, what they need to see is what you stand for. In the B2B space where I work, what they are looking for is an expert.

You may have read the Matthew Dixon book on The JOLT Effect. What people are looking for is an expert. They are looking for somebody that can help them. When they do that, they are looking to see, does that person have that experience. Also, they are looking to see that if they are going to buy something, they are going to build a relationship with you. How do they do that? There are three things that you need to look at, and this is what we do in terms of helping people. The first thing you need is a buyer-centric profile.

What do you mean by the word, buyer-centric?

Social Selling: HubSpot says that the average person spends 2 to 4 minutes on a website.

A buyer-centric profile is a profile that is attractive to your buyer. The mistake that we all make is that, especially in sales, we think it’s about ourselves, and we think, “We are great relationship builders. I have been to President’s Club 5 out of 6 times.” That isn’t what buyers want. What buyers want is, does that person understand my business? Does that person understand my business needs? Will that person sell something, and then disappear? What we are looking for is someone that’s going to help us. What we need to do is come across as that. Now, the more you share about yourself, and we have done research on this, the more people will walk toward you. This is transformation.

When you look over at LinkedIn and you see salespeople, the first thing you think is, “I don’t like you. I don’t believe a word you say. You are just going to try and sell me something I don’t want.” That’s what buyers are thinking. By becoming buyer-centric, people are going, “I think that person can help me.” We know now, because the research shows this, that people under 30 search more on social media than they do on Google. We actually do it at the same time.

Quite often though, we use Google because we know what we want. Give me the capital of Nigeria. Tell me about the best Italian restaurants in London. The problem with Google is if you go to Google now and put in, what is the best CRM system, it won’t tell you. What will happen is there will be loads of people buying that search.

What happens is that people come to social. Quite often, they don’t know what they want. It’s called discovery rather than search. What’s happening is that they come, and make that discovery. They are looking for people again. It’s about thinking about, how can I get people to come and find me. Now, I’m not saying that you sit at home hoping that people are going to find you. We are going to talk about prospects at the moment. For example, for one of our clients, Namos Consulting, we have taught them how to have buyer-centric profiles. The other thing that we taught them is about building a network. What you need is a wide and varied network as you can.

This is about connecting into the account, so not going to them and saying, “Buy my product because we are great,” actually, going to them and saying, “I’m really interested in what you are doing. I’d love to connect with you because I’d like to learn from you.” This is switching it around from me trying to pitch to you. If anyone comes to you and basically flatters you, you fall for it. What you are able to do is then turn that into conversations.

The way that LinkedIn works is as you build up that network, what you are trying to do is getting the people that you are trying to influence, the customers that you are trying to sell to into that network, and all the people that it may influence them. You are doing that because the way that search works on LinkedIn is that it’s based on your network.

You need to get people in that network so that when they start searching, they will find you. For example, Namos Consulting. We taught them 2 of those 3 things. What happened was that one of the buyers was online looking for what it is that they sell, which is Oracle Consulting. The buyer said, “You look like a person that’s interesting.” He walks towards the salesperson, and you just don’t get that. What happened was that turned into a $2.6 million deal. They have subsequently taken another $500,000 out of that customer. This is what I’m saying, this is where people are using social as a mechanism to get conversations, doing it at scale, and making significant money from it.

You said there are three things, have a buyer-centric profile, build a network, and the third one is?

The third thing is content. Content is important because one of the things that we do when we are buying is that we are looking for content and insight. We are looking to be told things that we don’t know. We are not looking for brochures. Brochures and brochureware sit on the website. If I want to see whether you exist as a company, I will go to your website. HubSpot says that the average person spends 2 to 4 minutes on a website. That’s it. “Okay, they exist. I’m back.” I’m looking for a solution to my problem. I know I have got to talk to a salesperson. What I’m looking for is someone that can help you.

