People first thought social media was just about taking pictures of your lunch. But now, it has evolved into something bigger, making social selling the norm of business marketing. If you don’t have a strong online presence, you are missing a huge opportunity. Mark Cox sits down with Timothy Hughes, co-founder and CEO of DLAignite, to discuss how to effectively generate revenue and get back to a growth trajectory through social selling techniques. Tim explains how to use LinkedIn and other social media platforms not to mindlessly promote your business but to build influence, make genuine connections, and start meaningful conversations. He also talks about the role of a changemaker in an organization and their role achieving collective success.
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How To Influence Buyers And Changemakers Through Social Selling With Timothy Hughes
How many of us are leveraging social media effectively for B2B sales growth? Frankly, not enough. If I look at the funnel, we're not doing enough. We're not doing it effectively. I'm excited to speak to our guest, Tim Hughes. Tim is ranked number one by Analytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top sales experts globally. Brand24 announced that he's the sixteenth most influential person in marketing globally based on measured social media influence and huge credentials in social.
He's also the Cofounder and CEO of DLAignite. He is the co-author of the book we're going to be discussing called Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. It's a great book. Candidly, somehow I missed this one when you think of all the episodes we have done. This book was released in 2016. It hit my radar because the second edition was released a couple of years ago. It was so insanely successful. It's a fantastic book.
I'll throw in a couple of things that jumped out at me reading this book. There was a different approach taken with social where social has to be an overall business strategy. It has to be a social strategy at the most senior levels in the company, not just posting. We have always been very good at posting within the funnel but having this is part of a strategy.
The second thing that was news to me was to focus on social listening, not just talking. You think of social as being social, meaning, what would happen if we were at a physical cocktail party? We wouldn't talk about us and post things. We would be listening and engaging with people. I also like the learning point for me that LinkedIn is about 30% social. For our company, it's probably 85% of what we do.
Tim talks a lot about having a LinkedIn strategy. Twitter and Instagram are the two other channels that have a significant impact. He talked about the five measures of digital organization. It's thinking about not just sales but, 1.) Visibility and recognition in the marketplace. 2.) Your digital strategy enables you to have trusted advisor status. 3.) You should be able to build a measurable pipeline socially. 4.) Access to the best talent and skills because of that social media presence, and then employee engagement, keeping your team more engaged because of your social strategy.
These are three things we get into when we talk about exactly what we do to get out of the gate. We have to think about, number one, a buyer-centric profile on LinkedIn. Do we have a recruiting profile so that if a recruiter comes to us, we look attractive? Do we have a buyer-centric profile where if a buyer takes a look at us, they can see that we can add value and insight to them? We have to think about those digital territories and talk about LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter or X as it's called now. Finally, content. What is it we're posting? How are we engaging?
We had an interesting conversation. Tim is a believer that you should be able to measure the return on investment of almost any keystroke associated with social, doing this with a focus on return on investment. He's a very interesting fellow. There's a lot of learning for me in this. I hope there are lots of learning for you in this. If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. Here's Tim Hughes with Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers.
Tim, welcome. It's great to meet you.
Thanks, Mark. I'm excited to be here and talk about some things to do with sales.
I'm super excited to have you here because I have finished Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I'll be honest with you. I'm a little embarrassed to say I've only recently read this book because everybody on the show knows how many of these books I read. This one is spectacular but it was originally written in 2015 and published in 2016. It was so enormously popular. We're on the second edition.
The one with the white cover was published in 2016. This one was published in 2022.
Thank you so much, Tim. It's a critically important topic for all of us. I don't know if there's a CEO reading who isn't going to get a new LinkedIn connection from a financial planner. As soon as they accept it, they're going to get pitched financial planning services. If I allowed email to be open during an episode, I'm pretty sure it would happen to me during this episode.
There's this massive opportunity to understand social selling. Although we have been running our business for many years, we have had lots of compliments on our stuff. I learned a ton from this book. There were lots of things we were not doing correctly. Tell me a little bit about your journey of initially writing the book and the need for it. What have you seen that has been changing over the last few years since the first edition?
