Social selling isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a game-changing approach to building trust, standing out, and creating meaningful relationships in today’s digital world. In this thought-provoking conversation, Mark Cox welcomes Adam Gray, a leading expert in social selling and co-author of two groundbreaking books on the topic. Together, they dive into what makes social media a powerful tool for connection, how authenticity sets you apart, and why gratitude is essential for personal and professional growth. Whether you’re new to LinkedIn or looking to refine your strategy, this episode offers actionable insights to help you network smarter and sell better.
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Harnessing Social Media For Sales Success: A Guide To Social Selling With Adam Gray
We have a great show for you today, talking about social selling and getting very specific about LinkedIn. Today's guest is a great guy. Adam Gray is the co-founder and the Head of Intellectual Property at DLA ignite. He's also the author of two great books. One is called Brilliant Social Media: How to Start, Refine, and Improve Your Social Media Business Strategy. The second is called Smarketing. He wrote that with his pal Tim Hughes. You'll remember Tim because he has been on the show talking about his book Social Selling.
Adam and Tim both work with DLA ignite. We've seen them in action. We brought them into a couple of our clients. They have great strategies for how to leverage LinkedIn properly by thinking about three things. What should your profile look like? How do you build out your network professionally, not spammy, the way many people do it? How do you create and then engage content? How to create your own content, what should you be doing, and then how you engage content with others.
What a great conversation with Adam. He's one of those calm confident people. He speaks quietly and is not a big shouter like me. He speaks quietly, which causes you to lean in and listen more. He has an incredibly interesting professional background. He's a very interesting guy with his hobbies and what he collects. We're both fans of music. He was a super high-end violinist at one point in time. I'm a super low-end drummer. We had a lot in common when we chatted.
What you're going to pull away is some great strategies for leveraging LinkedIn to stand out, which is what we're trying to do. It's pretty tough when there are a billion people on LinkedIn. If someone is looking for a sales trainer, there are thousands of sales trainers. What do you do to stand out? Let's have that conversation today. I enjoy my conversation with Adam. He's a great guy. You can enjoy it too. When you do, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well Podcast, and thanks for doing so. That's how we get great guests like Adam Gray. Here he is.
Hello, Adam.
How are you?
I'm great, thanks. How are you?
I can't believe there's no point in you complaining. Is there? No one listens.
I would listen. That's what this is about. More than anything, this show is about me counseling you in any way, shape, or form. You just laid out there, my friend.
Understanding The Power Of Gratitude In Daily Life
I'm all good. Thank you. I feel very fortunate that every morning I wake up. How lucky I am to have the life that I have. All things considered, that's pretty good. Isn't it?
What a great way, by the way, when we kick in and jump into the podcast. You give off that vibe, by the way.
Do I? That's harder then.
You have this calm confidence and almost a contentness. It's very engaging. We'll get into it in the show, but you give off that vibe.
Thank you.
I'm a huge one on gratitude. I do the same thing. I have a gratitude journal. I write things down.
I try to do that, but I'm not very disciplined about writing things down, making affirmations, and doing that stuff. I do invest a huge amount of time counseling other people. A lot of what we do is coaching people. Part of it showing people what they need to do and showing them how they need to do it. Part of it is what's stopping you from doing this. You know you want to do it and you know you’re better at it. I’m getting underneath that surface and helping people to realize how lucky they are.
That's the big thing, isn't it? To have been born at this moment in history when we have all of these privileges available to us and in the places that were born. You could have grown up in Gaza or something. You have no idea what it's like to be under pressure. None at all. You're not going to go to the President's Club this year. Big deal.
How Social Media Impacts Mindset And Contentment
It's so interesting by the way. I have this conversation a lot of times with my beautiful wife, Donna. Every once in a while, I'll make this comment that we won the DNA lottery. You wake up at some point in time and realize where you are, what's going on, and how privileged you are. I do think in this society, it's very easy to lose sight of that. It's a bit of the old statement that comparison is the thief of joy. In many ways, social media is a global way of comparing yourself against everybody else. It's a pretty easy way to end up feeling bad fairly quickly.
Have a catch-up on your feed Steven Bartlett?
No.
He does a podcast called The Diary of A CEO. I'm still on the jury about whether or not I find him incredibly insightful or incredibly annoying. I don't have my mind yet, but he has a lot of truly outstanding guests. One of whom he had on was Jimmy Carr, who was a British comedian.
I know Jimmy Carr. My parents are British. I know a little bit of that.
Jimmy Carr has said that at the moment we suffer from dysmorphia. Some people have gender dysmorphia or whatever, where they're not in the place that they think maybe they are. He said that in the developed world, we suffer from life difficulties. To put this in context, 50 years ago, people didn't have hot showers. Think of how lucky we are to live now. He's an incredibly insightful and very clever guy. He's incredibly insightful with some of the comments he makes, but often, it will pull you up short. What have I got to know then?
I'm completely aligned on this. For everybody listening, by the way, I’ll also admit that I have those periods of being in the gap. I have a friend named Dan Sullivan who runs something called Strategic Coach, which is a great coaching program for entrepreneurs. More than almost anybody I have come across, he has these mindset tools where he gets you and your best thinking. It's not a how-to program. It's a strategic program to help pull the best thinking out of you.
One of the ones that is so interesting is he's got one called the gap and the gain. Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan says, “All of us have this vision of the future, this place we want to be, this goal, this objective, and then there's where we are today. By default, if you're a sales or growth-oriented entrepreneur, where you want to be is always different from where you are today. You want to be somewhere in the future.
