Do you want your sales team to get better at social selling?

Jill Rowley puts the problem plainly: “More isn’t better. More relevant is better.”

That line gets to the heart of this conversation.

Most sales teams are still being told to make more calls, send more emails, add more touches, and create more activity. But buyers are already drowning in generic outreach.

More volume does not create more trust.

Jill argues that B2B sales is overdue for modernization. Marketing has already had to change because buyers changed. Now sales has to catch up.

In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Jill Rowley, Chief Evangelist and startup advisor for social selling, about how salespeople can use social channels to become more visible, valuable, relevant, and human to their buyers.

Jill has spent years helping companies think about social selling from a programmatic, organizational level. Her view is not that phone and email are dead. It is that social is an additional channel where salespeople can find buyers, listen to them, understand them, engage with them, and build real relationships.

We get into why old-school tactics do not work in new-school channels, why generic LinkedIn invites damage first impressions, how empathy applies to social selling, why salespeople need training on social networks, and how technology can help sellers spend more time on the human work of building trust.

If your sales team is doing more but not getting more relevant, this conversation is worth your time.

Jill Rowley is a Chief Evangelist and startup advisor focused on social selling. She has spent more than a decade in software sales, much of it selling into marketing organizations.

Jill describes herself as a sales professional trapped in a marketer’s body. Her work focuses on helping sales teams modernize how they sell by using social channels to listen, learn, connect, engage, and build trust with buyers.

Connect with Jill:

00:00 Introduction to Jill Rowley

“The phone’s not dead. Email’s not going away any time soon.” — Jill Rowley

“More isn’t better. More relevant is better.” — Jill Rowley

“The buyer has changed more in the past 10 years than the past 100.” — Jill Rowley

“The biggest mistake is taking old-school tactics and putting them in new-school channels.” — Jill Rowley

“Empathy is so important. You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer.” — Jill Rowley

“If you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.” — Jill Rowley

“To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.” — Jill Rowley

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Brian Carroll: Hello, welcome to the B2B Lead Roundtable Show. My name is Brian Carroll. I’m really excited to have Jill Rowley from Social Selling with us today.

Jill Rowley is Chief Evangelist and a startup advisor. I’ve known Jill for years, and she really grew up with marketing automation and is a modern marketing expert.

I’m really excited to bring her thoughts and ideas to you. We’re going to talk about social selling.

Jill, can you just tell us a little bit more about your background?

Jill Rowley: Sure, Brian. Thanks for having me today. I’m excited for 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.

My buyer was marketing, and the best salespeople know their buyers. They understand their buyers at an individual human level. They understand their role in the buying process and their role in the buying committee. They understand them at a company level. They understand them at an industry level. They understand the outcomes that that buyer is trying to achieve.

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 they embed social into their selling.

This is additive. It’s incremental. The phone’s not dead. Email’s not going away any time soon. Social is an additional channel where salespeople can find their buyers, listen and relate to their buyers, connect and engage with their buyers, and ultimately amplify their buyers’ advocacy, amplify their buyers’ message.

I work with big and small companies on how to approach social selling from an organizational, programmatic level.

Brian Carroll: It makes sense, and it’s really cool how you were able to really put yourself in your buyers’ shoes.

We’re going to talk a bit about that later.

I was just going to ask, what inspired you to start social selling yourself?

Jill Rowley: Wow. I think it was just frustration from the lack of results of other channels, in terms of 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.

Because I wanted to help my customers, my buyers, with their marketing initiatives, I needed to understand what social marketing was.

In doing that, in understanding social marketing, 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.

My background before software sales was consulting, and so I’m always digging, and looking for answers, and filtering through, and synthesizing from large data sets.

I think they’re really twofold: one, I had to know about social media for my customers, but I saw how social networks could help me, as an individual salesperson, with building relationships with my customers.

Brian Carroll: As you’re talking, I’m picturing salespeople still are being asked, and we talked about this a bit before our own call, to hit the phones, to send out more emails.

You were just seeing that that was declining.

Jill Rowley: 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 better. I know it’s not grammatically correct, but more relevant is better.

If you look at it, everyone now has the ability. Contact data has gone to zero. I can get pretty much anybody’s phone number and anybody’s email address.

Because I can get anybody’s phone number and email address, and I can send anyone an email, and call anybody, everybody’s doing it.

Now as a buyer, you’re receiving tons of generic, not-relevant emails. You’re receiving 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 totally ridiculous.

Brian Carroll: I’m laughing because I’ve received these, and it’s painful. It just seems like it’s getting worse.

Jill Rowley: It’s getting worse because the technology is now getting in 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 10 years than the past 100. Probably more in the past five years than the past 50.

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, modernization of the way we sell, to map to how people and companies want to buy.

Brian Carroll: I wanted to ask you, what are some of the social selling mistakes that you see marketers and salespeople repeating over and over again?

Jill Rowley: I literally just had this question, being interviewed for a Forrester research report on social selling.

The biggest mistake is taking old-school tactics and putting them in new-school channels.

