Tim Hughes explains why most social selling fails: people treat social media like advertising instead of building real conversations. He warns that platform changes and paid access can wreck your pipeline, and says the secret is human connection, not direct selling.
Chapters
Because what we're doing is that we're trying to build that, that human connection. And what we do is we actually use a particular case study of a large organization and we go through the.
Politics, there's certain platforms and I know this from personal experience. I'm sure your clients do too. Like Facebook. I've spent a ton of time, energy and effort cultivating audiences on a few Facebook pages. One of them for my online students, where they have to apply. He's written not one, not two, but three best selling books on how to sell through social media. LinkedIn has said he's one of the top 10 sales experts in the world in online selling.
But I think what happened was that when Elon Musk changed Twitter or X, the fact that you needed to pay for it, everybody across the board said, okay, we're going to charge. You know, I was on a call yesterday and, and the person said to me, we've got no pipeline, nothing. We can't generate it. There's nothing that we can do. And I've had people say to me, yeah, but I'm sharing value. It's a brochure, you're sharing.
It's the holy grail of selling. Everyone wants it, everyone dreams of it. Posting ideas, pictures, information about your products, your services on Facebook, Twitter, X, LinkedIn and having sales come to you. We've all dreamed about it, we've heard about it, we've watched the Gary Vaynerchuk youtubes and yet for most of us it slips through our fingers. Well, I'm very happy today to have one of the most world renowned experts on social selling. This is what he's done. He's written not one, not two, but three best selling books on how to sell through social media. LinkedIn has said he's one of the top 10 sales experts in the world in online selling. He's been ranked number one by Analytica as one of the most influential social selling experts. He is all over the place, he walks the talk. And we're going to learn fantastic lessons today on what we can do to do a better job of selling in our own business. I'm very excited to introduce our guest today, Tim Hughes. Tim, thanks for joining us.
Hi tj, it's really exciting to be here.
Our audience is excited about having you as well. So let's dive right in. I'm sure I'm not alone where every, every couple of years since about 2006, I get all excited. I watch a Gary Vaynerchuk video and I think I'm Gonna be great at this social media selling and I do a bunch of tweets or I start a podcast or I start a new series where I go live on Facebook every day. And a month or two later I'm like, eh, nothing much is happening. Guess it doesn't work and forget about it. I've been guilty of that. I know a lot of your clients have done that. What's the real difference between people who think about it, which is everyone, people who start, which is, I don't know, 90% of the world, and people who all go all the way through the funnel and make something meaningful happen to their business, their bottom line and their customers.
I think that I love Gary. I think he's brilliant and the advice that he gives is excellent. I think that the mistake that most people make is that they think that social media is the same as the world has always been. So for example, what's happened is that we've always had what has been called interrupt marketing, which is there's an advert, it interrupts you and there's a pitch cold calling is there's an interruption and I pitch. And email marketing is I interrupt you and I pitch. And people seem to think that what we do with social media is that they come to social media, you're going to interrupt me and I pitch. And it doesn't work like that. And, and what Gary and says, and he's very true about that, is it's social media. So we have to understand that being on social media, here we are talking, I mean, you're just, you and your team are just amazing experts at the way that you're able to broadcast using this, this technology. And it's amazing how we can have that at our fingertips. But what we're not doing is we're not going on and saying, you know, here's my product, buy it. What we're doing is we're having a conversation, we're sharing insights and that's the thing that people are wanting. You know, put yourself in the buyer's shoes. The buyer is going onto social media because they, they, they may have a problem, they may not know what the problem is and they're looking for a solution. They're not, you know, if, if you want to, if they want to read a brochure, they'll go to your website. What they're looking for is someone that's going to help them. So they're looking for an expert. So basically the mist, as I say, the mistake that everybody makes is that they think I need to go onto social media and sell stuff. The more you try and sell on social media, the worse the outcome will be.
And we should know. Tim's been talking to me for a while now. He didn't say, and everyone's got to go buy my book. Buy my book. He's had a conversation to be helpful to you and to me and that being sociable brings out reciprocity. And now I want to reciprocate. So I naturally want to talk about and bring people's attention to his latest book, which is Social Techniques to Influence Buyers and Change Makers. The second edition, which you could buy right now. Thank you very much for holding it up. See, that's social and organic.