Most people focus on the gap between where they are today and where they want to be in the future, but by nature, if you're ambitious, they're never going to align because as soon as you start to make progress, you keep pushing that goal out further. “I want to make 100,000. I want to make 250. I want to make 500. I want to make seven figures.” No matter what you achieve, you keep pushing it out just by nature of having these amazing goals and objectives. That's the gap that he speaks of.
Applying The Gap And The Gain To Personal Growth
The gain is thinking about how far you've come. It doesn't change where you are in life. It just changes how you feel about it and perceive it. It's incredibly powerful. I almost defaulted to this as a survival mechanism when I first started In The Funnel 10 or 11 years ago because I come from a large corporate CRO job. I lived a bit of the life, which was pretty good, traveling, hotels, and all that great stuff, then in a 6 or 8-month period of time, I started this company.
There was no revenue coming in except what you create day. When you started every morning, it was a little bit of saying, “Let's take a pause and think about the great things that have happened here, why I'm so happy to be running this business, and why I chose to run this business. It was almost this default gratitude journal as a means of survival and keeping myself in the right mindset before I even what those things were.
That's incredibly powerful but the problem is, and you are right about social media being very guilty of this. What you do is you see some 22-year-old guy who has a huge yacht and a fleet of Lamborghinis. You look at yourself and you go, “I'm a failure because I haven't got those things.” The way to look at this stuff is that there's a finite amount of you to go around. You cannot be good at everything. I was fortunate that life had given me a load of different things that I've done. In the early days, I used to sell HiFi to people.
You're selling in an audio store.
That was interesting. I was working in a relatively high-end audio store. One of the people who came in was quite a successful businessman. He said to me and one of the other guys in there, “You guys, why don't we go and set up our own store?” He was passionate about this. He became an investor and myself and this other guy. We started our first store, which was directly opposite Howard in Knightsbridge.
We went from working in a little provincial town on the M25 to working in the highest retail space in the world outside of an airport. What we ended up doing was engaging with people that were multi-millionaires. This was 30 years ago. One of our clients was the Sultan of Brunei, who at the time was the richest man in the world.
He came into your audio store.
He didn't, but his assistant did. We went to a number of his houses to install systems. We visit all of these different houses. Whilst I never got to meet him as a person. I got to go to the wedding of his nephew, which was held at the Dorchester Hotel because we became friends with the guy who was his aide in the UK. We got to meet loads and loads of really rich people. To a man, almost every one of them was miserable. Rich, huge houses, limitless cash reserves, miserable.
Part of it was because they didn't ever do this, stopping and saying, “I have all of this stuff,” whether or not that’s money, physical things, or possessions, whether or not that's achievements, “I've got all of these done and I've worked hard to achieve them and I'm proud of myself. I can stop, take stock, and enjoy this,” but they can't. They're so driven that often as you said, you want 100, then you want 250, then you want 750, then you want seven figures.
There's wisdom like the next mountain to climb and I get that's part of being entrepreneurial, and I get that that's part of being driven, but think about the saying, “I'm here for a good time, not a long time.” We're here for a blink of an eye, aren't we? You have to grasp every moment. What we all know is that if we've been fortunate enough to travel, we go to very rural places in the Mediterranean or wherever. We meet people who have got nothing, yet they're incredibly generous with the time in the few things that they do have with you.
We're here for a blink of an eye. You've got to grasp every moment.
There's a degree of contentedness. I'm a carpenter. I work with wood. My father was a carpenter. His father was a carpenter. I do it for the joy of creating and working with materials and the sense of achievement that I get from constantly being on this lifelong learning. Nowadays, it's like people don't want to earn their fame. I want to be famous. What do you want to be famous for? I just want to be famous. I want to be an influencer.
That's putting the cart before the horse, isn't it? You need to say, “Here's what I want to do and I want to get joy from doing this,” because there will always be room for improvement, whether or not you're trading on the stock market, making $1 million a day or whether you're building wooden boxes. There's always a chance to make it better. Finding the joy in those simple things is incredibly pleasurable.
It's so well said. One of the reasons we run In The Funnel is we're on this mission. Sometimes people roll their eyes, but I'm highly educated, and nowhere along my journey did anyone teach me anything academically about B2B sales. Part of my journey is saying, “I want to elevate this to the profession it really is.” That's what we do in In The Funnel.
The why is I know that when we do this, we're going to improve the lives of professional salespeople because so many of them are not happy. They fell into a job that was an easy job maybe to get, but they feel like they're trying to execute something that they have no control over. They don't know what they're doing. You can only get enough courage to trigger a conversation with someone when you don't know what you're doing for so long before you have to put a veneer up and you’re sort of scripting and pitching.
I believe in drive and ambition, and I still have a lot of those things. I have hopes, dreams, and goals that drive me. The difference now with a little bit of maturity may be, as much maturity as I can ever have, is I do want to take those pauses every day and go, “I'm happy about today. I'm so pleased.” That doesn't mean I'm not going to do things that scare me because I still do things where I jump outside my comfort zone. It doesn't mean I'm not going to have the odd salesman's night sleep, which is waking up in the middle of the night and being concerned about running the business and all those kinds of things. I either call them professional sales sleep or entrepreneur sleep.
Those things are all going to happen, but when I'm going through the journey, I want to enjoy those things that are most important because, as you say, we're far luckier than I ever dreamed we would be. One of the things I'm so lucky about is I love what I do. It doesn't mean it's easy and it doesn't mean that there aren't some parts of it, but something like this, this is part of my job to get to chat with a cool guy like you, learn from what you, and your teammate, Tim Hughes have done with DLA ignite and Social Selling. It's super fun for me.
