Joseph 3 Step Formula: How I Got Started In Social Selling

Saturday, April 5, 2014

How I Got Started In Social Selling

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When I had my first real sales job about 10 years ago, there certainly was sales process and there certainly was not social media. About 3 years ago I got hired by a tiny startup of about 60-ish people called HootSuite in Vancouver, BC as the corporate sales trainer. What a perfect place to blend solid sales process with social media! Around that same time, the only remnants of anything called social selling was an educational site called Social Selling University by spearheaded by a now good friend Koka Sexton. Koka’s thoughts and concepts of building twitter lists of prospects, customers, influencers, competitors and more was a revolutionary approach to organizing Twitter into a social selling dashboard for a busy sales person to monitor and listen for industry information and for potential buyer signals.

I began adopting a lot of these Twitter tricks and supercharging them by using the HootSuite dashboard to organize these lists and other searches all in one view. During this same time there were other tools emerging as pioneers of the social selling space like Nimble, Socedo, Trendspottr, NeedTagger and others. As partners of HootSuite, I got to interact with these great minds and became particularly good friends with Jon Ferrara who is easily one of my favorite people and pioneers of social selling.

Enter 2012 and social selling was actually returning some serious page results on Google but it wasn’t quite yet defined. I had been experimenting and trying to prove out certain concepts. It was during this period that I encountered two people that I absolutely adore: Jill Rowley and Jamie Shanks. Both of whom I spoke to either online or offline to discuss what was happening in the industry or who I sought for advice on social selling training.

Time flies and now in 2014, social selling is on everyone’s mind because it has such a profound impact on sales success and through empowering salespeople marketers could put a face to their brand and humanize it. And just as social selling is evolving, I find myself in the forefront of a field that is moving so fast and is changing so rapidly and thankful that I can share my knowledge and expertise to clients all over the world with NexLevel Sales. But I have to admit, it’s sometimes nice to take a break, and that’s precisely what happened this week.

About 2 weeks ago I was approached by Evolve! and kitedesk to participate in a list - fast forward 2 weeks and it turns out the list is actually called the Top 30 Social Salespeople in the World and would be appearing in Forbes. Koka pointed out that in 2 days the article had been shared over 5K times. For the first time in my life I couldn’t respond to the flood social messages, texts, and emails. It was a surreal time and a time that a group of people who have worked very hard together to shape a concept and an industry got to kick back and admire the body of work that has shaped. Below is the infographic they put together which culminates my social selling journey to where I am today.