Thank you for asking me. I appreciate what you said about the book. I have to admit that a lot of people say it to me. A number of people have come to me and said I've changed their lives because they have been doing all the old-school things like cold calling and sending spam emails that don't work anymore. They know that the buyers have moved onto social media.
In terms of my background, I'm a salesperson. I've been in sales for 25 years. I worked for Oracle. I've been used to either selling to large enterprises. When I worked in the Oracle channel, I was generally selling to mid-market organizations, both big and small companies. I got involved in social media probably back in 2012 or 2013. I was involved in rolling out a very early social selling program in Oracle across about 4,000 people in Europe.
It was there that I bumped into the co-author of the first book. We got a book deal within three months. I then wrote it for another three months in 2015 and it came out in the fall of 2016. It took off. In the presale, people were falling over themselves to buy it. What happened was that during COVID, it took off again. My publisher came to me and said, "You have to do a second edition because people are interested in it."
What's changed? Social selling has become the norm. When we started our business, we were seen as niche. People laughed at us. People thought that social media was about taking pictures of your lunch. It's become mainstream. If you are not being reported at your board level about how much business you are generating through social media, you are way behind.
If you are not being reported at your board level about how much business you are generating through social media, you are way behind.
It's interesting that you started to talk about the board. That was one of the first things in the book that jumped out at me. You get away from any tactics around this initially and say, "An organization needs a social selling strategy for the business and the organization."
This is not a book about tactics, LinkedIn, or a personal brand. This is about how an organization can generate revenue and get back onto a growth trajectory by using socials strategically within the organization. That's fundamentally different from every single organization that's trying to sell you social selling materials and tactics across the whole of the world. We're the only people in the world who do this.
That was one of the things that hit me so hard because being one of these people who would have been a couple of inches deep on LinkedIn over the years, we were early into LinkedIn but in the first 50 pages, you bring up the fact that LinkedIn is only 30% of a social selling strategy. I had been so proud telling our team for so many years, "We're going to focus on LinkedIn." It jumped out. The book is filled with these facts, not just platitudes.
I'll go back to the strategy side of things. I enjoyed it at the beginning as well when you mentioned the board level. We work with a lot of mid-sized SaaS companies, larger manufacturing businesses, and some very large enterprises. We haven't heard from anybody that they're discussing the social selling or the digital organization strategy at the board level.
We're in some of those board meetings because in some cases, we're an outsourced chief revenue officer. This is an interesting thought. There are samples throughout the books but tell me the ones that are prominent for you where you've come into an organization that wasn't doing this, and you did get the right buy-in at the right level, the board level. Tell me a little bit about 1 case study or 2 of a program that worked very well when it started at that level.
We usually enter into an organization at the CRO level because the issue that we get is that they've got no pipeline and the feedback that we are getting is nobody has any pipeline. The reason for that is that they're still thinking of interruption marketing. They still think the practices that we had in the 1980s and 1990s are relevant in a digital world, and it's not.
Sixty-one percent of the world's population is on social media and is active on social media. Everybody who's on social media spends 2 hours and 23 minutes a day on social media. This is where people come to talk and have conversations. This is where your buyers, future employees, and future investors are. Everybody has moved to social and COVID accelerated that.
We know through working for years that we can grow people's revenues by 30% and shorten the sales cycle by 20%. We've got salespeople who are getting ten meetings a week by using social selling. I need to say that when someone sends you a message over social and they do a pitch lap or pitch, that's not social selling. That's spam. When you talked earlier on about the CEO getting a message saying, "I'm a wealth advisor. Can I help you," that's spam.
We have a definition of social selling, which comes across in the book. “Use your presence and behavior on social media to build influence, make connections, and grow relationships and trust, which leads to conversational and commercial interaction.” The key thing is that it doesn't matter how good your salespeople are and how much you train them on MEDDIC. They're not having conversations. Conversations create sales. It doesn't matter. You can train people to close deals but if they haven't got any deals in the first place, it's not going to help you.
