Social Selling 101: How to Lead Conversations and Turn Them Into Clients

What I Mean by “Skipping The Pitch”

Before we dive deeper into the post, let’s define what I mean by “Skipping the pitch”...

Skipping the pitch is…

The ability to never have to sell and ensuring that it's effortless for your ideal customers and clients to work with you.

For me, this means…

Never having to send proposals…

No lengthy contracts…

Or any of the normal “stuff” that people talk about in business that you hate and feel is unethical.

But also… it's NOT randomly messaging people on social media trying to do cold outreach.

So, how do you do social selling… the right way?

11 Things I learned About Social Selling (After Making Tens of Millions of Dollars Doing It)

After doing it for a few years and generating tens of millions of dollars through social selling, here are the top 11 things I learned about social selling…

1. Social selling is NOT about some special type of script 

Using a script is what's going to make it extremely difficult for social selling to work because being able to Skip the Pitch is primarily about making it so that it never feels like you're being sold.

In what I teach, I always talk about how intimacy and conversation are important.

Further, curiosity is the ultimate social selling super power.

By being able to be truly curious about someone's experience, you can develop a deep empathy for that person.

And once we do that, we're able to easily and effortlessly share with them a new version of what their reality could look like, without it being tonedeaf and never feeling like you're really "pitching".

2. Being able to "Skip the Pitch" starts with your Relevancy

Without relevancy, it's spam.

It's just like email marketing or online ads.

I can't tell you that cold outreach doesn't work.

It's just not easy.

But if you want to skip the pitch, you need to build your positioning, your messaging, and all 8 core parts of what make up Relevancy.

Because the truth is...

99% of the sale is making someone feel like you're the only person in the world who can help them.

3. People aren't really buying a solution and if they are, you have zero unfair advantage.

A good "offer" isn't going to make it easy to sell socially. So, what are people buying?

It's a combination of...

- Who you are

- Who they want to be

- What they want to feel

- Their vision of a better life

- A lower or higher level of energy

People want to be like their idols. People want to be their highest self. People want to be around others who make them feel good.

#4. You need to understand the level of consciousness of the person you’re talking to

Every human has a level of consciousness. 

If you understand where someone is on a spectrum (which is easy once you understand it), your ability to help them lift or lower that is what will help you sell.

People always want to either lower their consciousness out of a desire for safety and security or they want to increase it in order to have a better life.

Understand which type of person you’re dealing with and your ability to help others becomes extremely easy.

#5. Following up works, but likely not how you've been taught

I've found that using content, groups, email, and omnipresence that is not hyper-targeted is more effective than any type of follow-up game.

Why?

Power dynamic.

No one wants someone continuing to just follow up, over and over.

Pull, don't push.

#6. The easiest way to properly social sell? 

Never be afraid of the number of new people you are connecting with.

This can be through joint ventures.

This can be social media.

This can be advertising.

I don't care.

The more people who are energetically connected to you… The easier it's going to be when you have so many people that want to work with you.

Why? Because, you don't overthink the process.

It allows for massively increased confidence.

#7. Pull v. Push

If you push, social selling isn't for you.

Or at least, you'll be overworked... underpaid, and competing with others.

#8. Make It Easy

You've got to make it easy if you want someone to buy something, and you can't focus on what they’re actually buying...

I'm talking a 1-page contract, max.

I'm talking a 1-page overview of what they get.

Don’t complicate it.

#9. Revisit Your Marketing If You Still Get Obvious Objections

If someone doesn't know who you are, how you work, the problem they have, the solution, your process, social proof, the vision for their life and their objections haven't been handled...

You need to revisit your marketing and allow for it to be skip-the-pitch-proofed.

If you're on the phone, or texting someone and they ask any of those questions, It's not going to work, because the marketing wasn't built properly.

#10. Principles and Boundaries Are Critical. 

If you aren't going to take phone calls, don't take them. If you say you don't give discounts, don't do it.

For example: I don't do payment plans.

I lose sales because of that.

However, those same boundaries create the respect that doesn't just create a great business, it also creates clients and people who respect you.

People who respect you are those who will do anything to become your clients and stay your clients.

#11. Be Relaxed… Seriously

You've got to be relaxed and not take things too seriously. I know that can be difficult, however, people don't want to buy from people who aren't chill.

That might mean sending some memes.

That might be meditating before sending a message.

That might be turning up who YOU are.

However, the truth is… People want to buy from RELAXED and FUN people.

Life is too serious, don't add to that noise.

Be yourself and have a good laugh.

Money and new customers are attracted to people who have a good time.

These are the things that I learned when it comes to social selling. For more in-depth training on how to do it, check out my Skip the Pitch workshop.

Using the above information, I came up with 6 principles to simplify it for clients and help them lead the conversation the right way and get clients.

What are those principles?

The 6 Principles to Lead Conversations and Turn Them into Clients

https://youtu.be/hmyyS_hhTp0

This is a quick video from my premium course, The ROI Method Course, that teaches social selling 101 and the 6 principles to have in mind.

These principles will work in any conversation no matter the platform or the medium used.

