What is social selling? (And what it isn’t)

About 16 years ago, when I started as a solopreneur, I had a meeting with a lead and spent the first 15 minutes explaining everything I knew and could do for him. My methodology, my track record, the case studies, the results. I thought I needed to make an impression so that he would take me seriously.

When I finished, the guy leaned back and said, “That’s impressive. But you haven’t asked me a single question about my business.”

He was right, and I obviously didn’t get the deal.
I spent the ride home wondering where it went wrong. It took me a while to understand what had really happened.
I wasn’t selling, I was performing.
Most of what gets sold as “social selling” today is the same performance, repackaged for platforms like LinkedIn and preferably automated, so you can spam leads at scale.

So let me define the term the way I teach it, because it works, but it looks nothing like the DM that just arrived in your inbox.

What is social selling, in simple words

Social selling is being useful before you’re needed.

It’s being known, liked and trusted by your future clients, using online platforms like LinkedIn, and offline platforms like events, long before they’re ready to buy. You share the valuable stuff you know, you engage with their content and you become a familiar and trusted source, so that when the problem you solve arrives, you’re the first call instead of a stranger.

Most sellers hear “social selling” and think it is a method to squeeze leads out of a LinkedIn network.”
That’s the exact reason it doesn’t work for them. Leads can’t be shoved down a funnel anymore.
Leads are people, and most people aren’t stupid. They can smell it the second you’re only being nice because you want something.

Treat it like a relationship, because that’s what it is. Lasting things start with respect and the patience to get to know each other, and asking “what’s the ROI of Social Selling” is like asking for the ROI on a first date. Wrong question, wrong timescale. Trust pays nothing this quarter and enormously over the years.

What social selling is not

This is where many people get confused, so let me clarify some concepts.
I’ll try to keep my annoyance about these activities to a minimum. 🫣

It’s not automation.
Sequences that fire “personalised” messages written by a tool. Bots that view profiles to fish for attention.
AI messages pretending a human wrote them and scraped lists fed into connection machines.
That is not social selling.

I regularly encounter these tactics in training programs with my participants, and I also always ask them one question. How would you feel if someone sent this BS to your inbox?
If the answer is “annoyed”, congratulations, you’re about to annoy a thousand people with better efficiency than ever before.

It’s not the pitch-slap.
Connect on Monday, and send a pitch-slap message like “great to be connected, do you have 15 minutes, because we build websites…” on Tuesday.
That’s a cold call with extra steps, and it burns the one thing the connection gave you: the benefit of the doubt.

It’s not posting alone.
Content matters, but content without conversations is broadcasting. And broadcasting only works if you’re really, really talented. Which I am not…
The selling part of social selling happens in comments, messages and eventually meetings, with humans, not with an audience.

And it’s not a quick fix for an empty quarter.
If your lead list is empty, social selling won’t rescue this month.
It does, however, save you from getting there in the first place.
The best analogy to Social Selling is an obstacle run. It takes a long time sometimes you move fast, sometimes you go slow. But in the end, you improve your health, endurance, learn a lot, and make some friends along the way.
Yes, it takes effort and energy, but you’re way better off than sitting at your desk making some cold calls or sending some messages nobody likes to receive.

Social selling vs cold calling

Cold calling is interrupting a stranger and hoping the timing is right. By the way, is anyone still taking these calls?
Social selling is making sure you’re no stranger by the time the timing is right.

I tested the difference on my own outreach. For years I sent connection requests the way everyone does: find the right person, write a polite note, and hope for the best.
My acceptance rate hovered around 64%, which meant 36% of leads clicking ignore.

A few years ago I changed one thing: before sending a request, I made sure the person had seen my name once or twice. Sometimes I could make a comment on their post. Other times, I found something I could use from the company’s website or company page.
I tracked a full month of it: 40 warmed-up requests, 36 accepted, and the conversations afterwards started from “I’ve seen you around” instead of “who the hell are you?”

With one of my past clients with a team of 12 sales reps we took it even further.
They cut weekly connection requests from 25 to 5 and moved that time into commenting on people’s content. Not only the exact people they wanted to talk to, but also the people around them.
Within four months, their meeting requests ratio had doubled.
Fewer connections, more conversations.

