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Written by: Dean Seddon
You don't realise referrals a trap until you hit a tough spot. When your contacts and clients are recommending you, there is no problem.
But then someone retires, a clients moves roles or a client leaves and there is no pending deals to fill the spot - you see how exposed your business really is.
This is why I'm a strong advocate for social selling, because it's a low cost way to create demand so you don't face a gap or feast and famine.
Social Selling is really simple.
It's about building trust with your ideal clients before you ask anything of them. In some ways it's the opposite of classic sales. In most sales environments, the seller will email, call and outreach to get an appointment and the trust building starts on the call.
Social Selling is the opposite, building it ahead of time.
I've shared this diagram before, but it's a good example of how it works:
When you are reliant on referrals, you essentially have no ecosystem beyond your referral partners. They use their trust to get you in the door.
In social selling, especially for expert-led businesses like consulting, coaching and MSPs for example, the trust pieces is essential - people are considering you for very sensitive work - that is critical to their business.
So trust has to come first.
How do you build trust?
Trust is about three things, relevance, consistency and evidence.
What many people do on LinkedIn or social media more widely to promote their business is promote, but buyers are researching earlier and talking to people later.
We don't trust people trying to sell things, we become cautious.
But we do trust people who understand us, understand our world and have stories of other people like us, who've benefited from working with you.
That's what you need to do. Not promote, but share trust building content through your profile and your content.
- Talk about situations they'd recognise in their world.
- Share reflections from your experience.
- Share stories of other clients getting results.
How do you get clients?
Lead generation is simple if you are building trust. I have 5 ways I show my clients, not so they can do all of them, but so they can master one of them.
If you've got most of your business from referrals, I'm going to be honest with you, it is highly likely that your current way of thinking, operating and managing new business is not fit for purpose.
If you got 50 leads today and for the last year you've only dealt with referrals, you are likely to mishandle the leads. Not because you're a terrible person, just because you are used to leads with very high trust levels - essentially - yours to lose.
With leads from social selling, they have a level of trust, but not the same level as a personal recommendation from someone - that means, if you don't have a tight process you will lose those leads.
These are my top ways to get clients from LinkedIn:
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