Chapter 8 How Social Selling Has Transformed Sales By Jill Rowley Just a few years ago, the discipline of social selling — using social media channels to reach prospects and customers — would have been considered a nice-to-have. Today, every major brand has a comprehensive social media strategy that encapsulates the notion of customer relationship management (CRM). There is still a long way to go for all businesses to be comfortable and equipped to engage at scale through this channel, but the tide has turned. In this chapter, Jill helps us understand why social selling matters and how we can harness the reach of this channel to engage with our prospects and customers to ultimately win more business. For all the new sales enablement initiatives that have surfaced in recent years, most firms are still selling the way they did 20 years ago. I’m not talking about finding better ways to automate the old ways of selling. I’m talking about completely rethinking the entire process of enabling purchase decisions. None of these are physical laws embedded into the fabric of our universe: • Sales is one person persuading another to do something. • Sales quotas are what drive sales success. • Relationships are secondary to transactions. • Technology is less valuable to the sales process than it is to other functional areas. • Sales initiatives have to be triggered by a human action. 8787