Tim Hughes: Yes, very quickly, I was in a corporate sales role and have been for 25 years, I'm a salesperson. And I was in this corporate sales role. And I was selling accounting systems, and I was getting bored of it. And my manager said, and this is 15 years ago, we need to get onto social media it's changing the world, and I did and I really enjoyed it.
And I suddenly thought, gee, you know, I quite fancy spending my life on social media, helping people transforming teams, The company that I was working for, very kindly laid me off, and the person who is my business partner, Adam Gray. And in the UK, being laid off is not like given a black bag and told to go away, you're actually given quite a lot of money, which enabled us to set up the business.
All kinds of things happened- 2016, my first book came out, it was the first book on social selling.
And we'll talk about how to actually things- I was saying to my partner actually the other day, so that that a lot of the things have come to me, rather than me having to go out and get and I can talk about that, during the discussion that we're having.
Felicia Shakiba: I know that you mentioned the importance of building a buyer centric profile on social media.
Tim Hughes: Yes.
Could you elaborate on what that entails, and why is it important to the sales cycle?
Tim Hughes: Yes so the mistake that we always make, whether we're salespeople, or we're in human resources, or whatever we think it's about us. And it's not, it's about the other person, it's about the candidate, it's about the buyer.
And what we need to do if we're on social media is that we need to understand what that person is thinking and what they're looking for.
And so, when we put ourselves out on social media, the first thing that we need to understand this that, when people are looking at our profiles, they're jumping to conclusions about what you're doing. So for example, if your LinkedIn profile is a CV, the only conclusion I can jump to is that you're looking for a job.
And so what we need to do is that we need to put or create a shop window to the world.
So our LinkedIn profile, there's a billion people on LinkedIn, and they all walk past your LinkedIn profile every day. And what we want them to do is rather than say, call us into the boring corporate profile, what we want them to do is go that's really interesting.
Do you know, I think that person could help me. And we actually have clients where buyers are walking across social media, and they're saying to the salesperson, 'I see your profile. I think you can help us. Can you do that?' And then that turns into a classic sales conversation.
We've got constant doing multimillion dollar deals purely by being on social media. Now, that's a transformation from typical salespeople. When you see a salesperson, there's a joke about salespeople, 'How do you tell a salesperson if he's lying? Their lips are moving.' And that's the thing about salespeople, we don't like them, we don't trust them, and we know that if we talk to them, we're just going to end up as a line in the CRM system. And so what we're looking for are people that are different that stand out.
And there's a whole bunch of other things that we train and coach people in in the way that search is different on social media, so how can you be found etc. But why I saw your profile is a building block of what you need to do to be good on social.
How do you approach and maintain a wide and varied network on platforms like LinkedIn?
Tim Hughes: The way the that the people will find you is because they will be connected to you.
So if you look at sales from a classic sales perspective, there's two ways of actually getting a sale. One is through outbound, which is where I will contact you. And the classic thing that people do, everybody will have had this on LinkedIn, is that someone will connected it to you, you accept the connection, of course, and then they send you a list of their products and services. That's spam.
That's not what we would see as social selling, I'm going to answer your question, but I'm actually going to define what social selling is because I think it's important that people understand that because quite often, they think social selling is selling on social, and it's not. So I'm just gonna read after reading off the wall, because I don't know this off by heart.
So social selling is using your presence and behavior on social media, to build influence, make connections, grow relationships, and trust, which lead to conversations and commercial interaction. Now, conversations are really key because conversations create sales. So what we're trying to do is create a conversation. So go back to your question about network, whenever we connect with somebody, all we do is we have the opportunity to have a conversation with that person.
Tim Hughes (06:37): So the way that LinkedIn works is that if you scroll down the timeline, it will show you content from people that you're connected to, and content from people that are connected to your contacts. So the wider and varied the network that you can have, the more likely that you're going to see podcasts, your podcast or whatever is coming to you, but the more likely that you're going to spread your influence and your message out over the LinkedIn and if you're using other channels, as well out through social media.
We call this having walking digital corridors and having digital conversations. So you build a network, you see each connection is an ability to have a conversation. And we train people in the way that they have those conversations. So ultimately, you will be in a situation where somebody will turn around and say, what do you do?' Think of is a networking event, but online.
Felicia Shakiba: Yes, absolutely, but people can't, or sellers can't be on social media all day, right? They have meetings, their meeting with other clients, they're traveling.
What is the recommended or suggested amount of time, that people should be spending on social media to build that what you call influence? What does that day to day or week to week look like for them?
