Social Selling continues to be a buzz term in 2017 and it’s here to stay. The act of Social Selling has actually been around for ages, but we just didn’t coin it as social selling until social platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, emerged.

According to research published in 2009 by the University of British Columbia, “an incidental similarity shared between a salesperson and a potential consumer in a sales situation… can result in a more favorable attitude and a higher intention to purchase and the need for social connectedness can underlie the effects.” An “incidental similarity” basically means anything you have in common with another person, and good salespeople have already been leveraging this when building relationships with prospects. The only difference today is that social platforms now allow salespeople to more quickly and easily find these “incidental similarities” with their prospects.

I caught up with social selling expert, Mario Martinez Jr., to get his insight on how social selling will evolve in the coming years so that we can all stay ahead of the game.

One of the things I love about Mario is how blunt he can be because sometimes we just need to hear the cold hard truth. He predicts that within two years social selling will just be called selling and that you will become obsolete if you don’t start leveraging social tools and engaging digitally. It makes complete sense because you need to go where your buyers are and that means email, phone, social networks, physical events and more.

As discussed in Part 1 of this social selling series, some of the top tools you should be leveraging are LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Twitter and One Mob. Mario also discussed how his firm, M3Jr Growth Strategies, has noticed a rise in texting as a way to engage. To put things in perspective, he gave an anecdote about how he emailed one sales executive countless times without a single response, but as soon as he texted the person he got a response. Moral of the story: you have to go where your prospects want to communicate!

Changes in technology drive changes in behavior, and these changes dictate how we need to interact with our prospects. And remember, as Mario brilliantly says in Part 2 of this series, “Be the CEO of your own business, and invest in yourself. Pay for the tools yourself, prioritize your time and enable yourself to sell.”

We hope you enjoyed our social selling series with Mario! To continue the conversation, Mario invites you to send a personalized connection request on LinkedIn and tell him you saw him on Leadfeeder. You can also follow Mario on Twitter at @M_3jr; follow his YouTube channel; or visit www.m3jr.com for more webinars, blogs and services around social selling.