From a strategic perspective, what we do is that explain to the CRO how we can increase revenue and shorten the sales cycles. All of our clients don't have a problem with the pipeline. I have this SDR who came to me and complained because he booked 25 meetings that week. He said, "I don't have enough time for the meetings I have." When you've got people cold calling and sending spam emails, they don't have that complaint.
What we're doing at a strategic level is once you go into an organization, you show them the power of creating influence online. You can take what I said, using your presence and behavior on social media to build influence and trust and make connections. You can do that in HR. What you are doing is immediately able to position yourself as the employer of choice on social media. You're able to suck up and get all the best talent.
You can do that in purchasing. You can make sure that you've got all the buyers with all the different things that are going on and the polycrisis we have with the supply chain and the differences in the supply chain. You can go out and get different suppliers at different rates. What we see suddenly is that this isn't just about selling. This is about an enterprise-wide strategy for the organization. It's about creating visibility for the organization and a better environment to work with. That's a board-level issue as much as the pipeline is. We're here to talk about sales but you did ask me about the strategy piece.
Those are the five measures of a digital organization that you touched on in the book. You talk about, 1) Visibility and recognition in the marketplace, 2) Trust or advisor status for whatever your core competency, and 3) Measurable pipeline, which we will get back to with a discussion on sales for sure. As you say with your HR, access to the best talent in the industry, and finally, employee engagement, leveraging social for employee engagement.
We have had lots of folks on the show. We have been talking about this disastrous situation of employee engagement. There are shocking numbers of people who are either disengaged or actively disengaged within businesses. Getting back to the positive on the sales side, another quote that I liked in the book that is going to keep most of the audiences quite interested is, "Every keystroke that a sales team makes can be measured against revenue and EBITDA." If that's the messaging here, I can't imagine there are too many boards or chief revenue officers out there that wouldn't perk up and say, "I would love to have a conversation about that."
We get a lot of people coming to us and saying that social media is about posting pictures of your lunch and stuff like that, and it's not. The feedback that I've got from most CEOs who have read the book is that this is the first book that shows that there's a connection between active use of social media and revenue. All the other books are about tactics. If you stand on one leg and put on a bandana, and then the algorithm does this, this is irrelevant. This is about your business. We use the term walking digital corridors and having digital conversations. LinkedIn is only 30% of your social graph, the people that you are trying to influence.
I remember going and seeing a friend of mine. I wrote an article about how you could get ten C-level meetings a week using Twitter. I wrote this years ago. It's on my LinkedIn profile. He said that the person that he was trying to get ahold of was a chief people officer. They weren't active on LinkedIn but they were active on Instagram. They were taking pictures. They were big. They had two dogs and they walked their dogs. They were sharing pictures of their dogs on Instagram. All of the skills that we have always had is the same but you need to be able to understand how to be social. It's not about how to use LinkedIn. It's about how to be social, pick that up, and take that to Instagram.
One of the things that we do in our social selling methodology is we do a lot of it on LinkedIn but we also teach people for 30 minutes how to use Twitter or what is now called X. What we're showing them is that this is about being social. We're going to go from LinkedIn to a different social platform. You're going to take all those things that you know and apply them. They go, "This is simple." This isn't about having to go to each platform and learn how to use them. It's about learning how to be social.
Social selling is not about going to each social media platform and learning how to use them. It is about learning how to be social.
We're going to talk a little bit about that. You've got the book, courses, and methodologies to teach people this but we will give them a few tips and tricks, knowing that it all starts with a strategy. One of the things that struck me, and I'll call myself the slow learner on this one, is we did spend a number of years posting. We weren't getting ten CEO meetings a week from posting. It was a fabulous credibility shield. When we were having a conversation with someone and they said, "Let's get to know in the funnel," it ended up being a very good credibility shield in the same way that a website was a good credibility shield years ago.
It wasn't wasted. We did get some inbound leads but the point we didn't grasp was being social. You make a couple of references to, "What if we jumped in the car and went to a place that had all of the best buyers for in-the-funnel?" What would you do if you walked into that cocktail party? Would you walk up dancing and pitching your product? Would you walk up and start having interesting conversations with people about them, their business, what's going on in their lives, and topics? Would you have those interesting conversations? That's what we do. We do the latter.