Tim Hughes: So it's a very common question that we get. And my answer to that would normally be like 30 minutes or an hour. I've been to customers where I say, so how do you say to somebody, so how did this morning go? And they say, well, I've wasted time. So I say why was that? 'WelI, I was cold calling and I'll never get through to anybody, and no one ever returns my calls,' it's like, okay, so why are you doing that?
You know, it doesn't work. We know social selling works. So why didn't you invest those three hours in social selling? Oh, I can't do that. Why not? Why would you do something that doesn't work versus something that does? Now all of our team, all of my team, all we do is social sell. We've never placed an ad we've never made a cold call. We don't have an email list. All we do is social sell. So I spend all my time in social media. When you say 30 minutes people say that's a long time and you go, 'Okay, yes, but...' There's a guy on LinkedIn called Simon Kemp.
He creates every quarter a it's now 500 slides of the most up to date data on what is social media? How many people are on the internet? How many people on social media.
The average person... So there are something like there's 5 billion people on social media. 62% - that's 62% of the world's population. And the average person spends two hours 23 minutes at day on social media. So...
Felicia Shakiba: Interesting.
Tim Hughes:
That 5 billion people are spending two hours, 23 minutes a day. Now, that's an average. So in the Philippines, they generally spend five hours a day on social media, some people less that gives you an average figure, as well as that, of course, some of that is posting pictures of your lunch or your fruit bowl or something like that. But also, what 75% of the people are using it for brand research. Or let's, let's go to let's take the family to Iceland. That'd be really good. What the first thing that you do is reach for your mobile.
Felicia Shakiba: Right?
Tim Hughes (10:40): Yeah. And you'd start searching. I mean, you wouldn't wait for someone to cold call you about Iceland, you'd just go and do it. And you just search, I've sat in a cafe with my partner. And she'll say, Let's go because I live closer to Iceland than you do. And she'll say, let's get to Iceland for the weekend. And I say, Okay, you search for the Airbnbs, I'll search for the flights.
And we're sat there talking to each other, going through our mobiles with our mobiles doing searching. And that's how people buy today. Now, what's happening also is that we've been conditioned in the way that we buy through to business to business. In the UK, I live in London, so house could be a million dollars. I can go online, and I can basically research a million-dollar house, I can go to what you call a real estate person.
Tim Hughes: And we're conditioned in that, and we're bringing that into business to business. So going out and buying a million-dollar accounting system, and actually doing most of buying online isn't, is seen as being normal. So Six Senses have just come out with this report that shows that people are now 70% of the way through the buying process before they contact a seller. And when they do contact a seller, they generally know who they're going to buy from, they've actually scrolled out and said, these are the this is the these are the products, these are the prices, this one's actually look like the right ones, or these are the wrong ones. And then they actually make those they call into those vendors.
So actually, by the time someone actually calls you, you may have already won or lost the deal. And this is what people don't understand that you need to have a position on social media because we know that our buyers are there, we need to have a buyer centric profile.
So what happens is that people see us as somebody that can help us, we need to have a wider varied network, because we need to be connected to the people that we want to influence, the people that are going to buy. And because what we're trying to do is influence the early stage of the sale, because people are doing all of this research and you said, oh, yeah, like, of course people do it. BMW is a client of ours.
When a buyer walks through the door of the showroom, they know that buyer will know more about the car they want to buy than the salesperson. So they've retrained their salespeople not to say, well, it's got GPS, and it's got electric windows and stuff, what they do is that they actually have trained the salespeople to say, if you buy this model that or that rather than that model, it doesn't depreciate as fast, and you're only losing five brake horsepower, but you're never gonna use that on the freeway anyway. What they're doing is that they're actually enabling the person to buy, and this is how sales and marketing has changed.
Another example is I was actually writing on my blog for tomorrow, we just had the you just have the Super Bowl, and what there's all these adverts that get take place. And what do we remember about the adverts? Well actually, in three months we won't remember it as a State Farm ad, we'll remember it was Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito. And the thing is that we don't remember the brand anymore. This is about people. Social has changed the landscape. That is not about brands anymore. It's about you, if I'm connected to you, I have a relationship with you.
If you say to ring me up tomorrow and say, Tim, I got this great opportunity. I'm gonna go and work for IBM. Fantastic.
What we've done is that relationship moves to IBM, the company that you're working for at the moment, I never knew what it was anyway, this is the landscape that's taking place and the transformation that's taking place. And this is just accelerating.
Felicia Shakiba: Right.
