Summary: Do you want to get better at social selling or help your sales team do the same? If not, you should. Here’s why.<br> B2B marketing has gone through a modernization to align better with how people buy. Now it’s time for sales to step up. According to Jill Rowley, “…we’re long overdue for transformation, a modernization of the way we sell…”<br> I recently interviewed Jill Rowley Chief Evangelist and startup advisor for #SocialSelling. Jill’s made a huge impact in the marketing automation community. She’s a modern marketing expert and is now applying her innovative thinking to social selling.<br> Writers Note: The transcript has was edited for publication.<br> <br> Brian: Jill, can you tell us a little bit about your background?<br> Jill: Sure, Brian. Thanks for having me today, I’m excited about the discussion. I say I’m a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. The reason is, of the 13 years that I was in software sales, I sold into marketing for 10 of those years.<br> Because my buyer was marketing for a decade, I really feel like I am trapped in a marketer’s body. Now, for the past three-plus years, I have been helping big and small companies think about social as a channel, and how do they embed social into their selling. I work with big and small companies on how to approach social selling from a programmatic, organizational level.<br> What inspired you to start social selling?<br> Wow. I think it was just frustration from the lack of results of other channels, regarding being able to get the attention of my customers. I think even before that it was because social was new to marketing, and marketing was trying to figure it out.<br> Because I wanted to help my customers, my buyers, with their marketing initiatives, I needed to understand what social marketing was. Also, I saw the potential for social and how it would help me, as an individual salesperson, be where my customers are, be visible and valuable to my customers, to be part of the customer conversation. I definitely saw it as a research tool.<br> Are you finding salespeople still are being asked to hit the phones, to send out more emails?<br> Yeah, absolutely. The mandate for most sales organizations is, make more calls, send more emails. They’re hiring more people to do those things, and actually, they’re hiring more junior people who have no business acumen, who have no sales experience, and they’re just doing more. More isn’t more better, I know it’s not grammatically correct, but more relevant is better.<br> If you look at, contact data has gone to zero. I can get pretty much get anyone’s phone number and email address. And I can send an email and call to anybody. Everybody’s doing it.<br> Now as a buyer, you’re receiving tons of generic, not-relevant emails. You’re getting a whole series of them, because now there are these automation tools that will automate a cadence, or a series, of emails. By the seventh touch, the seventh one is, “Have I offended you,” or, “Are you stuck under an elephant, has a rhinoceros eaten you?” That’s just ridiculous. These are tactics that are absurd.<br> Brian: I’m laughing because I’ve received these emails, and it’s painful.<br> It just seems like it’s getting worse. Why is that?<br> It’s getting worse, because the technology is now going into the hands of the salespeople, and they’re being measured on more. I think sales leadership really needs to step up. And sales leadership needs to realize and recognize, that the buyer has changed more in the past ten years than the previous 100. The way that people buy, and go about getting information, has dramatically changed, and the way that we’re selling hasn’t. Really, we’re long overdue for transformation,