The Long-Term Impact Of Gratitude On Mindset And Success
I get a dopamine hit from learning. It's a good message for everybody listening today this idea of gratitude or being happy. Anthony Iannarino has been on the show multiple times. He's a very nice fellow. He has a very similar demeanor to yours, very calm, and almost zen-like. In his recent book called The Negativity Fast, he speaks to the power of gratitude with some research. It was amazing what gratitude does for physical benefits, like the shocking physical benefits if you keep yourself in this mindset. I do think you can control it. I'm going to ask about your journey from this audio store to how we're talking about social selling today, and maybe particularly LinkedIn. I love the guitars behind you. Tell me about your musical career and your passion for music.
I was going to be a violinist. I auditioned for all of the conservators in London. I got accepted into a couple and I selected the one that I was going to go to. That was my career. I was going to be a violinist. During my course, I developed a lump on my neck from constantly having it on the chin rest of the violin. It became infected and I went and had it dealt with in a hospital and then it came back and had to be dealt with again. It took about three months out.
During that three months, I thought, “You're crap.” This is a challenge for everybody who is a high achiever at something in an environment in which you are the big fish. For a period of my life, I was the best violinist that I knew. Therefore, I must be pretty good at this. You move up and leave. I go to music college and I'm the worst violinist there I know. It's a bit of a shock. This is a repeating pattern that we all face.
You go to the next level for sure. Imposter syndrome is all over the place.
Absolutely, but this was not imposter syndrome because this was not me believing that I was not as good as these people. This was me not being as good as these people. During these six months out or whatever it was that I had, I thought, “You need to move on. This is not the right industry for you.” I ended up working in a store and I met one of the guys that worked in this audio store. He said, “You're wasted here, why don't you come to work for me, ?” “Okay.” I've always been very lucky that during my life, things have fallen out of the sky into my lap. That's one of those occasions.
I went and worked there and they loved the fact that I was somebody who understood music because when you demonstrate stuff to people, having an opinion on stuff is often quite valuable. That was my first real taste of selling. Previously in the store, I was like a wine merchant. Previously, I had learned about customer service but not about selling. In this store, it's amazing. Along my journey, I picked up these breadcrumbs that I think were incredibly useful to me. I'm going to share that with other people now. In this store, they will give you the opportunity to go on a sales training course. I went on the sales training course.
Do you remember what it was?
No. It was specific to the audio industry.
The trainer said, “You get to this point and they're giving you the buying signals,” or whatever it was he described, “Then you ask for the deal.” I said to him, “How do you ask for the deal?” He said, “You just asked them.” I said, “No, you missing the point. What words do you say?” He said, “I say to people, ‘Should we go outside and sort out the paperwork?’” I thought that would do nicely.
I took that little gem and I went back to the audio store and I became the most successful retail HiFi salesman in the UK by just saying this to everyone. If they look like they were ready to buy, “If you're happy with this, let's go outside and sort out the paperwork.” People would say, “Okay.”
I realized at that point that everybody understands a concept. I went on from some point down the road to be in marketing. People understand the concept. You understand that you're friendly but professional. Everything can grasp that. You write me a friendly but professional email.
How do you do it? We know what to do, but we don't know how to exactly do it.
If you want people to take action and behave differently, part of the job is about building those bridges. This is about giving them examples and illustrations of what this looks like so they can project what they do into that. In the case of writing a professional but friendly email, you might provide someone with words to use. We use help, we don't use assist. We use love, we don't use like. We use care, we don't use passionate, or whatever those words are. I can then look at the two and I can go, “I'm slipping into this area when I'm writing stuff.”
Social Selling: If you want people to take action and behave differently, part of the job is about building those bridges.
One of the things that's interesting about these is that at all points in our lives, whether we’re just beginning or we're more experienced, there are people who have come to the same roadblocks that we're coming to. Asking them. “Mark, how did you learn to close a sale?” It might be that you say, “It was easy for me because I did blah, blah, blah.” I can't relate to that, but it could be that you're exactly the same person that I am.
It could be that I say to you, “How did you overcome this?” You say, “What I did was this,” and then for me, the light bulb comes on. I go. “Right, so that's what I need to do.” When we work with clients, so much of this is about showing them what's the thing that I do. I like to try to be an example of best practice in the things that I'm teaching you to do. There's no credibility in standing there and saying, “What you need to do is this,” if I'm not doing it.
Yeah, if you don't do it.
It’s like the fat fitness coach in the gym. If you can't eat healthy and get yourself in shape, how are you going to help me to do it? We need to model the behavior. Often, a starting point for you and your journey is for me to say to you, “This is what I say, this is what I do, this is how I use these tools.” If you give me a script and I use the script, that's better than starting with a clean sheet of paper but it's not as good as if I take your script and then I refine your script. It sounds like it's me saying it rather than it sounds like you saying it.
Often, people need a leg up and they need a bit of help to get them from where they are to where they want to be. Oftentimes, we spend time with organizations helping them understand what are the things that they can say. A great example of what you need to do if you want to be successful on social is to connect to lots of people in your target areas. We had a client some years ago now. They were sending lots of connection requests to a particular target account. They were getting a very low acceptance rate despite the fact that they had a good profile. They were lovely. They were attractive, engaging, and switched-on smart people, but nobody was responding.
The connection request said, “Hi, Mark. I'm the account manager at such and such. I’d like to connect to more people in your company.” I said to this person, “The problem is what they're reading is, “Hi, Mark. I'm compensated for selling you things. Can I connect with you so I can sell you some things?” “But that's not what I said.” “It isn't what you said, but it is what they heard. Change that up into something, which is much less aggressive.”