You mentioned something about how we train salespeople, and I'm going to come back to that. But first, in your book, you highlighted the significance of creating insightful content for social media. Can you share some strategies for creating engaging content that resonates with the target audience?
Tim Hughes: Yes. So we've done research about what content works and what content doesn't work. And it's really back to the fact that people come to social media because they want human content contact, they want to have a conversation, they don't come to social media to read brochures. And in fact, their research from Six Senses actually says, don't waste your time getting your employees to post brochures or white papers on social media, because buyers can get those from your websites.
And we all know what brochures and white papers say they say buy my product, because it's great. When we go to a website, we'll know that the cop the website will say we're the best in the world. And you want to buy our product. Every single website says. We just filter this stuff out. What we're looking for is this human-to-human contact, which is your network loves you. Your network loves you and the content that you're putting out.
They're looking for insight. Tell me something about the CPO process that I don't know already. Tell me all of the things that this particular podcast actually stands for. We're looking for that insight. We're looking for an expert that's going to tell us that's going to help us. And so what we need to be doing is that we need to be providing that insight. We need to be sharing content where people go, that's interesting, because when we get when we pick up our mobiles, and we go down the timeline, we go Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, 'Oh that's that podcast, I really like that. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna make time to actually watch that.
We're looking for that insight, we're looking for those particular people that can actually provide that insight. And what we're also looking for is a human element to it.
And our research shows, because we've gone on to LinkedIn, and looked at particular content, and certain content, then certain content has, you know, so many likes and comments. And I suggest everybody does this because they can A- B test this. Tomorrow, put out a post on LinkedIn of a brochure of your company and see how many likes and comments you got.
The next day, put out a post, which is you, photo of you, holding up a brochure and see how many likes and comments you get.
And what you'll find is the picture of you holding up the brochure will get more likes and comments. Because as a network, we're interested in you and who you are and what you do and watch what you say.
We're not interested in corporate propaganda from some sort of company. So anybody can do that. And if I'm wrong, please come to me and tell me no, I've said this on podcast, some people have never come to me and say that.
So what we're looking for is we're looking for that content. So my blog tomorrow is about the Superbowl ads, and the fact that it's not about advertising, it's about the people. We remember is Jennifer Lopez, we remember that it's Danny DeVito. And what I'm providing is a very snackable piece of content, which people can read in 10-20 seconds with what they do is Yes, Tim he is Oh, yeah, he starts introduce interesting. Oh, yeah, he's our social selling guy. And what happens is that I'm constantly waving to people across the internet.
And when they're looking for someone to come in and help transform their salespeople to using social selling, they'll say who's that guy, oh ya he had interesting content. He does that he did that one about the Superbowl and Danny DeVito, and Tim Hughes, that's it, Tim Hughes. I'm actually what I'm doing is I'm being I'm making sure that people know who I am. They know who the expert I am, what I stand for, and I'm waving them to them every day.
Tim Hughes: What would you say to someone who might be a little bit shy or reserved from exposing themselves or their personal lives? Or I don't want to take a picture because I don't want you know, this funny background in my house, right? I mean, most people, some people work from home. So what would you say to that salesperson?
Tim Hughes (19:02): So I'm an introvert. Though I'm, I don't often come across as one. This is not about...the thing is to when you share a brochure, if someone says 'That's rubbish,' you can say, yeah, it's just a brochure. It's the company I work for, I'm going to leave them in three months anyway. Whereas if you're sharing a picture of yourself, people think, and someone says, 'You're rubbish or your background is rubbish,' oh, well, you would be offended.
The thing is that people don't do that. People know there's a kind of unwritten rule on LinkedIn, that if you're showing stuff about yourself, someone may actually say it's interesting that you've got avocados in your fruit bowl. And that may be a comment, but that they won't say you look stupid. Nobody does that.
And the other thing about social media, what you got to remember is that you can block these people. You are in control of who your network is and who is and the conversations you got have, if you want to you can report to LinkedIn as well.
So what I would always recommend, especially to people that think that they're shy or they're introverted is to try, try taking... here's this place where I like to go hiking, this is the these are the woods where I would go walking.
This is the place that that we take the children, they really love it here. And think about those things, or this is the Baker's that I go to, this is my favorite danish pastry. Now, what you're not necessarily doing is saying that it's not something about you. But there again, it is, if you're going and saying, This is my you know, on on Thursdays, my parents have my children and one of the things that I do is I go out, and I go and sit in a coffee shop and I buy a latte, and I just sit there in silence. And what I find is, is something that really inspires me, and it just enables me to clear my head.
