You are good enough

Imposter syndrome can feel like dissonance or disconnect between what you see as yourself and your public view. I think a little bit of self-doubt is very good for self-development and the three elements of imposter syndrome are:
a) You believe other people have an inflated view of your abilities and skills.
b) You have an intense fear that you’ll be found out and exposed as a fake.
c) You constantly attribute your success to other factors outside your own abilities and talent.

Social media has a huge role to play in imposter syndrome as you can see everybody else’s successful lives and feel that you are not good enough. Here’s an exercise: Write down all the things that you are successful at and then look at all the reasons why you may have achieved that success. This is because you can mistakenly attribute all of it to luck, but when you put it down on paper, you’ll realise how ridiculous that is. Learn to accept that you will make mistakes and you don’t have to be brilliant all the time. Contact me via e-mail for 1:1 coaching sessions.

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Fighting for attention

Digital marketing is an excellent way to reach a large audience. Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that involves endorsements and product placement. An influencer is someone who has a large following on social media and can influence what people buy or where they go. When a brand partners with an influencer, they usually receive payment, free products, or services from the brand in return for posting favourably about their experiences. Linking up with influencers that align with your brand is a relatively simple way of boosting your social media marketing strategy. And this is a wonderful way to gain exposure on platforms you may not have a huge following on.

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It’s a symptom not a tactic

Many years ago, I heard Seth Godin say, “You should always start with the minimum viable audience, and the minimum viable audience (MVA) is the smallest group of people who we can imagine serving. Once the MVA have been identified, then we can be specific and if we can be specific, we will create something worthwhile and when we create something worthwhile, it’s easy to sell because it’s worthwhile.”

Social media isn’t the way you become popular, it’s after you are doing something important that people talk about you on social media. I’m a big fan of “word of mouth marketing”, I know it’s old school, but nothing beats the process of actively influencing and encouraging organic word of mouth discussion about a brand, organisation, or event. So, I think that if we can change the lives of 50 people then they will tell their friends and family. Imagine being a specific, unique entity that connects with people at a really deep level, just start by being really special and then the word will spread, and you will add more people.

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If it bleeds, it leads

What happens when you give everyone a microphone?

There will be a lot of noise out there. 
In the past when we had a gatekeeper who chose who had a microphone was both good and bad. It was bad because it silenced voices immediately and it was good because it kept microphones away from people who wanted to tear things down. When I think about what is on offer from the social media networks, it’s really important to decode this and understand that we are not their customers, we are their products. We do not pay to use any social media platforms and these companies (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are selling us and our data to someone else and have created a regime where they make us feel bad all day and the only way to feel less bad is to click something. That’s the cycle they have built and the problem with that cycle and the easily measured metrics of how many followers you have, pushes people to be purist, it pushes people to be angry and it pushes people to tear folks down. 

The phrase, “If it bleeds, it leads” basically means that the media loves violence. In other words, if a story involves a brutal death or injury of some kind (or the likelihood of it), it is likely to get higher ratings. 

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The 3 day social media blackout

“A system can never defend the people it was not supposed to protect.”

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Ordering a pizza in 2022

This morning one of my friends sent me the below conversation on Facebook. I initially laughed and then I thought welcome to the future…


CALLER: Is this Pizza Hut?

GOOGLE: No sir, it's Google Pizza.

CALLER: I must have dialled the wrong number, sorry.

GOOGLE: No sir, Google bought Pizza Hut last month.

CALLER: OK. I would like to order a pizza.

GOOGLE: Do you want your usual, sir?

CALLER: My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE: According to our caller ID data sheet, the last 12 times you called you ordered an extra-large pizza with three cheeses, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and meatballs on a thick crust.

CALLER: Super! That’s what I’ll have.

GOOGLE: May I suggest that this time you order a pizza with ricotta, arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and olives on a whole wheat gluten-free thin crust?

CALLER: What? I don’t want a vegetarian pizza!

GOOGLE: Your cholesterol is not good, sir.

CALLER: How the hell do you know that?

GOOGLE: Well, we cross-referenced your home phone number with your medical records. We have the result of your blood tests for the last 7 years.

CALLER: Okay, but I do not want your rotten vegetarian pizza! I already take medication for my cholesterol.

GOOGLE: Excuse me sir, but you have not taken your medication regularly. According to our database, you purchased only a box of 30 cholesterol tablets once at Lloyds Pharmacy, 4 months ago.

CALLER: I bought more from another Pharmacy.

GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your credit card statement.

CALLER: I paid in cash.

GOOGLE: But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.

CALLER: I have other sources of cash.

GOOGLE: That doesn’t show on your latest tax returns, unless you bought them using an undeclared income source, which is against the law!

CALLER: WHAT THE HELL!

GOOGLE: I'm sorry sir, we use such information only with the sole intention of helping you.

CALLER: Enough already! I'm sick to death of Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and all the others. I'm going to an island without the internet, TV, where there is no phone service and no one to watch me or spy on me.

GOOGLE: I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport first. It expired 6 weeks ago...

Facts on Friday

The way we change the culture is not by getting a trending headline on social media, I think we change the culture by establishing that people like us do things like this. Culture is driven by media and media is driven by a business model. We all believe that we see the world as it is, in reality we live in a culture and that culture changes what we see.

Even though the world is safer and healthier than it has ever been before, even now during the Covid-19 pandemic, no one believes that is true. What has happened over the past 20 years is that the media business model has dramatically changed, and therefore, the reason that people don’t think that the world is safer and healthier is because the media does not want us to think that this is the truth. The higher powers have decided that society makes the most profit when we are on edge, insecure and feeling insignificant. #justsaying

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Tips on Thursday

Why do you use Facebook?
Facebook’s brilliant business model is to give you this audience and then charge you if you want to reach them. I think Facebook has become a ”pay to play” platform! I doubt that you will get any form of organic interaction from your Facebook business page nowadays as it’s non-existent.


It makes more sense to take one piece of content and ”slice and dice” it across the various SoMe platforms. Observe how your end-users are consuming that content and then look for opportunities to repeat, as the playing field is continuously changing and we have to be ready for that.


Contact me via e-mail when you are ready to build a community on social media.

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What Do You Know About Social Selling? Q&A with Tim Hughes

Image: Alex Low

Marketing guru, Seth Godin once said, “Build it, and they will come only works in the movies. Social Media is a ‘build it, nurture it, engage them, and they may come and stay.’" This week’s Q+A is with Tim Hughes, who is universally recognised as one of the world’s leading pioneers and exponents of Social Selling and he is currently ranked Number 1 as the most influential social selling person in the world. Tim was responsible for a large-scale sales transformation within Oracle which resulted in excess of $100m in sales uplift, and he is currently leading the sales transformation programmes at Avaya, Thomson Reuters and Pitney Bowes and is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Leadership Associates.


1. What are the industry trends affecting your business?

Currently, the internet and social media are the biggest factors in the area where we work. In September 2017, We Are Social and Hootsuite research figures showed that 51%, 3.8 Billion of the world's population are on the internet and 41% of the world's population, 3.1 Billion is on social media. I think for all of us, whenever we want to purchase some goods or services regardless if it’s a small value or a $200 Million outsourcing deal, we start the search online and we do this without help from any supplier. In fact, we do this in salesperson avoidance mode. CEB, now Gartner research shows that in fact, most people are 57% of the way through the buying process before they make contact with a supplier. What we are finding is that most prospective customers are using the people’s online presence to in fact deselect, not select a vendor. This buyers market and dysfunction in the buying process are problems for companies of all size, in all markets.

My business partner, Adam Gray and I spotted this when we started Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) 13 months ago and we have created workshops, programs and a methodology to help companies support a move to use social media internally and externally. This is at a strategic level (Board/C-Level), as well as a departmental level, for example, Sales, Human Resources (HR), Procurement, Supply Chain etc. Our “poster child” for this is our globally acclaimed, social selling program. This enables salespeople (in fact all employees) to understand this buyer dysfunction and the tools and processes to support this.
 

2. What are you doing now that you feel good about? Is there anything that you could be doing better?

I started this journey 5 years ago when I managed a sales transformation project at Oracle Corporation, where we transformed salespeople from “on-premises” sales to one of “SaaS” to meet the change in the market. This involved, teaching salespeople to throw away PowerPoint and use whiteboards, how to story-tell as well how to use social selling. During this project, I started blogging about social selling, then I got a book deal, and my book (On Amazon) “Social Selling - Techniques to Influencer Buyers and Changemakers” went into the Bestseller List during pre-sale. 13 months ago, my business partner and I left Oracle to set up Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) www.social-experts.net and we haven’t looked back. We love the fact that we are making a massive transformational change to our clients, not just in terms of return on investment (ROI) but in the way companies go-to-market and react to the buyer dysfunction made in answer 1.

