Social Selling works.

In a typical week I get around 75 phone calls. On average I answer less then 10% of them. Close to half, it seems are from either "unknown caller", or "blocked called". I refuse to answer those out of principle Even the ones that do come in with a number. many times I am not at my desk, in my office but busy talking to someone else, or otherwise not in the mood to listen to a sales pitch.

I don't get a lot of regular mail though when I do, I usually open it and the throw it away. Email, luckily mostly gets caught at the mail filter, the rest I usually hit the archive button on. I don't have an admin, but if I did I would see even less of these sales pitches.

The funny thing is, and maybe it's because it is still new, when I get someone trying to connect on linkedin, or a direct message on twitter, even though I know they are likely trying to sell me something, I accept and respond to it. 

Even better is when someone emails me with something relevant. For example I got an email last week that started with "Hi Rich. I read your blog and loved the post about..." Now maybe I'm vain or egotistical, I've been called a lot of things but never either of those. In most cases though the fact that they have now emotionally connected with me means I want to help them. It doesn't mean I'm going to buy from them, or use their services, but it does mean I want them to do well.

I wrote a blog post about just such a company They are called Incxo. Typically I wouldn't take time to meet with a recruiting agency.  I'm not hiring and if I was, we have an in-house team that we normally use. If I need to go outside of the company I'd use my network first and only then one of the regular firms I've used in the past. 

In this case though I took 30 minutes, which quickly turned into 90 minutes, learned about what they do differently and even talked about them to other people. The big difference, besides the fact that what they are doing is super interesting, is they engaged in a way that made me feel like they were listening. We connected, even before we met in person. 

Frankly if they had called and left me a voice mail, I would have ignored them, Social, especially when you really engage, works.