Social selling can be successful IF you know where to start. Many sellers waste time chasing celebrity status thinking that’s the only way to generate leads, not knowing there are options that can consistently get them to their sales targets. In today’s episode of the Sales Evangelist podcast, Donald Kelly talks with Tony Restell, the founder of Social-Hire, one of the leading social media marketing agencies in the UK. They discuss how to reach out to your target audience and convert that audience into opportunities. Two Roads to Success for B2B Social Sellers You become a celebrity in your field and receive inquiries based on your name/presence. For every “celebrity,” there are a lot of people who are trying to do that and failing. You grow your account by putting in consistent work and focusing your attention on a target market. This is the less risky way to generate leads. Writing Effective Connection Requests Think about how you would open up a conversation with someone at a trade show or a conference. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say in person. Drop a good question in the first conversation to get communication going. You have a 300-character limit. Use it to demonstrate your value as a connection, not to sell. How to Convert Your Audience into Opportunities Find ways to build trust and reach out without pitching. People on LinkedIn get pitched to all the time – you’ll be ignored. Restell’s strategy is doing short (5-10 minute) video calls with business owners on LinkedIn. They can use these short videos as content for themselves. Find ways to let your opportunities approach you. Asking for short interviews to gain information invites businesses to look into who you are and what you typically offer. “What we like to focus on is much more predictable and scalable [than attempting to be a LinkedIn celebrity], and it comes down to the consistency of effort. I guess that comes from my door-to-door sales background many years ago, where it was drilled into us that it’s all about the numbers and it’s all about improving your conversion rates between the numbers. If you do enough of the right things and you improve over time, you’re going to get a known outcome from that. And LinkedIn is no different for sales professionals.” – Tony Restell Resources Social-Hire.com – book a consultation call! Tony Restell on LinkedIn Sponsorship Offers This episode is brought to you in part by TSE Sales Foundation. I think we can all agree that sales should be fun. However, many times, we find ourselves in a quagmire where we’re not progressing and deals are not going the way that they should. This is why we created TSE Sales Foundation. It’s a program designed to help sales professionals just like you master the fundamentals of sales so they can radically improve their sales pipeline and close more deals. To find out more about TSE Sales Foundation and our next start date, simply go to thesalesevangelist.com/foundation. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.