One of my mentors said you have to assume that everybody, except you, in the world is stupid. It doesn't mean these people are idiots, but it does mean that they haven't got the same frame of reference that you have. You assumed that this person understands this. If you go, “This is what it is,” you can't make that jump but they can't necessarily make them. You have to handle the process and part of that is in all of these micro changes that we need to make.
When I say, “I'd like to connect to you,” because it's happened so many times in the past, you know you're going to get a list of my products and services and prices as soon as you say yes, so you'll say no unless I say, “I'm not going to follow this up immediately by sending you one of those,” in which case you might go, “Okay.” So much of this is about understanding the difference between what should happen in an interaction and what actually happens in an interaction. Often the two are not the same thing. If I say this, this is what you should do. If I say this, you don't do that. You do something else. Why is that?
Let's talk about that for a second. I love this this. I'd like to get to this example of what that reach-out should be. I've seen you in DLA ignite in action. I'm a big fan of your partner Timothy Hughes and his book Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers. I’m a huge fan of this, We've had Tim on the show. One of the things that you guys do so well is you have this different paradigm of what social media is.
Why Building Trust Is The Foundation Of Sales
I heard you say before, Adam, that social media is about being social. How would we behave if we were at a cocktail party talking to somebody? As soon as we were introduced to them, we're not going to pull a price list out of our pocket and give it to them for whatever it is we do. Tell us a little bit about how we should first start. Maybe we focus on LinkedIn for today because people will extract amazing insights. How should we be thinking about that platform? Today, with LinkedIn, there are a lot of people that look the same on LinkedIn. Different picture but, pretty similar.
There's a massive number of pitfalls that people can fall into. I know you, like you, and trust you. Therefore, when you say something, I'm likely to believe what you say because I know that you like me and therefore, you have my best interests at heart. The problem is that if I'm saying something true and helpful to you and you don't know me, there's no reason for you to believe that.
We've all got examples of this. You get outreach from an independent financial adviser and they say, “Hi, Mark. We're all middle-aged now. I wonder if you'd like to get some insights into what you can do. If you can give me some information about your investments, how I can make those work harder for you,” your response is, “No, I'm not going to tell you anything personal to me because I never know who you are.”
The first thing is we have to build that trust. The first step in building trust is standing out from everyone else. You have 5,000 followers on LinkedIn of whom you know 200, and the rest of them are people that you vaguely know. That means they're not front of mind. Given that you're a great metaphor for everybody on LinkedIn, whether they have 500 or 50,000 followers, the fact is that you know a tiny little sliver of those people.
How do I make myself one of the people that you recognize or that you know when I'm coming up in your newsfeed? The first thing is I have to look different. Anybody can simply search on LinkedIn for a marketing director and there are 27 million responses. There are 27 million people who identify as marketing directors. The fact that you are a marketing director at a company of possibly never heard of is not memorable or compelling.
If you’re a tall handsome guy who plays the drums, that's likely to arrest me when I'm scrolling through a list of marketing directors. A tall handsome guy who plays the drums and a marketing director is different. That first standout that we have and how we first present ourselves encourage people to read on.
A good example of this is how a well-constructed newspaper works. It has an arresting headline. The headline is like this, “Tall guy plays drums.” People go, “That's interesting.” Underneath it says, “Mark Cox, renowned sales expert and plays drums in a band on the weekends.” “Okay,” and then I read on and it says, “Yesterday, Mark was playing it at this particular gig and doing the following things.” It sucked me in from that top level to a middle level to a more granular level. We need to construct how we go to market in a similar way.
If all I remember about you is a tall guy who plays the drums, that's better than remembering nothing about you. It's very easy for me to absorb that and stand out. The next level down is that vignette of who you are and why I should care. A mistake that lots of people make with their About section on LinkedIn is their why about what they do. There's room for that in your job. You're not defined by what you do. What are you going to write in the About section? What are you going to say? It’s like a good autobiography that turns into a page-turner. I want to learn more about you.
Creating A Unique And Humanized LinkedIn Profile
You need to talk about what your dreams are. How did you end up here? If you won the lottery tomorrow, what would you be doing? All of those things. I get an insight into who you are. As you said about the cocktail party, I go to the cocktail party. I don't care that you're a sales coach and you developed a methodology. Not yet. What I care about is the fact that you're an interesting chap, you play the drums, and what music you like. We have that conversation but also recognize that to build a relationship, there needs to be a degree of dialogue.
You’re not defined by what you do. Your story, dreams, and passions make you memorable and help build real connections.
Think back to your last first date. If it went well it's probably because the person asked questions rather than spoke. There's that old story about an arrogant man who's talking to this girl that he's going to dinner with, “I've been here and I've done this. I've run this company, I have this car, and I have a boat here. Anyway, that's enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?” It's all about him. When you move from here's my profile to having an interaction with someone, there's nothing more attractive than demonstrating that you're listening and hearing what's being said, “Great post, Mark. Thank you for that.”
It’s the same way when you get on a call with somebody. You're desperate to sell your stuff. In the wider context of selling to people, the problem is that if I present my product and service to you, and if I try to close you and you're not ready to buy, you will never take a call from me again. It will be hard to close you. Whereas if we have a chat and I position what I do in such a way that you asked me, that's interesting, “We have no need for that at the moment.” “That's fine. I wasn't expecting you to buy it. We're having an exchange of ideas.”
The nice thing about that is because I've asked lots of questions and you've told me about your dreams and your company and your challenges and what you do at the weekend and all this stuff, if I say to you, “Let's touch base in six months and see how things are. It’d be great to catch up again,” you're likely to say yes. In six months who knows maybe you will be ready to buy them.
