Commission-Only Social Selling - Why does it easily reach millions of people?

Everybody is talking about social selling. But if you are an experienced online marketer, you know that most of the prevalent opinions about social selling are pretty ridiculous.

Every seasoned online marketer knows that unless you deal with large volumes of online marketing, you won’t generate enough sales to make any difference for your client or for your business.

We also know that generating a substantial number of sales or even endorsements from social media connections is a tall order.

So how do you do effective social selling?

Let's ask growth hackers. They’re the ones who produce most of the marketing-generated sales in the world today. Christian Dillstrom is a globally recognized growth hacker, so let's ask him how he does social selling for his clients.

 

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT IS SOCIAL SELLING?

It is selling that makes use of social media.

SO, BEING ACTIVE IN SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS IN SALES?

Heh. That's funny. Look at the evidence. You can easily discover who are the most active and popular people in different social media and see how many of these guys are millionaires.

If just being active in social media were enough, most of these social-media mavens would be rich—and they’re not. For whatever reason, one’s connections in social media are usually quite passive.

For example, look at the people with 20,000 to 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, followers on Twitter or 5,000 connections on Facebook. And then look at how many readers and endorsements their articles and updates have received.

The discrepancy is sobering.

OKAY, NOW I’M PUZZLED.

SOUNDS LIKE SOCIAL MEDIA IS A BUST.

HOW CAN YOU DO SOCIAL SELLING WITHOUT USING SOCIAL MEDIA?

You don’t. I am not doing it without social media. But I must drive people from outside of social media through social media.

We’ve done a lot of research and testing to find out that when you ask people to do something for you on social media, only a pitifully small number of them will then actually do what you ask them to do.

Here’s the shocker, though: when we approached the same people from outside of social media, a much larger percentage of them did exactly what we asked them to do.

You need social media. That’s the only place to get endorsements.

Endorsements—comments, shares, and likes, all the formal stamps of approval in those forums—are crucial to generating sales in social media. Endorsements massively multiply the reach of your efforts. Endorsements affect 83% of purchase decisions.

Advertising affects only 17% of purchase decisions.

SO, I JUST PUBLISH MY MARKETING MESSAGE IN SOCIAL MEDIA AND DRIVE PEOPLE TO IT?

Not quite. We tried that, but it was still not enough to produce the results we wanted. 

Both the number of endorsements and the number of eventual sales were still very small.

The only way to figure these things out is to test different approaches. We tried systematically pretty much everything, even selecting people manually to match the marketing content.

Eventually we had no other choice but to interview

target groups to learn what we were doing wrong.

To our big surprise, the problem was the lack of credibility in the marketing material. 

It wasn’t about the credibility of the content; we were using credible content in our tests.

It was about the popularity of the content as measured by a trusted and independent third party.

Popularity is what confers the kind of credibility that results in sales.

We found that publishing marketing material as a SlideShare article and making that article popular works great. SlideShare users are busy business professionals, and 99.5% of SlideShare articles have one hundred or fewer readers.

But in today’s world, having 100,000 or more business readers

for your SlideShare article makes your message credible.

HOW CAN YOU GET 100,000 READERS FOR YOUR SLIDESHARE ARTICLE?

IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE?

It is not hard if you have a couple million followers in SlideShare. SlideShare will send your followers a notification when you publish a new article.

Another way is having your SlideShare article featured, with a link, in the online version of one of the major business media like The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Forbes, Business 2.0, etc.

A third way is to get recommended by a SlideShare article author who has millions of readers every month. That would be me. I have eighteen million business readers, and I recommend the SlideShare articles of our clients to my business readers.

I FIND IT HARD TO BELIEVE THAT SLIDESHARE ARTICLES PRODUCE SALES!

They do it if you know what you’re doing. And if your message is proved to be credible—which means popular—by SlideShare.

All our sales come from our SlideShare articles. But you must do more than wish for good results to get good results.

Every one of our articles includes a clear call to action, asking interested people to immediately leave their contact details in our system or with our live-chat personnel.

Also, getting a very popular—therefore credible—businessperson to endorse your article will further increase your sales conversions.

 

I GUESS I STILL DON’T GET IT.

WHERE DO THE BIG SALES COME IN?

After you have made your message credible and you have calls to action in place to turn your message into sales, you need to drive a lot of good traffic through all of that to generate a lot of endorsements and a lot of sales.

The first thing I usually do is turn the employees of my client into marketing powerhouses. If a client has about twenty employees, we can generate over 800,000 endorsement views once a week or once a month.

The frequency depends on the client's industry. It takes an individual employee only a minute or two to perform his role in each campaign.

So, it’s not going to be a big burden.

After that, I help clients understand how to convert the prospects on their mailing lists and in their customer and marketing databases into marketing superstars—while also selling to those same prospects.

10,000 of them can generate over 800,000 endorsement views once a week or once month: again, depending on the client's industry.

WHY WOULD MY EMPLOYEES AND CUSTOMERS DO ANY MARKETING FOR ME?

It’s not so much the ”why” you need to focus on as the ”how”. The first principle is to ”sell without selling”. And the second principle is to always find and communicate in your messaging ”what's in it for me”, ”me” being the recipient.

It’s not easy to sell without selling. But people have become very suspicious of sales pitches. So, don’t sell. Just provide your readers with the truth and let them know ”what's in it for me”.

Do that with good taste and you’ll be surprised how much people will do for you.

We also advise our clients to sponsor a competition that gives participants a chance to win something cool when they endorse. Each endorsement serves as a kind of raffle ticket.

That kind of incentive usually doubles the number of

endorsements and sales you will receive.

WHAT IS THE MOST CRUCIAL POINT OF FAILURE AND WHY?

Many people don’t understand the importance of the proven popularity—and, therefore, the proven credibility—of their SlideShare articles. If you miss that, the number of endorsements is going to be very low, and your sales are going to be very low.

These days, most people just don’t want to bother with anything that is not already popular and proven. So, they won’t want to endorse such things.

The same reluctance applies to buying things. Why risk buying from someone no one else trusts when you can buy from a popular competitor?

No need to wonder how social selling works for your business,

as we do it with commission-only deals.

Just click here to book a free teleconference to find out more.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.

Talking with a seasoned growth hacker really gives you a new perspective on things.

There are many steps to achieving big sales. Although each individual step is simple, the procedure is complicated. But you can get a handle on it.


You just need to put the sequence of tasks in the right order and execute each step in the sequence at just the right time.