Founder and CEO at Mindset Digital
To be a leader in a digital age, you must be a digitally savvy leader.
Too often, when it comes to leveraging new social selling approaches, leaders and sales managers are sitting on the sidelines—telling themselves that Sara or Zach, down the hall, will handle all that for them.
But it doesn't work that way.
To be a leader in a digital age, you must be a digitally savvy leader. Or as a senior financial leader we worked with put it:
"In social, you've got to lead from the front."
When he signed up his team for our Social Selling Habit Coaching Program last year, he also signed up for a Mindset Digital LinkedIn Executive Makeover (think mini-magazine bio).
He said the transformation to a five-star profile gave him a valuable insight: "Having a great online presence is like wearing your best suit. When you're looking good, you feel more confident."
If you are a leader today whose LinkedIn profile is still half-completed, poorly written, or simply dry and dull (or worse, you have no profile at all) you are sending a strong message to your teams and potential recruits. It's just the wrong one.
Eighty percent of us want to work for a socially savvy leader. Your colleagues and team members are watching you, and taking their cues from what you do—or don't. It's time to get up to speed.
Three Key Questions
OK, you get it. Just as giving your friends gym memberships won't make them fitness gurus, giving your sales teams access to social networks won't make them top social sellers.
Even bringing in an inspiring speaker, or adding a splotch of online training, isn't going to cut it.
Yes, they may head back to the office fired up and ready to change the world. But we all know what happens next.
Once they call up that first email… the old habits kick right back in.
So how do you bring about real change? First, you must make sure your entire leadership team is on board. They can't just outsource social, they must understand it. And embrace it. (If you got on LinkedIn a long time ago and never went back, it's time to take another look.)
Second, whether you turn to our high-performance coaches at Mindset Digital—or you rely on your internal team—you need to build in accountability by asking the right questions. Here are our top three:
How are we driving social selling habits?How are we tracking and rewarding success?Who are our top social sellers—and how do we know?
I started this blog series by citing a bit of common wisdom: What gets measured, gets done. That's true for social selling, too.
If you don't know who your top social sellers are, isn't it time to find out?
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