[bctt tweet=”A buyer-centric profile is a profile that is attractive to your buyer.” username=”John_Livesay”]

If people are posting authentic content about themselves, in accounting, for example. I think that the top three things impacting telco companies are the three things. For example, I met the chief financial officer of Vodafone, which is our biggest mobile company. I met that person and said to him, “What are the 3 to 5 things that are impacting telcos?” He told me, “You could walk out of that meeting, and turn that into the content.”

You wouldn’t necessarily mention the person or the company, but you could say, “This is insight.” As people say, what do you think? That would create a discussion. What happens is that would then go through people’s networks. You would then find people finding you go, “This person seems to know about accounting in telcos. I think I need to talk to them.” They then start inviting you in.

As a storytelling keynote speaker, I’m constantly posting clips of my talks on my LinkedIn profile. Part of your job as a speaker is to get through the clutter of all the other speakers out there and get bureaus to want to represent you, so you have all ways to build relationships and all that good stuff. You hear occasionally these, what I was calling urban myths, like an actor being discovered at the Schwab’s Drugstore.

Every once in a while, someone will say, “Somebody reached out to me and wanted to represent me, or they heard me speak,” and I thought that would be amazing. I thought that was just for a very few people that I couldn’t imagine that ever happening. A-Speakers Bureau based in Denmark reached out to me on LinkedIn and said, “We have been following you on LinkedIn. We see your clips, and we think we would like to represent you.” I was surprised.

I can believe that story. We get inbound all of the time. Part of that is you set it up. For example, I spoke at one of Hewlett-Packard’s kickoffs. I had basically decided that Hewlett-Packard was one of my key targets, so I connected to a whole bunch of people at Hewlett-Packard. It’s like a source sitting there simmering on great visuals. They then come and contact you. Someone says, “I don’t believe this social selling works.” You say, “How do you think I have got this speaker gig?”

People forget speakers have to sell themselves.

I have sat in front of so many CEOs. They fold their arms and say, “I don’t believe this works.” I say, “How do you think I got this meeting?”

One of the things I want to ask you about your wonderful book, Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers, is the future of personal branding. Everyone always is interested in the future. Since you have your pulse on the zeitgeist, what do you think the future of personal branding is?

I think personal branding is so important. The thing quite often with personal branding is that people see it as being, I see Kim Kardashian, Brian Solis, and these influencers, and think, “I could never be like that.” This is about them thinking I have got to go from 0 to 100, where really where they need to go is from 0 to 1.

Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers is the future of personal branding

Part of that is saying, “First and foremost, I need to have a buyer-centric profile. I need to do the basics out there to have a profile that is at least attractive to my bias.” Quite often, people don’t understand how to create content. Again, it’s about going to the gym. When I first went to the gym, I thought all the weights were really heavy. After you have been there six months, you go, “These weights aren’t heavy enough.”

Creating content is like a muscle, you just get used to doing it. One of the things that we are still going through a process is getting leaders to understand that this is how you prospect now. Quite often, people think of going onto LinkedIn, changing their profile, and creating content and a network. I can’t be bothered to do it because I have got all these other things to do. This is how we prospect. This is how we as a business run. What people need to do is make that switch to say, “In 2023, we need to stop using 1980s sales methods, and we need to start using 2023 sales methods.” It’s making sure that leaders understand that switch.

I think what you are saying is exactly what I say the old way of doing it is to push out information, as you said, brochures. The new way is to tell stories, which I love to teach people how to tell stories, and you are teaching people how to use social selling. Both of those things pull people in. If your content is story, people remember it, repeat it, and share it. I think that’s really the secret to all of this new way of being magnetic instead of repulsing. You pull people in with social selling and storytelling. Thank you so much. If people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way?

Thank you so much for having me on. It’s been fantastic talking to you. The best place to get me is on LinkedIn. I’m Timothy Hughes on LinkedIn. The website is DLAIgnite.com. I’m also @Timothy_Hughes on Twitter.

Thanks, Tim.

Thank you so much.

It’s so great talking with you. Congrats on the huge success and influence you are having. I’m sure that buyers and sellers are embracing this because nobody wants to be pushy, and you have shown us a new way.