“Social Selling?” — I’m Too Scared To Say That To My Management

This blog previously appeared on the DLA blog here

In a recent discussion with a prospect we were talking about the difference between training, coaching and mentoring. We agreed that social selling was a change of process and therefore training wasn’t appropriate.

What I mean by training is where somebody turns up with 150 Power Points and beats you into submission with facts, hints and tips and hacks. Then you go back to your desk, the phone rings and nothing changes. After all, many people have been on LinkedIn for ten years and no few have changed their profile, why would sending people home to update it as homework make any change? People just won’t do it.

In the discussion we laughed about how we had been there so many times and seen no change and laughed about how companies had wasted money.

We then talked about webinars. I relayed the stories of my last company how they had used webinars to roll out social selling and if anybody bothered to turn up, then they usually sat and did emails without listening to the webinar.

This means that we webinar did not activate the people you wanted to activate and of course, nothing ever changed.

We then discussed, the difference between sales coaching and sales training and it was her that mentioned the phrase that”Common knowledge is not common practice”.

Training gets us common knowledge, the leaders job is to get us to common practice. Especially with social, where there is a need to do things differently.

NB: CEB now Gartner has research that shows that training will give you a bump but training with coaching will give you a 4 x yield.

This blog continues on the DLA blog here