What we tried to do in the early days was outsource the listening part of social media. We had very junior people in our company doing the listening part of social media. God bless them. They were wonderful but they didn't understand how to respond when somebody said, "We're having this issue where we get first meetings with buyers but we never get a second meeting with buyers." Buyers are unengaged in that first discussion. They don't know what to do next. Where it started to change for us a little bit was when I took more ownership, "We're going to have those conversations." That is something that jumped out in the first half of the book to me big time.
The mistake that people make is that they think what we're going to do is do what we have always done on social media. We're going to take brochures and get the employees to push them out, "Won't that be great?" What happens is nothing because people don't come to social media to read brochures. That's what your website is for. I bet they don't read them on there either.
What people don't have is a strategy in terms of, "I've read an article that I need to post on social media." They post and then do something else. You got twenty likes on that. What did you do with them? They said, "What do you mean?" I said, "You got twenty likes on it. What did you do?" "I don't understand what you're talking about."
I said, "All those likes is a person digitally saying, 'I digitally resonate with your post.' Did you go and talk to them?" "No." "Why not? This is free business." We have been running a piece of research where we have been working out all the posts so that we know exactly what post works on social media, when to do it, and why to do it. What I mean by "works" is I don't mean it gets views or clicks. I mean that it generates revenue for the business.
To clarify, do you know the timing of the post for your business or all businesses?
It's for our business. We're doing it for two people. One of them is us. We know the type of posts that work and the type of posts that don't work. We have a client who got a $500 million deal off the back of posting something on LinkedIn. It is possible to get business by posting stuff but if you do it once, that's luck. What you want is a methodology to say, "I post something every week. Every week, I get a billion-dollar deal."
What we do is teach people to say, "For everything that you do on social media, there has to be a reason. There needs to be a methodology or a process so that you know when you are going to post something, why you're going to post it, and then how you are going to harvest the response that you get from it." For example, human posts work far better than corporate posts because most people see a brochure as corporate propaganda and won't read it.
For example, if you post a brochure, you will get little or no response at all. If you post a picture of yourself holding a brochure, that's something different because it's a human person. You may say, "I've been working for The Selling Well Podcast for six months. I love Mark. He's inspirational. He's empowered me to do these things." Everyone goes, "That's brilliant." We don't see that as selling but what you've done is put The Selling Well Podcast in front of me. What I'm able to do with my content is put that in front of people every single day. If you cold call people, how often a day can you cold call somebody?
It depends on your business and industry but you would have folks out there saying, "Let's get away from the nutty auto-dialers and generic 10 to 15 live conversations."
You couldn't cold call somebody every day or every week.
Not the same person.
You might not even be able to cold call them every month but every day, I put a piece of contract and go, "This is me. Here's the business issue. Here's another business issue. Here's the business issue that you may have." I can do that every single day. People get to know me, like me, and trust me. If I cold called you every single day, you wouldn't know, like, and trust me. You would come around to my house and probably shoot me.
Hopefully, not. You're posting every day and you get those numbers of likes. What do you do when you get the likes? I'll give you a real-world example as well. We did a post at the beginning of Q4. We talked about the importance during the Q4 sprint to recharge your batteries, take a pause, and make sure you stay balanced.
We got a few likes and a few thoughts there. Somebody came back and went, "What do you do to stay balanced?" I said, "Share what you do to keep a bit of balance." Different people were weighing in. Somebody went, "What do you do to stay balanced?" I put a post of a short video of a bar band that I play in where we were playing a gig. To your point, we have never had engagement like we had in that video. It's probably one of the top posts we have ever had.
I'm going to answer the question about content. You asked me to come up with things that your audience can implement straight away. Let me go on that and I'll talk about content. There are three things that you need to know and understand. The first thing is that you need to have a biocentric profile. What that means is that your profile on LinkedIn is a shop window to the world. LinkedIn is about to go past a billion people who are there. They walk past your profile every day. If your profile is the same as everybody else's like, "I'm a salesperson. I've been in President's Club," they're going to walk straight past.
