Social Sales with Brynne Tillman: Customer Café Podcast
It is clear to us why Brynne Tillman is the CEO of Social Sales Link. She knows how to connect, start, develop and deepen relationships strategically. In this episode of Customer Café, you can score a slew of tips and strategies for maximizing LinkedIn to leverage your time, and land and expand your pipeline and revenue. (Brynne is also impressively the Membership Chair of the West Orange Chamber of Commerce and Co-host of Making Sales Social.
You can and should tune in wherever you listen to podcasts including Spotify, Apple, or here.
We did not capture the many useful examples and hacks here:
Good swag ideas?
She prefers mugs. (At Customer Café, we couldn’t agree more!) Her fav mug? “You’re on Mute!”
What is Social Sales Link?
“A sales training company that focuses on LinkedIn as the tool. We teach social selling. I believe that we teach it from a completely different perspective than most people in the industry. Because we actually believe social selling is about starting conversations not making sales. It’s really about building rapport, providing real value, developing trust and credibility, by being a resource and detaching from what the prospect is worth to us and attaching to what we are worth to them. The sale will come when the time is right when you do it right.”
Are we just talking about top of funnel with social selling?
You need to “land and expand.” Yes, it is about TOFU, but it is also about nurturing and cultivating your champion and meeting new champions in the company. By staying in touch in the company, you’ll want those warm introductions.
“LinkedIn you go in and you buy your map. Here are the 17 other people in the organization that I should be having conversations with. And now we bring those names to our buyer and our internal person, they may say of these 17 people I feel comfortable bringing you into six of them. Some of those six can bring you into the other 11 over time. LinkedIn is great for land and expand. The top of the funnel is the land.”
What do people get WRONG with social selling?
“It comes down to bringing the right resources to the right people without coming across as salesy. The moment they feel like you are trying to pitch they run. Most of these folks are not looking to buy your solution.” Rarely do you have people reaching out to you about your solution.
“Recognize that when you are starting conversations with these people, if you start with a connect and pitch, they’re gone. They didn’t show up at your profile or comment on your content or show up in a list they didn’t even know they were showing up in to be sold. We have to earn that right.”
5 Steps to getting started with social sales?
- Start social listening
- Create a value-centric profile
- Curate content
- Create content
- Engage with content* (Most important according to Brynne.)
Why is engaging with content the most important thing to do in social sales?
“Engaging is vital in getting your buyers to like you. 50% or more of your time should be engaging with other people.” That is how you matter to them. “Ring their bell and engage with targeted people’s content. Slow down our outreach to speed up our outcome. Be conscious and thoughtful of who you are reaching out to. Engage two or three times per person and then reach out.”
Pro tip: Use Listen Notes to identify similar content that might interest your prospect. Talk to them about topics and provide resources that they care about. “Start conversations with the right people.”
Brynne provides a slew of tips and hacks on how to do this. You’ll have to listen for those!
Why start with social listening and what is it?
Identify “who your ideal buyer that happens to be on LinkedIn. You may have an ideal buyer that isn’t there prominently, so there may be someone else in the organization by title that just is showing up more often on LinkedIn. So sometimes we talk about going as high and as warm as you possibly can go, but we prefer warm first. If it is a little bit lower, warm matters. Building out the persona of the people we want to have conversations with and looking at what the content they are engaging with. Look at their recommendations, what is the value they are bringing to their clients. What industry do they serve? That is important. When we can get curious about our prospects’ clients, we can really show up in a way that serves them.
How and why should LinkedIn profiles serve as a resource and not a resume?
“You need a value-centric profile. People work with us because we bring them value. Corporate Visions did a study that says 74% of buyers choose use the sales rep or company that was the first to add value or insight – not the lowest bid.”
“People choose the person that consulted with them. The person that got them to think differently about the way they were doing things.”
How do you create FOMO?
Target the right people. “Decide what the goal is and develop a plan around that goal.”
Then, don’t rush to pitch or even to share content.
“Don’t just send the link to content. Ask permission to send the link. If you send the link they can click anytime and there is no conversation started. They have to at least say ‘sure’ or ‘yes’ to get the link.”
Brynne’s company A/B tested this. Of 100 first-degree connections, 19 clicked through. Of 100 when asked 69 said “yes” and 58 clicked through.
How do you get them to ask?
If you don’t pitch or push what you do, eventually they will ask. “Show up as a resource, not a salesperson.” In doing so you will make them curious about you and what you do, and they will ask. “When they ask, they will listen.”
Don’t get too personal.
LinkedIn is a professional social networking platform. “If you want this platform to work for you as a business development platform, you need to show up that way.” Save the pics of your adorable children or grandchildren for truly purely social platforms. She saves that for Facebook, for her “bubbie page.” “Show your professional face on LinkedIn.”
Should everyone do LinkedIn Premium?
No! Waste not want not.
“Take baby steps. Start with the free version.” If you want to build up and go pro, try out Sales Navigator. Brynne likens the experience to joining a gym. You need to get started before signing up for advanced classes. It would be a waste.
When should you socially surround?
When you are hunting whales. You need to collaborate internally to network and connect with their internal network and team. Teamlink in Sales Navigator can be incredibly helpful in this work. Start listening at minute 37 to learn how to round up the troops to land a whale.
Use the social media platform that your prospects are using!
How does Brynne learn and grow professionally?
Brynne listens to audiobooks and podcasts regularly. She recently read Trust and Inspire by Stephen Covey and highly recommends it. “I spend a lot of time learning and then thinking about how to use it in social selling.”
“One of the things I love about my industry, social selling, is that most of us believe that high tide rises all boats. So, I am in chat groups with all of my competitors and we’re sharing all the new features. That is part of why I absolutely love what I do. So, there are people like Kevin Turner who is on top of every new feature and shares. We are an incredibly collaborative community. From a LinkedIn and Social Selling perspective, it is my competitors. We are collaborating in a wonderful way.”
Also check out LinkedInLibrary.com. Brynne has tons of resources there!
Want more? Tune in! Customer Café by Collabria is available wherever you listen to podcasts including Spotify, Apple, or here!
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Looking for more to listen to? Join Menachem Pritzker and Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, hard core Collabrians, as we drink coffee and learn from collaborative leaders in sales, customer success and account management.
Ready to get started? Customer Café by Collabria: Sales Collaboration Tips for Pros is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
