Social Selling: No Friend, No Sale?

What is Social Selling?  It is definitely beyond social media selling and is beyond selling. Together with Heart Selling, Consultative Selling, Key Account Selling and Attraction Selling, Social Selling is considered more effective. It is definitely way above Hard Selling and better than Problem Solving Selling. Social Selling has 8 key elements:

1. You Sell without Selling, because you are never selling and only Socialising. Make friends, not make sales. 
2. Share, not Sell. You share matters that people are most concerned with, and people will be connected with you. When people are connected with you, they will buy from you without you selling at all.
3. Making friends take priority over making money. So you would rather lose the sale than lose a friend
4. You have to put making a sale or presenting out of the back of your mind. In other words, you simply make friend and that's it. You don't make friend because you want to present your friend with something, right?
5. Group is more important than individuals. Social means the society, thus social selling is about benefiting the society more than benefiting the individual
6. No Rejections or Objections at all. In social selling, because you don't sell at all but only share, you have no objections or rejections. If you face objection or rejection, you're not doing social selling but only selling. For in social selling, you don't propose at all. You just simply make friends. And if people don't accept your friendship, there is no rejection, only a friend in the making!  
7. Ultimately Social Selling will lead to a sale, that's why it is called social selling and not social gathering. But the sale only comes after the connection is built. There is no selling at all because your friend will simply buy from you without you asking, for they treat you like a friend and want to support you. 
8. With Social Selling, continuous selling is unnecessary. This is because people are so connected with you that they will just keep on purchasing without you asking. Just look at the yearly or once-in-two-years upgrade of iPhones and you'll know what I am talking about. People feel so connected with iPhone that they will become life-long customers. That must be the goal of social selling, isn't it?

By Andy Ng, Sales Trainer Coach with www.AsiaTrainers.com and producer of 91 training videos at www.youtube.com/AndyNgCoach