While we are doing projects in the UK, we have a number of global companies who want to transform using social media, both globally and at a local level. Global consistency, but with localisation. Having created a unique set of intellectual property rights (IP), we are now in the process of signing up global resellers. Our first one is in North America, but we are currently looking for partners in all countries. This is a huge opportunity as all the buyers are on the internet and social media, this fundamentally changes the way every company markets and sells in the global marketplace.

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3. When you start a new project, how do you set yourself up to win?

We set ourselves up to win, by providing a change methodology to the client that has a proven track record. We also understand that each company is different, so we research the new client and understand their business and markets, which enables us to fine-tune our methodology to their unique requirements. Built into the methodology are the measures and Governance so we can track “as is”, work out the milestones and set targets for “to be”.


4. We know that feelings and emotions drive human behaviour, but why do you think that storytelling is a powerful tool to build culture?

Storytelling is always powerful as we show our audience a metaphor that they can all relate to, "by putting yourself in the shoes of your client or prospective customer". It is great for taking a complex idea and turning it into something that people can understand.


5. Based on a prism of what’s working and what’s not from the customers’ perspective, how can your organisation realign to meet your customers’ needs?

We have decided to focus totally on social media as an organisation. Unlike the traditional full spectrum marketing agency that does websites, search engine optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, PR and are a jack of all trades. While we know about these subjects, it’s not what we focus on, and this is our strength as our methodology allows us to align with our customer's needs and business issues.


6. How does trust relate to the customer experience and customer relationships? And what about its impact on employee engagement? 

Trust is central to the way Marketing and Sales work today. Who do you turn to when you want to buy something? Your friends, your family and your network! The problem is that every supplier says they are the best, so much so that most corporate marketing today is just lost as noise. The fact of the matter is that nobody cares about your company and it’s products. There is an old saying that “people buy people” and they do. Which is why it is critical that you enable your salespeople and your employees to be the “experts” that people turn to when buying. In the past, we often spoke to people who said, “I wished I had spoken to you last week, as we have just purchased something”, social media enables you to build trust so that you increase your chances of that serendipity moment.


7. How do you use customer experience in the battle to win the hearts and minds of your customers?

We talk about the issues we are seeing in the market in the blogs we post http://www.social-experts.net/blog/ we have now posted some 100 blogs. These all take a business issue and then how we can solve it. Focusing on people, process and strategy rather than tools. We hope this creates a vision for our clients that they can see we can make an impact and enable them to get more leads and meetings than with the tools they used in the past, e.g. email marketing, advertising or cold calling.


8. In your experience, are external consultants better suited to engage employees in dialogue when discussing risks and benefits of customer experience management?

We think that external consultants are ideally placed to help a business, but then again we are biased. We often see, well-meaning people, trying to help people with social media, but it not really moving the needle. For example, we often hear about a person that found a Hubspot article on social selling and think that by working through it they become a social seller, or by reading my book is enough to become a social seller. If I get a book on judo and worked through it, I would get a good idea, but if I went into a judo fight I would lose. Here at Digital Leadership Associates (DLA), we help our clients understand buyer dysfunction and help them use social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc) as proactive methods to enable them to get leads and meetings. It’s worth saying that as an organisation we make no cold outbound, in fact, all our business comes from inbound. The opportunity to write this article came from inbound, this is what we teach our clients. There are a lot of people out there searching on social media and we help them find you and engage with you and they will only do that if you “appear” on social media as a trustworthy person.


9. Engagement is a challenge, but in your opinion, when you bring the suggestion to hire an external consultant to your bosses, what questions do you expect them to ask? 

You say in your question that engagement is a problem, is it? The world has changed, engagement is a problem because most sales today are started via cold outreach. You are just another supplier and nobody trusts you. The great thing about social media and social selling is that people find you, if they trust you, then they will contact you. It is then about empowering people to buy, closing is dead, it’s all about empowering!


10. If your boss asks – “What extra value will this service bring?” How will you prepare for that from a business justification stand-point?

If a boss asks about “what the value will this bring” we will show the current return on investment (ROI) our clients are getting. We totally understand this question as most consultants work similarly on ERP or CRM projects - let’s take what we have and make it more efficient. This is great and you can, of course, run projects like this, as it assumes you spend to save and what you save is profit. Our social selling and methodology are different, as while we will get you efficiency savings, this is all about creating incremental (new) revenues for our clients.

Thanks Tim for taking time to answer my questionnaire, I am humbled and extremely grateful for your engagement.

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