What is Social Proximity? – Social Selling Daily Tip #008 - Linking Into Sales

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Audio Transcript:

Here’s your social selling tip of the day for February 10, 2017. I’m Greg Hyer of Linking into Sales.

What is social proximity? It’s the closeness in a relationship you have to an opportunity.

In our social selling training courses, we teach students that there are four quadrants of social selling. Social Listening, Social Proximity, Social Engagement and Social Capital. Each serve a function in our social selling methodology.

Social proximity gets you to look at the degrees of separation between you and the decision maker. This can be literal and figurative. For example, your sales territory is nowhere near your physical location or you’re selling in an industry you don’t have any professional connections with. Both of these would be examples of a lack of social proximity. Social proximity improves over time as you start to make connections and use the other three parts of the social selling quadrant.

Here are several ways you and improve your social proximity.

1. Grow your network – Use social networks to connect with the bridge builders inside your prospect company. Also, connect with influencers and referral partners that can help you make the connections you’re seeking.
2. Improve the quality of your network – This can be subjective at times but if you sell IT in consumer channels and then decide to change companies but that company sells to the government, your network quality may have dropped in value. Again, that’s subjective. The point it that just because you have a large network doesn’t mean everyone wants to buy from you.
3. Engage in community discussions – This is simple to do because of social media. On LinkedIn, participate in groups by asking questions and commenting. On Twitter, participate in Twitter Chats. On Facebook, comment on live video. On YouTube, leave intelligent comments and like videos that are helpful.

Set a goal to improve your social proximity. Remember to measure your progress so you can repeat your success time and time again.

That does it for this social selling tip of the day. In addition to this daily tip, check out the Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales on iTunes, Google Play Music, Stitcher, YouTube and Tunein. You can even ask Alexa to play the Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales.

If you missed any of this week’s social selling tips, visit LinkingIntoSales.com/alexa to listen to each tip or read the transcript. You’ll hear from me again on Monday morning.

This is Greg Hyer. Let’s Start Linking into Sales!

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