And I'm just sitting there in a moment. That's not sharing anything private about you. It's not unprofessional, it is sharing something about you. And what you'll probably get is people coming on Yeah, and my mom and about moment of silence is so important. And when someone says you know well, I prefer a flat white rather than a latte or whatever it is.
But what they're doing is if they're commenting and liking your post, what they're sharing is that they have a digital resonance with you, wonder if we can connect. That's all it is. You're not asking for anything else.
And from a sales perspective or a CPO perspective, it could be because you're what this is doing is that you're looking for your future employees. It's not just about sales. But what we're doing by using that content is that we're creating that connection. And that's just an an idea.
I mean, I can take you through lots of different if we've got time, at the end, I'll take you through another example of content.
And so you're in you're talking about employer branding.
Tim Hughes (21:57): Yes. So, but it's, employer branding quite often is seen as being, what we're going to do is we're going to buy a piece of software, and we're going to take the brochures and the white papers that people aren't reading on any of the other places, and we're going to push those out. So it's still quite often employer branded is still seen as we're going to stand on the top of the building, and we're going to get a megaphone, and we're going to shout out how brilliant we are. And no one's interested.
It's about, employer branding, is about empowering the employees with guardrails, to understand how they can go out onto social media look interesting, build networks, and share content that actually people will engage with and go, that looks really interesting.
So we have a client that creates desktop terminals in Cambridge, in the UK. They don't spend any money on job adverts or recruitment consultants anymore, they've cut that completely from their budget, because they're totally online. And people are going, that's really interesting. Oh, you do that as if you've got a woman's group, that you're doing that around diversity that's really interesting.
And what they're doing is that they're taking their culture and they're putting it online. And we all know that the employees that are going to stay the longest and probably give you the most, most of their time are the ones that are going to walk towards you and say, I want to come and work for you, rather than necessarily somebody that's got a CV. So what we're doing is we're seeing this transforming not just in the sales, we're right across the whole of the enterprise.
Could you walk us through the process of training salespeople on how to best do this?
Tim Hughes:
What we're doing is we're teaching people something new. And whenever people learn something new, they have to have time to actually think about these things. So there's new concepts about the buyer centric profile.
What does that mean? Writing in a different way, rather than writing in this business gibberish, I'm a results orientated. Yeah, we're all results orientated.
We're all highly energetic, and it's meaningless. What we want to do is that when we see someone's profile, we want to see the story of what they are the fact that they people say to me, I'm passionate about digital transformation. And I say to him, so three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, you're really passionate about digital transformation. They say, No, I'm watching the kids play football. Okay, so you're not passionate about digital transformation.
You're passionate about your kids playing football. And so what we do is that we teach people how to write in a way that is actually is interesting to the buyer. We also take them through about how to grow a network that's connecting to people without spamming people. And usually at that session, we actually see them getting meetings. So even though it's a 12 week program, people think that the we don't get a return on investment until 12 weeks we actually generally get a return usually about by about week three when we start teaching people to get the meetings.
We then show people how to talk about the key words of how they need to be found, how they can be found, how they can go out and have conversations. So you have to go out onto posts and say, your podcast sound sounds really interesting, etc, etc. Starting conversations, joining conversations, and the last thing that we do is that we teach them how to create content.
And everybody writes a 300-word blog. And the whole of the process is certified by the Institute of Sales Professionals, which is a sales trade body here in the UK. It's the only independently certified social selling program in the world.
And given that 12 week program, what three things can people do, or sellers do right now, that will help?
Tim Hughes (25:54): The first thing is, I'm going to tell you some things, and I've already told you some things and knowing and doing two different things. So I can tell you this stuff, and you're gonna know it. But I can guarantee you that you won't do it. And it's important that what you what people do when they take away from this is the fact that they actually go and do it.
So the first thing that you need to do is you need to have a buyer centric profile. And one of the things that you can look at that is your summary title on your LinkedIn profile is the most visible thing about you on the internet. If I google your name, unless you've got your own blog, or website, because Google loves LinkedIn, because it's full of content, when I google your name, I will see your photo, your name and that summary title.
Your job is to get someone to come and look at your profile in more detail. Because what you're trying to do is if whatever product or whatever service that you sell, you want to get someone to go, Oh, that's really interesting. I've never thought about that. Yeah, we need to get some people in around that. And I'll contact you. So if you've got your title, which is Head of Tax Group or something like that, you can ascend desperately boring.
