#Social Selling

Over the last couple weeks, I've been to a few conferences in the SF Bay Area, including the Sales 2.0 Event and the Eloqua Experience.  One of my big surprises was that "Social Selling" was a huge focus of these two events.  Until this point, I figured this was a buzzword of hyper-connected sales people in the Bay Area looking for an excuse to be on Twitter all day long.  It turns out this is an up and coming focus in enterprise sales with some of the leading "old school" companies encouraging their reps to curate content through social channels.

After hearing a few lectures and talking to dozens of people about such topics, I'm a new found believer, even going so far as to focus on expanding my Twitter and LinkedIn connections.  

One positive side effect that I noticed as a result of this new focus is that I'm becoming an equal opportunity networker.  In the past, I fear that I had a very short-sided view of business conversations, opting to focus on those that would have an immediate impact on my pipeline and quota.  I'm no longer considering people potential "prospects" and am instead seeing them as potential future advocates.  

The long term benefits of this shift in thinking will hopefully be an increased network from which to reap referrals, gain introductions, or cultivate future opportunities.  

The short term benefits are that I'm actually enjoying meeting people more than I did in the past.  I'm not a shy person, but I've always been somewhat private, so striking up small talk with a complete stranger over a cheap cocktail has always felt a little forced.  Shifting my vision from sales to building a social referral network has made these events a lot more fun. 

Of course, the key to all of this will be posting interesting, relevant content, positioning oneself as a thought leader and industry expert; otherwise we're just a bunch of narcissists overly focused on our number of "followers."