Inside Sales and Social Selling: Are You Ready?
Over the years, AG has been kind enough to send me off to a variety of professional development conferences, helping me to hone my skills in the many hats I’ve worn within the organization. Being a smaller company, I’ve fortunately been exposed to many scenarios that I may not have otherwise within larger companies. Typically these conferences provide me a wide range of topics/workshops which I can easily apply to my account manager/trainer/director job. 
One of the conferences I’m looking forward to is coming up next week, the AA-ISP Leadership Summit in Chicago 2013. We will be sponsoring the event along with many other organizations we’ve had the pleasure of partnering with on a variety of engagements. As you can imagine, the inside sales world gets much smaller when you’ve been at this as long as we have. It will seem like ‘old home week’ when we get there.
The agenda appears to be chock-full of topics that are very relevant to what I’m experiencing on a daily basis. A couple sessions in particular are focused on leveraging “social media and social selling” in the sales process. We’ve heard on several occasions that cold calling is dead, and that social selling is the only way to go. You can imagine, not surprisingly, we’ll vehemently debate that this is absolutely not true. But we will say is that this is certainly something that has to be blended into your attack when you cold call into an organization. In fact, this is something we've begun implementing here at AG and I can’t wait to apply what we learn at the event.
We’re not naïve enough to believe that strictly picking up the phone is the only way to go; but you can't sell or even truly qualify a prospect through social channels. Social selling is here, and it will continue to become further ingrained in teleprospecting for years to come. Adapt or die, right!?
If you plan on attending, let us know in the comments section below so we can meet for a drink. Looking forward to seeing you in Chicago!