What all buyers are looking for is an expert, someone who can help them. It's not about you or me. This is about them. What we are looking for when I talk about a biocentric profile is a profile that's going to show that you understand the business issues. It doesn't matter what age you are on this, whether you are my age, which is 1,000, or whether you are 23 or 25. You can show that you are an expert and people will stop. What we know is that most people under the age of 34 use social media to search more than they do search engines.
Social Selling: If your LinkedIn profile is the same as everybody else, people will walk straight past it. What all buyers are looking for is an expert and someone who can help them.
There's data produced by a guy called Simon Kemp who's on LinkedIn. He's a great person to follow. He produces data every quarter. It's free of charge. It shows that most people under the age of 34 use social. What we often do when we use search is we know the question to ask. When we use social media, generally, we don't know the question to ask. The problem with search is it doesn't give us the right answer. If I go onto Google and say, "What's the best CRM system in the world," you will get every single CRM vendor buying that search. It's a mess. We come to social media because we know it gives us a far better response.
It's a more authentic response.
It's about your network like the question that said, "What do you do, Mark?" The second new thing that you need is for us to have a wide and varied network. If you are not connected to the people that you are trying to influence or sell to, you are invisible. I would guarantee that if your audiences go out to their sales teams and say, "How many people that we're trying to sell to a week are we connected to," I bet they will say 1 or 2.
BMW is a partner of ours. They've got 100,000 people who work for BMW. How many people should I be connected to, 1, 10, or 100? I don't know but it's more than one. Whenever your leadership is running QBRs or Quarterly Business Reviews and account reviews, one of the questions that they need to ask is, "How many people are you connected to in the account?"
I have a section in the book about how to run QBRs in this digital world. You need to be connected. LinkedIn allows you to connect to about 200 people a week. Your sales team should be maxing that out. When I mean connect, I don't mean, "I come from The Selling Well Podcast. Here are all my wares." That is a spam. This is your ability to have a conversation.
If I could drive you to a room where all of your prospects are, and they're all standing there and holding a drink, what would you do? You wouldn't go up to them and say, "I've got a great podcast for you." You would go, "Where have you been? Have you traveled far? The weather is terrible at the moment." You would have a conversation. That is one of the things that we end up teaching salespeople outside of our social selling methodologies about how to have conversations and run those first meetings on social.
The next thing is social selling isn't about, "You have to do the whole transaction on social media." The whole point of using social media is that you get a meeting like this. I'm on this show through my use of social media. Mark has allowed me to comment here because of what I've done. You need this wide and varied network. The third thing that you need is content. This isn't about brochures, white papers, and stuff. This is about how you as an individual. This is your LinkedIn profile.
In the world of sales, people buy people. Even in the world of AI, people buy people. "I want to know that if I buy something from Mark Cox, he's going to look after me. He's the expert that I think he is. What we're looking for is content like Mark in his band because that shows that Mark is a real person. I would love to be in a band. I never played an instrument. As you can see, all I can do is play the gramophone but I would love to do that. My business partner is a guitar player. Behind him, he has loads of guitars. Funnily enough, all of the deals that he closes are with people who play the guitar."
Isn't that amazing? What we're doing is creating those connections. I'll give you an example of a piece of content that one of my teams put out. He put this piece of content out and said, "My family loves Led Zeppelin. Every Friday night, my wife puts on Led Zeppelin. When I can hear it through the door of my office, I know it's time to start the weekend. I finish whatever I'm doing. We go out and I spend the weekend with my family. What's your favorite Led Zeppelin song?"
People went, "Stairway to Heaven." Mine is Kashmir and Whole Lotta Love. When I tell this story, a lot of people say, "When the Levee Breaks." On Monday, he went to all of the people who responded that he wasn't connected to and said, "When the Levee Breaks is a great favorite of mine. Can we connect? It's a 100% connection rate. There's no connection. This is my product. This is about having a conversation." To all the people that he knew, he said, "We have an interest in Led Zeppelin. Why don't we get on a call?" They all said yes, "He's a Led Zeppelin fan. We're going to talk about Led Zeppelin."