That doesn’t make cold calling dead, although I must agree I hate to do it or get those calls, but it does make cold calling expensive.
People check your profile before they accept your invite, and they check your activity before they reply to your message.
If your last post was three months ago and your comment history is empty, you’re a stranger with a pitch, whatever channel you use.
Warm wins on every number, and the warm-up is something you can build deliberately instead of waiting for referrals to happen to you.

Social selling vs social media marketing

Marketing talks to a market; selling talks to a person.
Social media marketing is your company building visibility with an audience, one to many.
Social selling is a person building trust with their ideal client profile, or even better, the full decision-making unit, one to one, under their own name.

They feed each other, but the buyer only signs with a person.
That’s why the seller’s profile, activity and reputation matter more here than any campaign, because people buy from people, and a logo has never bought anyone a coffee.

Why it works: every deal is a risk transfer

Every deal is a risk transfer, and the buyer carries all of it.
If the project fails, they’re the one explaining to their board why the budget is gone.
You move on to your next deal while they live with the consequences.

What I have found time after time is that the seller who reduces the most risk wins.
Not the best product, not the sharpest pitch, not even the best price.
The one who made it safest to say yes.

Building real trust is the fastest risk-reducer there is.
Everything in social selling- the visible expertise, the consistent presence, the helpfulness with nothing attached- is risk reduction the buyer can verify on their own, before they ever talk to you.

When you see deals this way, your whole approach changes. You stop trying to increase desire and start removing fear. References before they’re asked for, realistic timelines instead of optimistic ones, and what happens when things go wrong discussed up front.

The second principle is to diagnose before you prescribe.
Imagine a doctor writing your prescription before asking where it hurts.
You’d walk out, not because the prescription might be wrong, but because the doctor skipped the most important part of the job.

Most salespeople do exactly that: “we can help you with X” before someone has confirmed X is their problem.
I’ve lost count of the companies that told me they needed “content strategy” when the real problem was a sales team terrified of being visible online.

Diagnose first, and the eventual proposal doesn’t feel like a pitch, it feels like the obvious next step.

PROVE: the method behind it

To make this repeatable, I built the PROVE method.
Five steps, and you can’t skip one because each one sets up the next.

Position.
Your online presence is your 24/7 salesperson. It works while you sleep, while you’re in meetings, while you’re on holiday.
Most social profiles of people waste them cause they read like a CV with a job title, company, and responsibilities, which tells a prospect nothing about whether you understand their problems.
Position means a headline that speaks to your buyer’s challenges, an About section that shows you know their world, and content that proves it consistently.

Before any of it works, define your ideal customer by the problems they face, not by industry and company size. Demographics give you a list; problems give you a conversation.

Recognise.
Watch for real buying signals in the noise instead of guessing who might be interested.
A prospect changing jobs is more open to new approaches. A company announcing growth needs help scaling. Someone engaging with your content, even if it is a like, is already paying attention. A profile visit means they’re researching you.

Sort signals by urgency, act today, act this week, keep watching, and something odd happens once you’ve defined your three to five cues: you start seeing them everywhere.
It’s the red car effect. Buy a red car, and suddenly every street has one.

Train your attention on real signals and your pipeline starts filling itself, because most of the opportunities your competitors miss aren’t hidden, but just ignored.

Open.
Warm up before you connect. Engage with their content a few times with real insight (not “great post!”), become a familiar name, then send the request with context.

And before you go hunting for strangers at all, look at the three degrees of your network: deepen the relationships you already have, ask for warm introductions through mutual connections, and only then earn attention from people who’ve never heard of you.

Most salespeople pour everything into the third group, while the second converts around ten times better, because a referral borrows trust that already exists.
I’ve known teams who now do this after my training program as a habit. With every lead review, they check whose network holds the introduction they need.

Validate.
Stay visible and useful after connecting, because connecting is the start, not the finish.
Most people connect and pitch immediately, or connect and vanish until they need something. Share things relevant to the prospect’s world, engage with their updates, ask about their experience, and ask for nothing in return.

