In the first part of our interview series with Social Selling guru, Mario Martinez Jr., we dug deep into social selling tools and tips to help you crush your sales goals. At the end of the day, the advantages and benefits of social selling are undeniable, but there are two seemingly major roadblocks to rolling out social selling on a wide scale: your audience isn’t on social media or you can’t get buy-in from your manager to adopt a social selling strategy. In part two of our interview with Mario, he completely erases those concerns.

I asked Mario what salespeople should do if their audience isn’t on social media? Is it even possible to implement a social selling strategy?

First off, Mario reiterated that cold calling isn’t dead and it’s the kiss of death if you completely switch over to social selling. However, it is dying. So, we need to touch prospects in every possible way without coming off as a stalker and social media is one easy avenue. According to The Pew Research Center, 76% of all American internet users are on a social networking site. Granted, your buyers may not be “active” on channels such as Twitter or LinkedIn, but that usually refers to the act of publishing content. If you look at it from the perspective of how many of your buyers are consuming content, then your buyers are very active on social media. With that in mind, a form of social selling is to post relevant content: industry-related, company-related or problem-specific.

In fact, at Leadfeeder we recently closed a deal by consistently posting relevant content. We had a customer who finally purchased a subscription two years after signing up for our free trial. Throughout the two years, the customer never engaged in conversations with any of our team members, so we asked him what made him decide to purchase. Simply, the need for more relevant leads became a priority for him and Leadfeeder was top of mind because of the content we continuously pushed across email and social.

It’s also important to note that social engagement is not just one-to-many, but also consists of one-to-one communications. As discussed in our first post, a creative way to stand out is to implement a video marketing selling strategy to send video messages and create personalized landing pages. You can also leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator to see who has posted content in the past 30 days based on your target audience and engage directly on the post. And of course, if all fails above, then pick up the phone!

So your audience is on social media, but what happens if your organization has a rigid sales structure that doesn’t allow for investment in social selling?

Mario gives some tough love and bluntly says that you shouldn’t be in sales if you’re asking this question. As a salesperson, you’re responsible for bringing in a certain amount of revenue, which essentially makes you the owner of what you’re selling. Be the CEO of your own business, and invest in yourself. Pay for the tools yourself, prioritize your time and enable yourself to sell.

Out of the 19 years that Mario has been in sales, 18 of them were in corporate and 15/18 years have been spent in the President’s Club or 100% Club. He attributes his consistent success to when he was 21 years old and wrote a check for $7,000 to the Miller Heiman Group to get sales training. On top of that, he also invested an extra few hundred dollars on sales tools. The company Mario worked for didn’t cover any of these costs – Mario was being the CEO of his own business.

Make sure you’re subscribed to our blog to receive Part 3 of our interview with Mario Martinez Jr. We’ll close off the series by discussing how social selling will evolve in the coming years and why you need to start adopting social selling now.