We teach people how to run those meetings. One of my SDRs gets ten meetings. He works for an organization where they insist he makes cold calls and emails. He gets nothing from it. One morning, he will get ten meetings, which is enough for him not to be fired, and then he takes the dogs for a walk in the afternoon. I said to him, "Why didn't you get another ten meetings?" He said, "If I got twenty meetings in a day, they will think there's something wrong with me. I only get ten because that's all I need to do. I tick the boxes and pass the KPIs," which is ridiculous.
It's a great example but let's go back to the three things that Tim spoke about, buyer-centric profile, thinking about your digital territory, and then content. Let's go a little further on the buyer-centric profile because if memory serves, your profile when I took a quick look at it before I jumped on said something about, "Should have played Quidditch for England," or something of that nature. It didn't talk about being a social selling expert. What is Quidditch? My parents are British. I should probably know the answer to this question.
Quidditch is a made-up game that doesn't exist from the JK Rowling books about Harry Potter. It's a game that you play on a broomstick. If you Google your name, unless you have your website, the first thing that will probably come up is your LinkedIn profile, which will show your photo, name, and summary title. Therefore, your summary title is the most visible thing about you on the internet. What you want is someone to go, "What on Earth is that?" The click-through comes through to my LinkedIn profile because I have the professional edition of LinkedIn.
You know who did it.
I know everybody who looks at my LinkedIn profile and anybody who googles me. What most LinkedIn trainers will do is that they tell you to put what you do on that. You are self-harming yourself. People connect to me and say, "I help CEOs with their accounting." I already have an accountant, ignore. "I help CEOs with their physical fitness." I run three times a week, ignore.
This advice is fundamentally flawed and is killing businesses. Your summary title has to work for you. It has to create curiosity. Someone goes, "That person sounds interesting. I wonder what that means. I would like to talk to that person." People are walking across social media and saying, "You look interesting. We've got this problem. You can help me." That's turning into multimillion-dollar deals.
Your LinkedIn summary title has to create curiosity. If people can see your account and get you to help solve their problem, that is the start of multimillion-dollar deals.
Let's go back if we can though. You bring up that point about playing Quidditch for England. Thank you for that. We have permanently lost any of the Harry Potter fans who realized I'm not a Harry Potter fan. They're never going to be reading this again. They have clicked off.
Maybe you get some magic.
Maybe I'll get into it. We also talked about those buyers under 34 who are using social for searching. If your profile has something quirky like that, then how do they find you if they're looking for an expert on social selling?
I have social selling elsewhere in my profile but the way that Google and LinkedIn look at your profile is a string of text. I have social selling in my profile. It's in your job. It's elsewhere within your profile. Your summary title is not what's reliant on search.
We talked a little bit about LinkedIn. Give us a couple of data points as well on Twitter or Instagram. One of the things that I found very interesting in the book was you think Twitter is better for making first contact with some of your buyers than something like LinkedIn. Maybe you can explain why.
If you're selling in IT, which is what I've done, you will find that people are on Twitter or X. You've got a far more ability to have a conversation with them. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is have a conversation because the conversation creates a sale, which leads to conversations and commercial interactions.
What you need to be doing is be part of the conversation, which is retweeting and responding to the comment, "I love the interview that you did with Mark Cox. I learned a lot. I can learn from you. Thanks very much." If you say, "That's great. I've got this great platform," the first thing I'll do is block you but if you say, "That's interesting," I don't find that as scary. Andy Paul says in his book, "If you pitch to somebody, it creates a fight or flight reaction in somebody." What you don't want to do is do that.
That's exactly how I got you on this show. I heard you on Andy Paul's episode, reached out to you, and said, "We've got a show. Here are some other people who have been on it, including Andy." First, I said, "I loved you on his podcast."
You were very nice.
Thank you. For good reason, this will be a great episode for us as well. The book is Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I like the discussion as well on changemakers. Tell us a little bit about the changemaker term and who that individual is within the organization.
Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers
All of the sales methodologies MEDDIC have a term, whether it's a coach, economic buyer, or champion. We see that there's this particular person called a changemaker. This comes from research that Google did back in 2015, which is where they saw this different person. The person tended to be younger, probably less than 40. They could be now in their 40s. They're probably looking for their next promotion. They're not bothered about your solution. Most of the sponsors, coaches, or people like that usually want your solution to come into the organization.
When I was at Oracle, I used to sell to a lot of people who wanted Oracle on their CVs. Therefore, they gave you information to make sure that you were the chosen solution whereas this changemaker doesn't care. What they want is to get the promotion. If you go to a meeting and they tear you apart, it's highly likely that person is a changemaker because what they're trying to do is they're testing your solution and credibility, whether you are trustworthy, whether you lie, or that sort of stuff. They're testing you and they then take your solution into the business.
For example, the Azure people in Microsoft use this technique. They find changemakers within the organization and then say, "Here's a piece of content that you may find interesting," knowing full well that changemaker will then take it into the organization and spread it. The finance director may not be active on LinkedIn but the changemaker does the work for you.
That's early in the book. There are great definitions there. Let me add a left-of-center question. What are you reading professionally?
I am a horrendous reader of books. I've read or will have read 40 books in 2023. The book I'm reading is a book called The Mom Test. If you are starting up a company or you have a business idea, the worst person you can ask about whether it would fly is your mom because she will tell you, "It's a great idea." It goes through how you should ask questions to customers and prospects. You haven't even built a product. It's the type of question that you should ask. It's good.
Isn't that fun? What a great premise for the book.
He has been a startup person himself. He made all the mistakes and said, "This cost me $500,000." He is great at coming up with the scenarios of the questions to ask rather than saying, "Would you like a fitness app?" You would say yes even though you didn't want one. You would say, "I'm a podcaster. Therefore, I'm interested in fitness." With the fact that I asked the question and you lied to me, immediately, I'm lost.
It's Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I learned a ton reading the book and you will too.
Thank you, Mark. It means a lot.
You're very welcome, Tim. We have lots of folks on this show. Many of them are driven because when I read the book, I want to talk to the person who wrote it, not the opposite where we get a guest. Andy has been on our show a few times and I've been on his show a few times. The thing that jumped out was, "How did I miss this?" Like you, I'm a voracious reader. I was kicking myself a little bit. Once I got into it, I started enjoying it because it is a strategic approach. It does get into some tactical coaching on what to do once you understand the strategy behind it. People are going to want to learn more about you and the business. How do they do that most efficiently?
The best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm Timothy or Tim Hughes. My summary title is, "Should have played Quidditch for England." They can find me on Twitter or X. I'm @Timothy_Hughes. Our website is DLAignite.com.
Tim, thanks again for joining us.
You're welcome.
It's great to meet you. Folks, thank you so much for joining. We run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales but we're trying to improve the lives of salespeople. As Tim mentions in his book, which quotes back to Daniel Pink, one of our other guests, the more mastery you have in something, the more you're going to enjoy it. We run this show for you. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I would like to know.
My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We love constructive criticism. We respond to everybody who gives us an idea. If there's something you like, let me know that's great but if there's something that we could do to improve this, we want to know that. Thank you for doing so. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. We want to improve their lives too. We will see you next time.
Important Links
Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers
Simon Kemp - LinkedIn
Andy Paul - Previous episode
TimTi - LinkedIn
@Timothy_Hughes - Twitter
Daniel Pink - Previous episode
About Timothy Hughes
Tim Hughes is universally recognised as the world leading pioneer and innovator of Social Selling. He is currently ranked Number 1 by Onalytica as the most influential social selling person in the world. In 2021, LinkedIn said he was one of the top 8 sales experts globally to follow and Brand 24 announced recently he was the 16th most influential person in marketing globally, based on measured social media influence.
He is also Co-Founder and CEO of DLA Ignite and co-author of the bestselling books “Social Selling - Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers - 2nd edition” and “Smarketing - How To Achieve Competitive Advantage through blended Sales and Marketing”. He has recently launched a second edition of “social selling - techniques to influence buyers and change makers” which has been fully updated.