This headline from a recent post by my friend Philip Rowley grabbed my attention. I’ve experienced first-hand organisations large and small who look at adopting social selling programs, by giving their inside sales teams LinkedIn premium or shelling out for LinkedIn Elevate and expecting their sellers will “go social” all on their own.
What Philip hits on in this article is that you not only need to change the sales incentives, you also need to change the whole sales culture.
Recently I had someone tell me about a “new way of selling”, using relationships and understanding client needs rather than always asking for how many widgets the client needed to buy from me. I then explained that’s the way I had been selling all along.
Another person told me how they had been responsible for $100M of influenced sales during their 4-year tenure at a consulting company. Because the sales culture and reporting mechanisms didn’t allow for this new type of selling to be captured, they let the person go saying they had made no contribution to the organisation.
I encourage you to read Phil’s article on Linkedin and then understand what you need to change in your sales organisation to step up to this new way of selling.