Or the other thing that people do is what's called the pipes thing, which is where they've been told by some LinkedIn trainer to basically put keywords in it. So it'll say, podcast, author, speaker, TEDx, x-Google, x-Facebook, or whatever. I mean, that it all it does, is it just for the buyer, it just looks like a blur.
So I would ask anybody who, if you're interested in this coming over, look at my LinkedIn profile. I'm Timothy Hughes, or Tim Hughes, search for me and, and social selling as well in you'll find me and you'll see that I have a very different summary title than anybody else.
And why does it?
Tim Hughes: My summary title is,
"Should have played Quidditch for England."
What happens when they read it, people come to me and go, 'Wow, I had to come and look at your profile, because I read your title, and then I had to come and have a look at your LinkedIn profile.' And I say I have a spelling mistake, right, at the end of my LinkedIn profile on purpose, because some people say come back to me and say, 'You do realize you've spelt experience wrong,' and I'll go 'Yeah'. And I know that you've just read my LinkedIn profile the whole way, all the way through. The thing about your summary title, this is about creating a conversation, this is about getting people to come and look at your profile.
This is about getting people to understand that you are the expert that they're looking for. Now, if you have professional addition of LinkedIn and above, then LinkedIn shows you who's looked at your LinkedIn profile. So that means that you're able to go back to those people and say, you looked at my LinkedIn profile.
Have you found what you were looking for? Can we connect? And then when we connect, you say, Thanks for looking at my LinkedIn profile. Was there anything actually that you were looking for? And quite often people come back, and they'll say something like, oh, yeah, we're actually looking for a speaker for ourselves would you be interested?
And I'll convert 25% of the people that look at my LinkedIn profile to business purely by going through this step-by-step process.
Now your summary title needs to be your WHY, not your WHAT. Lots of all LinkedIn trainers basically say it should be your WHAT, it shouldn't be. It needs to be your 'Why is it that you do something?,' because what you're trying to do is, I get lots of people connecting to me saying, I help CEOs with their fitness, and I just go ignore, because I know what's gonna happen.
You're gonna it's gonna pitch to me. Or I help CEOs with their accounting, and I just ignore it because I've got an accountant already. Now, they may be the best counselors in the world. I won't know that, because you're trying to pitch to me. So I'll tell you about this piece of content. So this is just an idea.
So a person that worked for me basically put out a piece of content and they said, my wife and I, we love Led Zeppelin. And whenever on a Friday night, my wife puts on Led Zeppelin, and I know as soon as I hear it through at the door of my office, it's the time that I need to finish up what I'm doing and go enjoy the family for the weekend. What's your favorite Led Zeppelin song?
People will put in 'When the Levee Breaks' and 'Stairway to Heaven' and 'Whole of Love,' and 'Cashmere,' which is my favorite.
And then on Monday, what he did was that all the people that he wasn't connected to, he basically sent a message saying, 'Hey, thanks for your message. Yeah, I love When the Levee Breaks is really brilliant Led Zeppelin for it's just a fantastic album. Can I connect on all the people that he was connected to?' He sent a message to say, yeah, thanks for the message about Led Zeppelin. Yeah, I really love Misty Blue Mountain.
It's a really, we clearly have a lot in common, why don't we have a conversation and get together on a call?' So what we've done is that we've used a piece of content, which is it's not unprofessional.
It's actually something which is that people are interested in, we learn something about that person. But also at the same time what we've done is that we've, we've connected to a whole bunch of people that have shown that they have a digital resonance with us, because they're saying, We've got we like Led Zeppelin. And what we've done is that we've teed up a whole load of meetings with people of with Led Zeppelin fans.
Now, the way that you run that meeting, I don't have to time to have to go into that. But you run that meeting in a particular way where you don't go on and pitch. But that's just an example of where I'm hoping that I can spark people's imagination about how they can use content in a way that will actually generate a network and conversations for them.
Felicia Shakiba: Tim, everything that you've shared today has been so insightful. So eye opening, thank you so much.
Where can people find you?
Tim Hughes: They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Timothy or Tim Hughes, if you search on social selling, and there's also my book, which I'm holding up, though, nobody can see it.
My book is Social Selling Techniques to influence buyers and changemakers. It's the second edition, the one with the yellow cover and I completely rewrote the one in from 2016. And that second edition came out in 2022.
Felicia Shakiba: Thank you so much, Tim.
Tim Hughes: Thank you.
Felicia Shakiba: That's Tim Hughes, CEO and co-founder of DLA Ignite.
