Con Sotidis breaks down social selling on LinkedIn: it's not spamming, but a four-step approach of building a strong profile, connecting with the right people using an Ideal Client Profile, sharing thought-leadership content, and nurturing relationships offline where actual sales happen.
Hello and welcome to our channel on YouTube and also on TikTok. This is Conso Tudas from the Social Selling Warrior, also known as Mr. LinkedIn on Instagram. So today I thought we would relaunch our YouTube channel and we'd start off with doing a bit of a bit of a review, I suppose, of what. I do and how I support people going forward. So my name is Colin, like I said, and I've been in sales for quite a few years. While my background is mainly in accounting and also moved on from that into HR learning development, where I gained a lot of my sales experience in selling learning management systems and other SaaS platforms, one of the vehicles I found was really, really effective for me was LinkedIn. LinkedIn was an amazing platform that provided me with pipeline opportunities, conversations, relationships, all those things packaged into one. Now, contrary to what many people might think about LinkedIn, it's more than just a resume or a recruiting platform. Yes, probably about 15, 20 years ago it was, and that's why LinkedIn sort of got to the fore and became a prominent platform. But the last probably 7 to 8 years, I would say, my experience, it's really morphed into becoming a business-to-business networking platform in that it provides businesses, people who work in those businesses, opportunities to network and to create relationships that can further themselves as a career or even position their business and their brand for additional opportunities that come their way. So when we talk about LinkedIn, there's a concept that goes around and we talk a lot about is social selling. Now social selling is nothing new, and in fact a lot of LinkedIn trainers and coaches don't like the word social selling, but I've adopted it as you can see as part of my logo. Because I really like the word and the phrase, sorry, and it also captures a lot of things about what we do. But let me put it up front here, we don't sell, we don't spam on LinkedIn. Even though we have social selling as a word, as a phrase, we do not sell on LinkedIn. So let's have a look about social selling and what I do. So social selling is predicated on 4 key pillars. Now LinkedIn developed these and put these out there in the big wide world as part of their developments and their sales push for Sales Navigator, which is a premium product of LinkedIn, and we'll talk about that in a future video. So social selling, the first part of social selling, and it's got a very much a linear approach to it. So we have profile. It is proven over and over again that people buy from people. Once someone knows, likes, and trusts you, they will eventually want to have a conversation with you and hopefully, most likely, buy from you. So although we have company pages on LinkedIn, and that's another video for some other time, it It's always important to focus on your personal profile from the beginning. That's where you're going to get people connecting with you. That's where you'll get traction on your posts and so forth. So profile, develop a rockstar profile, something you can be proud of, something that symbolizes who you are, your brand, and identifies what you do and how you help. And again, in a future video, we'll go through that in a bit more detail. Secondly, it is about connection, and that is about connecting with the right people. A lot of marketers and a lot of branding personnel will tell you about developing an ICP, an ideal client profile. Develop an avatar that symbolizes that particular client you're targeting. Once you've done that, LinkedIn provides you an opportunity via its very powerful search engine to input those parameters and identify the people you'd like to connect and/or follow. So connection is key. Connection will give you traction. Connection will give you relationships, and connection will give you conversations. The third one is thought leadership, or what LinkedIn calls engaging with insights. Now, thought leadership is about educating your network. It's about positioning yourself as an expert in your field and allowing others to see that and for you to shine through and put that out there in that big wide world of LinkedIn. Now there's different ways you can do that. You can do that by videos like I'm doing now. You can do that by carousels, by documents. You can do it by audio. There's a number of mediums you can use. To position yourself as a thought leader in our industry. Thought leadership will give you awareness. It's about positioning yourself, and that's why a lot of thought leaders on the platform are in creator mode. Their aim is to ensure that they're getting people eyeballs on their content. Connection is important, but for them, followers is more important for them to see the content they're producing. Again, that's a video for the future where we'll talk about creator mode and why should you, why should you not go into creator mode. So what's the last part of the social selling approach? This is the most obvious one, and this is what we're all about. It's about nurturing relationships. So it's okay to have all these Ticked off. But if you're not doing that, you're not being effective on the platform. Continue to interact, continue to comment, continue to reach out in the DM and the message to people about what you do, how you do it, to encourage them to have what we call an offline conversation. A Zoom call, a coffee, a meeting. That and only that is where you do your selling. Once you get them out off the platform in a one-on-one conversation, your sales process can kick in. But the aim of LinkedIn and the whole social selling strategy is to get to this. This is what we call The gold. This is a champagne moment. Once you get to there with your connections, you know you're successful in these 3 points. So let's summarize again quickly as we wind up this video. As a Social Selling Warrior, my aim and my intention with all my clients is to build rockstar profiles. To create a brand that's powerful and that can put them out there in the platform, on the platform, and something they can be proud of, but also that others can see and can get a sense of what they're on about. My next aim with my clients is to support them in connecting with the right people, finding the right people, seeing where they are connecting with them, creating conversations. I then move into coaching them in relation to thought leadership, and that's all about being able to create content to support them on the platform and to position them in a more effective manner. We want them to be known for their expertise. Lastly, I educate them and coach them into how to nurture relationship. What kind of message to send, when to send them, and so forth. Because that's where, like we said, that's where the gold lies— nurturing relationships. So that's what I do as a Social Selling Warrior, and that's why I've adopted that name. Hopefully you found this helpful. In future videos, we'll go through these in a bit more detail, but also we'll unpack some of the tools that we use that support us in undertaking some of these processes. Till next time, I'm Con Sotidis from the Social Selling Warrior. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe to the channel. We will be doing a lot more of these, and we look forward to talking to you either online via the YouTube videos and TikTok, or via face-to-face conversation. Take care, and we'll talk to you soon.