The concept of qualifying out, particularly today, is a very dangerous thing. We should not qualify in route. We should qualify now or later because if I have the right product and you're the right target for me, it's a good fit. Why are you not going to buy it? Because you have no money, because you're under contract to someone else, because you're not in the procurement process for that, or because you're busy procuring other things. That's not out. That's just not quite now.
The concept of qualifying out particularly today is a very, very dangerous thing. We should not qualify in a route. We should qualify now or later.
The beauty of the social thing is that it enables me to stay in touch and stay in front of mind, not by saying, “Here's our product. These are our three USPs.” I'll tell you that. I'll tell you that again tomorrow. I'll tell you that the day after tomorrow. I’ll tell you that the day after that. It comes to a point when you block because you know what I'm going to say.
It's so relevant. By the way, I believe this in a couple of iterations over the last ten years with LinkedIn. The reason I'm so excited to have you back Adam or to have DLA ignite back is because I believe everything you're saying. Once a week or twice a week, I get a financial plan for reaching out. As soon as they connect, they go, “Are you happy with your investments and how they're doing?” If they followed up and said, “Mark, it looks like you're doing cool things over In The Funnel.” By the way, I love that post you did about supporting the Michael Garron Hospital. My daughter was born at the Michael Garron Hospital.
They could say, “I love to chat over coffee in person or via Zoom at some point and learn more about you. It looks like we're in the same neighborhood.” I might be open to that because I like meeting interesting people. I know the value of networking and we'll see you expand my network. I might look at that and say, “This guy has done some cool things.” Maybe there are some interesting synergies here. If somebody comes back and pitches right at me, I feel like you're polluting this environment.
The other thing that I hope everybody takes away and you guys are so good at articulating this. In The Funnel is unique, different, and one of a kind. I can go through all of these reasons why we're so unique and different and better and all the rest of it. I closed a $1 billion deal one time. I don't know that many people have done that. To the rest of the world, we look like every other sales training company out there. There's nothing we can put on LinkedIn that says we're unique or we're different that anybody cares about.
That's the point, isn't it? People often misinterpret this. Whatever field you're in, for you, sales training for me, it’s creating software solutions, whatever it is. We think the thing that people are buying is that little veneer of brilliance that we offer over and above everybody else, that special button, that special connector, or whatever it is that we do. Most of our clients are not sophisticated in this way.
I remember the story of the furniture retailer who used to actively demonstrate scratch-guarding as an upsell on their furniture.
When they pour a cup of coffee on it or something.
They sprayed the furniture and then they poured the coffee. They go, “This is what you need to do.” Everybody would buy it, and then scratch-guarding became the norm. Every piece of material came with a scratch-guard. They stopped demonstrating it because it wasn't an upsell. Its sales started to fall off. Part of the reason that they did that is because there was none of that interaction anymore. Yes, it's scratch-guarded but the customer didn't know it was scratch-guarded even though everyone in the industry knew it was scratch-guarded.
They started to demonstrate it, “This is scratch-guarded. Look at this,” and poured coffee. They go, “That's fantastic. I'll get that sofa,” and so it went back up again. The parallel here is that people are buying these very simple things. You think you're unique. We're unique because we offer incredible insights to all the customers who entered into the CRM system, as does every CRM vendor. Why you? The reality is, “Mark, why you?” It’s because it's you. You're the guy I know. You're the guy I like. You're the guy I want to do business with. You're the guy that if we're stuck and locked in a boardroom for 24 hours to flush out the minutiae of the deal, it'll be a fun 24 hours, rather than a dull 24 hours.
These are the reasons that people buy. They buy in on something they can understand. This is the point, isn't it? If you are a specialist at your thing, injection molding, software, training, or whatever it is, you understand every single facet of the element of this particular vertical. The customer doesn't. You think that you're selling these unique things and they don't hear what you're saying. If you give them something they do understand which is, “I like you. I don't mind you making a profit on me because you're a nice guy. We get well and we share the same love of hockey, cars, fine dining, or whatever it is.” We've had a bit of banter and chatter around that. You're somebody that I'm happy to do business with. That's the key.
Trust and credibility. You have to start somewhere. In the coffee analogy, people aren't buying scratch guardin. They're buying a comfortable place to sit to make their living room look beautiful so that when their friends come over, they can all have a good time. Forget what we do, it's what we do for them. It's why they want this. What is it going to get them? It's all about that.
These days, with our stolen focus, I steal the name from Johann Hari and his book, Stolen Focus, it's hard to get somebody's attention. You guys are so great with your social selling training where you think of things. You say, “Let's first take a look at our profile. Let's let's think about how we build connections.” You and I had the same number of connections today. 17,000-ish, and then, “What do I do with my posts or other people's posts?”
There are some clever insights there. I'm with you. I do think people want social interaction. You have a couple of tactics that I applied and they work extremely well. Before I talk about my experience with them, maybe share. We've talked a little bit about the profile and trying to humanize it in this digital world. Your profile says collector of many things. You get these three cool model cars on your profile. I'm looking at your home right now. You have four guitars on your wall that look beautiful. Just an interesting guy.
You went from violin to guitar. I cannot believe how many of my clients are musicians or prospects and have been in a band. One in two people in the world wants to be a rockstar and they are in a band and it's common. When I post that I'm sitting behind a drum, mocking around, trying to do my best, but having the time of my life.
People love it, don't they?
I've never had responses like that on anything. For those listening, the stuff I post about businesses is genius. I’m joking. I post my lousy drum-playing.
