The Social Selling Lies

In September of 2017 I spent 4 weeks on the sales floor of a recruitment firm that was about to go under. Why? Because six months prior some social selling experts told them that they didn’t ever have to make another cold call again and to ditch the basics. He called some of the stuff that they were doing outdated. “Get on LinkedIn and you will have a full pipeline full of hot leads. Stop with the cold emails and calls, it’s so outdated!” Do you think the recruitment consultants were happy to hear this? Of course.

The CEO called me in August out of desperation. He said that there’s no hope. He wanted me to come in that same day.

“We’ve put them through a bunch of training. I don’t know what more we can do.” I started there as a consultant two weeks later on a Monday. It was so quiet. It did not sound like a sales floor. After my sales audit, it was confirmed that they needed to get back on the phones asap.

I mean these guys weren’t even picking up the phone to make a warm call. And the only time they picked up the phone was to speak to a few candidates. All sales activities were done through LinkedIn sales navigator.

One consultant in particular, let’s call him Jason, thought that he was doing fabulous. “But my posts are reaching 10 k people a week. That’s 40k people a month! That’s 480 k people a year.”