The key to getting better is understanding where you are now — Talk Marketing 071 — Sam Rathling
Today’s guest has sales exposure, at least going back to 1998. I’m sure she won’t mind me telling you that 24 years. She has a wealth of what I call double sales experience from her seven years in recruitment. She has also been a director for the BNI and a fellow of the Professional Speaking Association. She is currently host of the Social Selling with Sam Podcast, and founder and CEO of the Social Selling with Sam business and CVO and social selling strategist with Pipeline 44. CVO interestingly stands for Chief Visionary Officer. She is the author of Linked Inbound and soon to be released Linked Outbound. She is a hammer.
Today’s guest is Sam Rathling.
00:00 Introductions.
07:30 How are you qualified to talk about LinkedIn and social selling?
17:01 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives?
35:16 How much does sales navigator cost?
46:43 CRM systems.
52:41 How to use LinkedIn like an effective canvasser or prospector?
1:07:08 What is your recommendation for anyone who wants to get better at LinkedIn or social selling?
1:09:37 What should people read?
1:11:02 Who can you introduce us to who might enjoy to be a part of the Talk Marketing series?
Martin Henley
Let’s start with question number one, how are you qualified to talk to us about LinkedIn and social selling?
Sam Rathling
So I was a very early adopter of LinkedIn, I had moved to the Netherlands in 2001 and I fell into the recruitment industry, it was not a decision I made, I couldn’t speak Dutch, and couldn’t work in sales and marketing because I had no Dutch and somebody found my CV randomly and said we think you’d be really good at recruitment. So I changed my career completely. I’d previously been working for the drinks company, Diageo, been in a corporate environment, and I fell into recruitment. LinkedIn didn’t exist until 2003 and I heard about LinkedIn at a networking event. Back then, when it first launched, obviously, LinkedIn was very recruitment heavy, it was all about people putting their CV and you know, using it for job seeking, etc. So my first introduction to LinkedIn was fairly early on.
Sam Rathling
I started using it to find candidates and to look for people for my clients. 2005, I moved again, I changed country and moved to Ireland. That was the year I decided to set up my own business. I did set up an a recruitment agency, but I literally knew nobody in Ireland apart from my husband at the time. I was like, if I’ve used LinkedIn to find great candidates, I wonder how I could use it to actually develop business. So I decided to start using my talent with LinkedIn to actually find customers, studied networking, both online and offline, and built my recruitment business from scratch, knowing nobody in a country where everything is done on who you know, pretty much using the LinkedIn platform.
Sam Rathling
A few years later, 2010, I was asked by somebody, how did you build your recruitment agency? Would you mind speaking on stage? It was a big conference of like 200 business owners in the room and never spoken on stage before ever. I was petrified because I had never given a keynote speech. I stood on stage in Yorkshire and delivered my top tips on how I’d grown my business and a lot of the that came back to what I had done within the LinkedIn environment. I think back then I had maybe 2000 connections, which was huge back then. Nobody was using LinkedIn to generate business and that’s kind of where my journey started in terms of teaching LinkedIn.
Sam Rathling
Over the last 12 years I’ve developed a system, a social selling system, which has got eight different strategies which to date has gender aged over £138 million for the clients that have applied my methodologies. So I think that kind of qualifies me to talk about this subject. I’ve always been at the kind of the forefront in terms of LinkedIn social selling as being an authority in that space. When full time, it was always a side gig for me, whilst I was still in the recruitment industry, went full time in 2016 and that’s what I’ve been doing since then.
Martin Henley
Okay, super cool. So it sounds to me like you’re qualified to talk to us. So well done, that’s hurdle one, completed, cleared. Should people understand what social selling is? Like? How do you define social selling?
Sam Rathling
This is a question I get all the time. I think it’s a very misunderstood kind of buzzword, it’s out there a lot and it gets overused and misunderstood a lot. So my definition of social selling is, it’s the art of selling without selling. It’s about building relationships, building relationships, creating brand awareness, and really kind of getting yourself to a point where you’re getting visible with customers and prospects, so that when they’re, when they’re ready to buy, they think of you first, because let’s face it, everyone that you connect with today is not in the buying window for your product or service.