That whole “more” approach, and “all about leads” approach, “my company, my product, my customers,” as a salesperson. Not “you, your company, your business objectives.”

The “me, me, me” approach is now in social and is being amplified. It’s frightening.

There’s a woman who is an aspiring social seller, and I got an invite to connect with her on LinkedIn, and it was generic. She’s an aspiring social seller and she sends me a generic invite to connect on LinkedIn.

I write her back. I reply. I don’t accept the invite. I reply and I give her a link to The Art of a LinkedIn Invite.

Essentially, you have to personalize your invites to connect.

She did respond and thanked me for the tip, but unfortunately my guess is her behavior won’t change.

Because she’s in the “more.” She’s in the “just do more, connect with more people, send more tweets, share more content,” and not thinking about more relevant. More helpful, more human, more handy.

Brian Carroll: You know I talk a lot about empathetic marketing.

How do you see empathy applying to social selling?

Jill Rowley: Empathy is so important.

You have to look at things through the eyes of your customer. You have to appreciate their point of view.

From a social selling perspective, I’m in such a more capable position as a salesperson to get that information, to get that insight.

It’s a gift really, I think, being able to look up someone on LinkedIn and see where they went to university, see what skills people are endorsing them for.

For you, Brian, lead generation, B2B marketing, strategy, CRM. Now I get who you are and what you’re good at.

I read recommendations that people write about you. If I’m thinking about where I invest my time, if you’ve got glowing recommendations I want to work with you.

There’s this ability for both salespeople to learn more about their buyers, but at the same time too, there’s this ability for buyers to learn more about the salespeople.

They make decisions whether to engage or not based on whether they think that that salesperson actually can help them solve their business problems.

Brian Carroll: That makes a lot of sense.

As I’m listening to you, it sounds like it really applies in helping people connect better with their customers. The empathy gives them the ability to build a rapport, to allow for that connection to happen.

Jill Rowley: That’s exactly right.

An example is, I’m helping someone out at AT&T. He runs sales in their federal group, and he’s been asked by the leader of the public sector team to present to their 4,000 public sector employees on how B2B buying has changed.

In doing my research, not just on that broad topic about how B2B buying has changed, I’m looking for indicators of how AT&T’s already changing.

I spent some time on AT&T’s website and on their blog site, and lo and behold, I found a video interview and a blog post of his boss, Kay Kapoor. She’s the president of public sector at AT&T.

I found this blog post and this video interview of her, and I shared it.

It was all about women in tech, which is something I authentically care about.

That’s another thing. If I didn’t authentically care about women in tech, I would never have shared that piece of content. But I authentically care about it, so I shared that interview and blog post of Kay on LinkedIn, and I tagged her.

Because I want her to see that I’m getting to know her. Ultimately, I want to have the conversation with her about how we can take a programmatic approach to social selling within her public sector team, and how I’m the person that she wants to work with if they’re going to invest in social selling.

Brian Carroll: That’s really great.

A lot of us in marketing and sales want to feel like we’re making a bigger impact or difference, but we want to do it with things that matter to us.

What I’m hearing is connecting with that authenticity.

I think this is something people sometimes feel they struggle with in terms of, how do I connect? How do I proactively build relationships with people and do it in a way that’s who I am, and honoring who they are?

Is that what you find as you’re talking to people out and about in social selling, and applying it, and doing it well?

Jill Rowley: Yeah. I differentiate marketing and social media.

Media is more about the reach, and you use social media and marketing for brand and demand, and it really is about reach.

Social networking, same thing, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, but I call them networks when I talk to salespeople, because the intended use of those networks is about relationships.

Reach versus relationships.

Ultimately you could argue that marketing should be about relationships, and that they should be about engagement and not reach, but let’s just talk reality.

From a sales perspective, these networks are very valuable, and just a way to really better understand who and how and why you can help someone.

Brian Carroll: This is great, Jill.

Are there any success stories, or tips and advice, you have for our listeners who want to get better at social selling and connecting with their customers?

Jill Rowley: Yeah.

This is going to sound harsh, but I always say if you suck offline, you’re going to suck more online.

Online and social amplifies both the good and the bad.

If you don’t have the right mindset in sales today, that your job isn’t to rush anyone to signature, to go for the kill, to hunt and farm your customers.

If the mindset doesn’t come from more of, you’re a facilitator of a journey, that your job is to help the customer solve the problem, achieve the goal, and if it’s your problem or solution that they need, your job is to facilitate that purchase process.

The mindset has to start there.

Then, from a skillset, and then an enabling toolkit, this absolutely requires training.

There’s no question in my mind, regardless of whether you’re a millennial who has grown up with digital devices and access to social networks, or you’re a baby boomer who is a digital immigrant.

I think that these networks, each one has their own culture. Twitter is much more conversational. LinkedIn is all business.

Please, no death announcements on LinkedIn. I’m seeing a lot of that lately. I’m seeing a lot of Facebook-type content being shared on LinkedIn, and I don’t think we should go there.

I think then, how do I actually find good quality insightful content, as a rep, that I could share in my networks that isn’t just all of my company branded content?