It’s not lousy. It's fantastic. Stewart Copeland but better dressed. That's the point, isn't it? From the seller's perspective, we think everyone else lies, but when I say these words, they're they're true. The problem is from a biased perspective, everybody has access to the same words. Everybody is passionate and customer-focused and top quartile performance and all of this stuff. We've all got the same lexicon of words. We try to big ask ourselves up and we trip over the things that we say. There's always an implicit agenda in what it is that we're saying.
If I message you saying, “I love the drum solo yesterday, Mark,” that's it. No implicit sales pitching there. One would be cynical and could say, “It means I've lowered your guard a little bit so I then follow it up with something.” If you want to be successful in this space, it's a bit like dating. I walk into a bar, I see a beautiful girl across the bar. I walk up to her and say, “May I buy you a drink please and will you marry me?” She slaps me and leaves. Yeah.
Why did that happen? If I said, “May I buy your drink,” and then when we finish, “May I buy you another drink?” and then, “Do you fancy a bite to eat?” and then, “It's been a lovely evening. Can I see you again next week?” and I court her. Maybe at some point, I ask the question and maybe she'll say yes. It's inappropriate to say that at the beginning. It’s the same with sales. You have to court somebody.
The beauty of these social networks is LinkedIn, to use your analogy of the cocktail party, there are a billion people at this cocktail party. Every single person from a business context that you would ever want to speak to is there. You can't sell to all of them today. What you're not looking to do is to sell to all of them today. What you're looking to do is to identify the low-hanging fruit. Here are the people that I'm looking to talk to. I'll see which ones want to talk to me. I'll see which ones are excited by this, then those are the people that I focus my effort on, knowing that the ones that I've accepted my connection request and have potentially seen my content, I'm going to farm them over a period of time.
Maybe they're not ready to buy for six months or six years, but if I keep posting stuff, you keep seeing me in your news feed. Hopefully, you'll keep consuming some of that content. At some point, down the road, when you are ready to buy, you might think, “It's that Mark Cox guy. He's the guy I need to talk to. Perfect.” Often, we're trying to hammer a round peg into a round hole. You have a budget at the moment. How can we get the budget allocated to this? You can't.
How do you do that today? Without giving the secret sauce for everything.
I give the secret sauce away because nobody does this until they have a structure around it.
You've done posts on this. You've been very clear about things. If I know my buyers, which I do, and I know they don't make snap decisions on major training initiatives to train their team. They're not going to change their mind about January or at the end of November the prior year. I want to start to introduce a relationship so they may have interest. How do you do that?
There are a billion people on LinkedIn. You can't connect to all of them. The first thing you need to do is you need to build a network. For people who are starting out, let's assume you have 2.000 people in your network. For most people, 90% of those people are connected in the wrong place. They're places where they used to work, cars they used to have, or industries they used to be in. A very small number of those are people that they want to talk to today.
Strategies For Effective Networking And Relationship Building
You make conscious decisions about the fact that you're going to connect to people that you want to talk to. If you want to sell to company X and I’m connected to two people in company X, that means I'm invisible to company X. If I’m connected to 200 people in company X, I would be visible to company X. The first thing we can do in the easiest thing we can do is we can pull that lever. We can say, “I'm going to connect to as many people sensibly as I can within that organization.”
People being people, we have to recognize that I'm trying to talk to the head of procurement. I'm desperate to talk to the head of procurement. The head of procurement is desperate not to talk to me because they don't like me. Maybe they do look at me and they go, “This is not somebody that I want to associate with because he likes folk and blues, and I like heavy metal. He’s not someone I'm going to have any sort of relationship with.”
What I need to do is I need to get multiple touchpoints into the organization. Simply targeting that one person is like asking for a marriage proposal on your first date. It is inappropriate and ineffective. What I need to do is I need to surround that person with love and connect to lots of people around that person, people who are their direct reports, their managers, and people who are at a similar level in other verticals within the organization.
I know that you don't want to talk to me, but John who sits at the next desk and your opposite number in a different field within the business has become a friend of mine over time. I'm hoping that ultimately, I can ask John to introduce me to Mark in a nice way. If I build a relationship properly with John, he will say yes. We need to connect with these people. What we then need to do is we need to parallel with that. We need to make sure that we are engaging with any content that these people share.
Firstly though, how do I get them to connect? As you say, I'm going to reach out to somebody who's surrounding this head of procurement. What's your strategy or even a tactic that says, “How do I get somebody to connect?” A lot of people today don't accept connection requests.
It’s always a personal note. A personal note needs to be generic enough that I can quickly apply this to lots of people. Spending twenty minutes reading your profile and creating a beautifully crafted connection request that guarantees 100% acceptance is not effective because that's 3 in an hour. If however, I produce a generic friendly connection request that I can then send to everybody, just changing the name, I might be able to send 100 of those now. If I only get a 50% strike rate or success rate, I’ll have 50 connections in an hour rather than 3, which is better.
There's always an element of numbers in this. My connection request would say something along the lines of, “I found you.” How I find you? “You were mentioned in this post or LinkedIn suggested you, or I'm connected to those people that you're connected to, or whatever that is. I looked at your profile. I'm always looking to add good people to my network. Is it okay if we connect? PS. I promise. I'm not going to try and sell you anything.”
“I'm not selling or buying at the moment, but who knows what the future may hold.” Something that is friendly and will hopefully pique their interest. Like all of the listeners, I've invested a huge amount of time in creating a compelling profile. I want, if possible, to get you to look at my profile. The beauty of that is if you think I’m a cool guy, you're going to remember me. If you think I’m an idiot, you're still going to remember me. I've broken through the noise by getting you to look at my profile because it is unique and polarizes people.