The person who isn’t ready today might be ready in three months, and if you stayed helpful in between, you’re the first call. If you disappeared after the first message, you’re just a connection or name in their inbox they can’t place.

Earn.
Recognise when the time is ready, and move from connection to potential partner without damaging what you built. This is where most social selling advice goes silent, because the transition can’t be scripted. You need to earn it by the four steps before it.
Confirm your diagnosis before you present anything, let them correct you, and be willing to say “I don’t think I’m the right fit” when that’s true.

Partners solve business problems, vendors deliver products, and everyone can tell.

Make the yes safe! A pilot, a proof of concept, guarantees you can stand behind and reduce the risk for the buyer to a minimum.
For calls with leads, mine is that you’ll walk away with concrete insights for your situation whether we work together or not, and I can afford that guarantee because it’s true.

Another one is that my clients have an insights guarantee. If by the second module none of the participants has learned something new, I will refund my invoice, no questions asked.
The risk is down to a minimum for my leads and clients.

For the PROVE system, you must be aware that when you skip a step, the system weakens and probably doesn’t work.
❌ Positioning without recognising signals means you look credible but talk to nobody.
❌ Opening without validating means connections that go cold.
❌ Most failed social sellers didn’t fail at effort, they failed at sequence.

What about automation and AI?

I won’t pretend efficiency doesn’t matter.
But somewhere in the last few years, people started to confuse efficiency with effectiveness.
Efficiency is doing things as fast as possible with the least amount of energy.
Effectiveness means all activities are aimed towards a specific outcome.
Using automation or AI to scale your relationship building might be efficient, but it isn’t effective at all!

Three questions decide what you should and shouldn’t automate.
Does this activity build or maintain trust with a specific person?
Keep it human.

Would the recipient feel misled if they knew it was automated?
Don’t automate it.

Does human execution add insight the machine can’t?
Keep it human.

Everything else, the list-building, the research prep, the CRM hygiene, the reminders, automate with my blessing.
The rule is dead simple.

Automate the work around the relationship, never the relationship.

How to start (without quitting in week three)

Start smaller than you think, and build the system before you chase the outcome.

Daily, 15 to 20 minutes.
Comment with thought on posts from prospects and industry voices. Respond to those that engage with you and check your signals. Substantive means a real opinion in a few sentences. Nobody wants to be known as the “great post” person….

Weekly.
One piece of content every week or two is plenty at the beginning.
Ten good comments a week beat one masterpiece a month and follow up with the people who engaged.

Monthly.
Review your list: which relationships warmed up, which signals you acted on, what worked? Then improve and adjust.

Give more than you ask for, structurally.
Share the knowledge, apply it to your niche, let people taste the expertise,
Like the free samples in a supermarket. You give away a real piece now so you can invoice the bigger piece later.

Knowledge stopped being scarce, so hoarding it buys you nothing.
Sharing it is how people find out you have it.

Even if your network does nothing for you yet, publishing pays, because search engines and LLMs reward content that answers real questions.
So your future buyers find you on their own, and it saves everyone time instead of those annoying cold calls.

How to measure social selling success

Track inputs and outcomes separately.
You can’t control how many meetings you book this week, but you can control how many substantive comments you write, how many relationships you warm up, how many helpful messages you send.
Inputs are the leading indicators. If they’re consistent, the outcomes follow, with a delay measured in months.

Month one feels slow and pointless….
Month two, signals start appearing, profile visits, replies, small recognitions.
Month three, conversations happen that you didn’t initiate.
By month six, prospects reach out to you, referencing things you posted that you’d forgotten writing.

The results compound because trust compounds, and every post, comment and helpful message keeps working after you log off.

The people who succeed at this aren’t the ones who start big.
They’re the ones who don’t stop.

That lead from 16 years ago taught me more than most trainings I’ve paid for.
These days I open every first meeting with questions, and deals close faster than they ever did when I was pitching, because the people feel understood instead of hunted.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a sales rep’s automation tool cheerfully sends “quick question” number 4,000.

While everyone else is still cold-pitching, you don’t have to anymore.

Questions I get about social selling