There are these things that require new skills, and that to me means there needs to be an investment in training.

I think about it from the individual seller, but also at an organization level.

The organization should take a much more prescriptive and programmatic approach to deciding how they’re going to train their salespeople and what they’re going to train their salespeople on, and tying it to the overall governance in social media policies, et cetera.

Training is something that you absolutely need to invest in.

Brian Carroll: Are there any stories that you’d like to share of people who’ve followed your approach, and how it’s helped them? Or any other tips or tools you wanted to pass along to our listeners?

Jill Rowley: Yeah, for sure.

There are definitely individuals and companies doing this well. I would say that we’re still fairly early days in figuring all of this out.

ON24 is doing a really nice job of training their salespeople. They’re working with a partner company of mine, Sales for Life, and they put all of their reps through the Sales for Life 10-week training program.

There’s a certification process at the end of it where they have to demonstrate that they’ve used social to source a new opportunity, so a real certification.

It’s good for that salesperson too, because now that’s a skill and something that can be helpful in getting another job. Not just getting their next customer, but potentially their next job.

Their leadership is bought in at that sales director level. Shout out to them.

One of the things that I love to do, I go to LinkedIn’s annual conference, and they always post their video content on YouTube.

There are presentations available. Just this last one was in New York, and IBM, Genesys, Qualtrics, TiVo, now called Rovi.

There’s a bunch of presentations from real companies doing real social selling work, and so I recommend that as a resource as well.

Brian Carroll: Thank you.

We have time for a few more questions.

What excites you right now about the future of sales and marketing? Or what are you feeling particularly passionate about right now?

Jill Rowley: I feel like I’m pulled in two different directions, because one, what excites me is what I see coming to the sales industry that I saw develop in marketing over a 10-year period.

An explosion of new technologies to help automate, to help segment, to help personalize, to help measure, to help improve conversion rates.

You’ve seen this massive explosion of tools and technologies in marketing that are helping marketers be more scientific in their marketing efforts, be more measured.

We’re seeing the same thing start to happen in sales, and there are some great tools that are being developed and available for salespeople.

Artificial intelligence, I’ve published a number of blog posts recently on LinkedIn about how I think AI is going to change sales.

I see some great potential in AI in terms of all of the research that I do on individuals and companies and industries today that I do manually. There are tools that are going to aggregate and synthesize and proactively send me relevant information that I otherwise would have to go find manually.

There’s some really exciting stuff happening in AI around how that’s going to make the best reps even better, allowing me to do less of that administrative work, and freeing me up to spend more time thinking about the human side, which is how do I be more empathetic?

To be more empathetic, I need to know more about my customer.

Now I have more time to research them. I can listen to their CEO on their investor presentations. I can speak with more people within their organization. I’m able to spend more time on the strategic and human aspects.

On one side I’m talking about technology, and on the other side I’m talking about being more human.

It’s the balance between those that excites me the most, striking the right balance between tech and human.

Brian Carroll: That makes so much sense.

I think as I’m listening to you, we’re going to have this technology to help us augment and apply our empathy, which really gives us the intuition to know how to best connect.

These tools won’t automate trust, but they’re going to enable us to be able to spend more time making choices and doing things to help us build trust.

Jill Rowley: There you go. It is about building trust and credibility.

To earn your trust, it needs to be about you, not about me. Mutuality matters, so there needs to be mutual benefit.

But one of the expressions that I loved, that I learned from the president at Eloqua, was, “To be interesting, be interested in something other than yourself.”

To be interesting to you, Brian, I need to be interested in you. I need you to me; I shouldn’t lead with me.

I like Tim Sanders’ book, which basically says that the best salespeople share their knowledge, they share their network, and they show they care.

I think that’s really where a lot more of the emphasis needs to be placed, in both sales and marketing and even in product design, thinking about it through the eyes of the user.

Of the product, and customer success, and knowing and understanding how to bring your customer along on a journey based on their current state and their desired future state.

Brian Carroll: It’s great.

Jill, I’ve really enjoyed listening to you, learning from you. I’m sure our listeners and readers will as well.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Jill Rowley: The absolute easiest and fastest way to get my attention is on Twitter.

My Twitter handle is @Jill_Rowley, R-O-W-L-E-Y. That’s a great way to get my attention.

How you do it matters, so I’ll leave it to you to think about how exactly you would want to get my attention on Twitter.

Then LinkedIn, if you want to invite me to connect on LinkedIn, send a personalized invite.

If you’re doing it from the mobile app, up in the top right-hand corner of the mobile app there are three little dots, and if you hit those three little dots there’s an option to hit personal invite.

If you hit connect it’ll send you the generic invite.

I say generic invites are #socialstupid or #justplainlazy, #firstimpressionsmatter, #everyimpressionmatters.

Never, ever, ever, ever send a generic invite to connect to anybody. Personalize it.

Those are the two best ways to reach me.

Brian Carroll: Jill, thanks again, and we look forward to sharing more of your insights in the future.

Jill Rowley: Thanks Brian. It was great catching up with you.