You need to understand that the idea behind social selling is to get the other person to buy from you on the spot (which I most commonly do nowadays) or get them on a phone call so that you can turn them into a customer on the phone.

Most of the sales I’ve closed have come from social selling. 

In the past few years, I have generated over 40 million dollars. Around 32 million dollars have come from social selling at some level. That’s why intimacy is an integral part of my methodology and my businesses.

Here are some of the main principles to keep in mind to be effective at social selling.

Principle #1: It's Never About You, It's About Them

When you're in a conversation, it shouldn’t be about you and how great you are. It's all about them.

You should make the conversation be oriented toward them, their pain and problems, their vision, and the gap to achieve it. 

You want them to feel heard and seen and have your presence. This is the #1 thing you need to do to have an effective conversation.

Principle #2: Understand the Fact That People Are Self-Centered

This ties into the first point. 

People as a whole are pretty self-centered. Even when we do things for others, a lot of the time we do it for self-centered reasons, like wanting to feel good or to make other people like us.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. 

From a levels-of-consciousness perspective, it makes sense, as well, because if you are not in an abundant state then you're in survival mode, and it will be hard not to be self-centered. 

It's difficult to think of other people when you're spending every minute wondering how you're going to scrape by. This is what I mean when I say that we’re on a level of survival if we’re not thriving.

And when we are in survival mode, we’re self-centered.

That's why you need to focus on this when you're in a conversation with someone and not feel bad about it.

Principle #3: Never Sell - Be Curious to Help Them

I know this is obvious, but I can’t stress it enough. 

When you’re having a conversation, your whole purpose is to help someone go from where they are to where they want to be. You won’t help them achieve their goal right away, but you should focus on helping them and serving them.

You can do great things by just focusing on how you can help them understand themselves better. 

Try to be curious and think about how you can help them figure out what’s wrong with their life and how you can point them in the right direction.

Principle #4: Allow for Open Ends

So when you’re talking with someone, you don’t try to close the conversation like you’re closing a support ticket or like you have a to-do list item that you want to check off.

You don’t have to go in and say something like “See you later. Talk to you soon.”

Keep conversations open and keep the conversation going so you can jump in from time to time and keep it going.

Which brings me to…

Principle #5: Increase Intimacy Over Time… the Right way

I see people fail at social selling a lot of the time largely because they try to escalate the conversation too quickly. 

You need to remember that someone’s going to give you as much of their time and attention as they’re willing to give you. That’s why having conversations in the Fast Lane is much better than the other two lanes.

So you need to increase your intimacy over time. Don’t try to escalate the conversation too fast. 

This means wishing them a happy birthday and taking the time to show that you care. You could send them a link to a guide or something because they interacted with one of your recent posts, for example, by liking your Facebook post or commenting on it.

Once things advance more, and after you’ve built some intimacy, you could start hopping in on conversations because you already kept it open-ended as I told you, and ask things like “How's it going? I just wanted to see how you're doing.” 

Make it relevant to how you ended the conversation the last time.

You have to realize that social selling is about being there. It’s another level of omnipresence and another level of getting attention to flow towards you.

And this brings me to the last and most important principle...

Principle #6: Never Pitch Your Service, Embed What You Do

Pitching will make you lose people that could have been potential clients in the long run. 

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t talk about your services and what you do at all, you just need to do it the right way.

So for me, for example, instead of going to someone and telling them I could help them scale their business, I could say something along the lines of, “You know, one of my clients last week had this problem and here’s how she fixed it.”

Again, you don’t talk about yourself or what you do. You’re actually just helping them understand how to solve their problem and how other people had the same problem and solved it. 

But at the same time, you’re implying that you have clients and that you could help them scale their business (or whatever your service is).

You talk about it like it is something you do all the time. 

Be natural and casual about it so they don’t feel like they’re in a sales call. You want to make them come to you at the end and say something like, “Maybe we should talk about how you can help me.”

This is by far the most effective way to have someone work with you enthusiastically without worrying about price objections and trying to align something that isn’t in alignment. 

This lets me choose the clients that I work with, so I’m happier to wake up every morning and help people.

And you can experience that positive, liberating energy, too... if you apply the principles above. 

Let me tell you, it’s nice never having to worry about always pitching your products.

Social selling is about drawing people’s attention to one-on-one conversations, adding value, and never selling in a way that’s pushy, but rather seeing what their vision is and how you can help them.

Even if that means that it's nothing about you, but you're connecting them to a friend of yours, or you're just giving them something that's actually valuable. 

Social selling in the simplest terms is helping somebody, and when we help people, we typically end up doing business with them.

But most entrepreneurs don’t do what I showed you here. 

They obsess over getting more leads and trying to close the sales faster. If they did what you just learned, they would build a very successful business right from the get-go. 

I know this because this is how I did it, and this is how I helped thousands of people build their six-figure business. 

You don’t even need ads most of the time until you’re making more than $10k/month, maybe even $20k/month.

Until then, focus on havng conversations. It’s really that simple.

If you want to learn more about social selling and how to skip the pitch, check out my new workshop, Skip the Pitch.