Once I have you in my network, I've built a digital bridge between you and me. What people often do is I can follow Mark and I can see his content. I'm not interested in seeing your content. I'm interested in you seeing my content. I need to connect to you and if Mark doesn't accept my connection request, John, Dave, Janet, Frederico, or whoever will. That's fine. I'm looking for coverage within an account, then I'm going to share a variety of stuff.
We need to take our whole selves to the platform. Part of that will be my best thinking, “If I'm going to give one piece of advice to you today, it would be this.” Part of it will be, “Here is something that every organization needs to do. You need to have a strategy around this because you won't get to your destination by chance.” Out of it will be like, “I've worked up this morning and I was feeling sleepy. The first thing I needed to do was go for a walk.” I took one photo of me on a walk.
The Role Of Personal Stories In Professional Branding
I think that’s what people are going to have the most challenges with. I'm going to be honest. Before I started talking to you guys, I would have never posted a picture of me playing drums on LinkedIn. It was all corporate, value, and insight. We talked and you said, “Just try it once.” I posted this thing and had 12,000 impressions. I'm getting comments from people who would not return a call when I reached out to them three years ago, but they're going, “You look fantastic on that drum set.”
There were two reasons why this works. The first of them is that if you do a post that says, “We have a seat open for a sales training program coming up next week. Drop me a line if you are interested in being on it,” and I liked that post, you're going to be straight on the phone, trying to sell me something, so I'm not going to like.
If you hear I'm playing in my band, I'm proud of what I've achieved here because this is a difficult piece and I drop a like on it, there's no back route in there to try to sell me something. That's you saying, “I'm wearing my heart on my sleeve.” Here's me saying, “I love it, man. That's fantastic.” That's a bit of human interaction, which is good. With all of these things, what we're looking for is cutthroat yet another company selling whatever product or service. To me, it's not cutthroat.
You’re walking down the street and saying, “Look at this, a 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa parked on the street. It would have been better in black but red is still good enough for me.” You post that in your newsfeed. I scrolled past it and I was like, “What's that?” I scroll back and I go, “What a great car. I love that.” It stopped me in my tracks. In the same way that it stopped you in your tracks walking down the street, it stopped me in my tracks scrolling through all of this noise.
What's interesting for people who say, “None of my buyers would behave that way. I know that because I don't behave that way. I don't engage with personal posts.” I would call that out as BS. If you look at even the people who say that and they genuinely believe that, when you look at their activity, the stuff they have dropped a like on is, “Mark is celebrating eleven years at In The Funnel. Mark going away for his wedding anniversary. Mark has treated himself with a new car.” That's the stuff they're liking.
Even if it's, “It's Mark’s birthday today,” they drop him a like. Those are the things that they're engaging with. They're not engaging with that business content. Don't get me wrong. The joke that I often tell is that if you want the maximum engagement, you share a video of a kitten playing with a ball of wool. You share videos of kids. People think you run a pet shop, which is not right. You have to blend these two things together.
You have to say, “Here's the interesting stuff that makes me. Here's the stuff that makes me an expert.” You dovetail the two and a 50/50 split is perfect, “I’ll only share personal stuff at the weekend.” Great, but during the week, you are not going to achieve a standout if everyone else is sharing the same dull nonsense, and then you share something like, “Here's me. New shoes. What do you reckon folks?” People go, “I like them both. No, I don't buy brown shoes for myself,” or whatever the comment is. The fact is you’re getting that interaction.
The key thing is that for most people, whether or not they are using the telephone, email, or LinkedIn messages, what normally happens is I send you a message and you don't even respond. That’s what normally happens. If you say, I just bought a new pair of shoes. I think they're fantastic and I drop you a message saying, “You should have bought the red ones, Mark,” you are going to respond to the message and now I have you in a conversation.
Standing Out By Sharing Authentic And Engaging Content
All of this is about making sure that you do not look like the rest of the clones out there behaving a certain way. It's standing out. I like the authenticity and I like this idea today of humanizing B2B sales because marketing automation killed this for a while. This is why you can't stay current with the spam filters for email. This is why certain jurisdictions had to start to regulate what we're emailing people because the marketing automation platforms are blasting people 320 billion emails back and forth every day.
It's shocking. Even bigger than social, I think that sales scheduling tools sales teched all the bane of a salesperson's life. You take this thing and it says, “Monday, you send an email, Tuesday, you send a connection request, Wednesday you follow him up, and Thursday, you email them.” That's the best practice in quotes. What invariably happens as people always do with a process that's as complex as sales is they fix the bit they understand, which is not necessarily the bit that's broken.
With the sales tech, it says, “At this point, you need to send. This is your third email to someone, so you need to say something along the lines of, ‘I'm circling back to bump this to the top of your inbox, checking that you read my email.’ You need to write something like that.” You, being pressed for time, don't write something like that. You say, “That will do,” and you send that. That's a set script within product X.
Everybody gets those today, “Bumping this to the top of your inbox.”
Twenty different people at ten different companies are all sending you exactly the same words. As you said, it's removing the humanity and the human connection from this. That's the problem. The problem is if it said, “You are a miserable sword. Why aren't you responding to my emails?” You're much more likely to respond and say yes. If you caught me on a bad day and then you sent one of these pseudo-personalized nonsense emails, “Just circling background to do this, just bumping this to the top of your inbox,” go away. You have not even been bothered to write me a personalized script.
The key thing here is saying to people that in a commoditized world of products and services, the only USP is who you are. If you major in that, it gives you a massive competitive advantage. Does it mean everyone is going to want to buy from me? No, because some people will say, “I don't like bald people,” in which case, we're both in trouble.
How dare they, by the way.
You can't legislate for that. I often think to myself that the beauty of this is that if you understand who I am and what I am, you know what you're buying. The danger otherwise is that we schedule a call without having any interaction. We scheduled a meeting without any interaction. I drive for an hour to come to your office, to spend an hour with you, and to drive an hour home for you to say, “I'm not going to work with you, Adam, because I don't like you.”
Social Selling: The beauty of this is that if you understand who I am and what I am, you know what you're buying.
It’s much better that when I first reach out to you, you look at my profile and say, “I'm not going to engage you in a conversation because I don't like you.” It saved me three hours to get the same result. Much of this is about saying there are a billion people on LinkedIn. You don't want to talk to all of them. What you want to talk to are the ones who love you because they can't buy that anywhere else.
This is such a great conversation. It's evolving, so it's always changing. One key message I love for all the young people starting in professional sales is this concept of being the best version of you. We were joking when you said you're a nasty side. Be the best version of you, but be you. What happens a lot in professional sales and it certainly happened for me in the beginning. I was living this party lifestyle. I thought I was a mess, out late nights and drinking and doing all this crazy stuff as a young person.
I put on my suit. Back in those days, you wore a suit more frequently and I had this veneer. The veneer was, “I'm not letting you into that craziness, but I'm going to act perfectly and that I'm pleasant and positive and all those kinds of things. It was my authentic self. They can sense it. There's no real close connection. People say, “You're formal.” They would say that to me. If you follow anything I do now, you know I have the maturity level of a 12-year-old. I'm pretty good at sales training but I'm not formal. It's just this way.
People have developed beyond expecting a certain color and a suit. It's interesting the whole authenticity thing. I genuinely believe that turning the things that you perceive as negative into positive is an important behavior to have. When I'm coaching a young person, the challenge that they have is that it may be their first proper sales role. They've been in this day cold calling or whatever, and they moved into proper sales roles.
Turning the things that you perceive as a negative into a positive is a really important behavior to have.
They're going and meeting customers. They’re young. They're in their early to mid-20s. They're facing off against someone who is in their 50s. I'm not credible because I'm young. They make up all of this stuff about how they don’t have experience of this. You haven't. It's like when a 20-year-old says to you, “In my experience, Mark, you should do such and such.” You say, “What experience? You're a kid.”
I often think that you should turn it on its head because for somebody like you, if a 20-year-old says, “To be frank, you will be my first major win. As my first client, I will go above and beyond the call of duty to make sure that you're happy.” How attractive and beguiling is that to hear? You can't hide the fact you're young. What you can do is you can say, “I have boundless energy.” You are not one of a thousand. You're one of one at the moment. I'm going to make sure that you become my case study for success. I know that that person is going to go the extra yard to make me a success than this person who's too interested in going on President's Club night.
Will leave it there for today. We could be talking for hours about this and we will. What a great conversation today and clearly the first time we've ever used the word beguiling on The Selling Well podcast. We've taken it up a level in terms of class and dignity. This is the British coming through. Thank you for that. First of all, thank you so much for joining The Selling Well podcast.
Thank you very much.
How do people learn more about Adam or DLA ignite?
They can connect to me on LinkedIn. You can search for Adam Gray on social media or something like that, or if you want to type it in, LinkedIn.com/in/adamgray. That's my URL and or you could buy a copy of one of my books. Tim wrote that book. I wrote this. It was the first globally published book on social selling, probably a little bit old hat now. It’s great for wobbly tables.
I wrote this book with Tim. Those outline the thinking that we have as an organization and the challenges that we help other organizations overcome. I would stress for anyone to connect to me on LinkedIn preferably. If not, follow me and subscribe to my newsletter where I'm serializing a lot of thinking.
We have a partner in Singapore. His headline used to say on his LinkedIn profile and this is one of the best lines ever. He said, “Knowing but not doing is folly.” That's particularly pertinent because the irony is that all of the staff that we talk about is not a moon landing for anybody. Everybody knows they need to do this. Everybody knows how to do this. Anyone who's been able to have any relationship with another human being understands how to network and build rapport and relationships.
What they don't do is they don't do it. They are looking for shortcuts. That's where they fall over. Recognizing that social as a platform to enable you to scale the intimacy of those one-to-one conversations is where the wind blows.
Recognizing that the social media platform enables you to scale the intimacy of those one-to-one conversations is where the wind lies.
Amazing counsel. What a great conversation, Adam. Thank you.
Thank you. It’s lovely to see you.
It's great to see you.
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You going to want to have a conversation with Adam just like I did today. I'm going to tell everybody, I've read these books. I'm applying the strategies provided by DLA ignite. I've learned a lot. This is why I love the podcast so much and it works. I have these great conversations with people in networking chats, and they're all amazing. Sometimes they turn into an opportunity and sometimes they don't. The reality is that what we do is let’s say a Chief Revenue Officer, it may not be today that they need us. It might be 6 months from now or 12 months from now, but eventually, they’ll need us. We're front of mind when we have that personal connection.
I'd like to thank Adam so much for joining us today and giving us some great insights. As always, I like to thank you for listening to The Selling Well podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast as much as I did. If you did, please like and subscribe to The Selling Well podcast because that's exactly how we get great guests like Adam to join us. Thank you for doing so.
We're also growth-oriented over here as you know. If you have some ideas as to how we can make this podcast more effective for you so that you can apply the strategies and the ideas to what you do every day, please let us know. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn or even email me at my personal email, MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That's my personal email that comes to me. I respond to every bit of constructive criticism we get and we love constructive criticism. Keep your ideas coming and thank you for that. We'll see everybody next time on The Selling Well podcast.
Important Links
How To Influence Buyers And Changemakers Through Social Selling With Timothy Hughes
Social Selling: Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers on Amazon