Social Selling can deliver a stronger pipeline for sales teams. Sellers that combine social selling with their emails and phone outreach consistently outperform those that dont.
But often it doesn’t deliver because companies try to bolt LinkedIn onto an existing sales process without understanding how social selling is different.
It’s fundamentally different from selling via email, phone or in person.
In this episode of the Social Selling That Work! Podcast, hosted by Dean Seddon, we look at 10 mistakes we see when companies hire us to help them relaunch their social selling programme across their sales teams
Listen to the full episode here or read the quick summary below.
Having worked with hundreds of sales teams over a decade, these are common mistakes teams make when they choose to adopt social selling and don’t have expert guidance and implementation support.
The 10 biggest Social Selling mistakes
- Not changing the sales culture
- Leadership not being on board
- Not mapping a Social Selling process
- Poor time management
- Poor lead management
- Weak LinkedIn profiles
- Connecting too late
- Poor sales and marketing integration
- Introducing automation and AI too early
- Getting LinkedIn messaging wrong
1. Not changing the sales culture
The first mistake is treating Social Selling as if it is simply another sales channel.
It is not.
Most salespeople are used to a particular way of working. They may be used to cold calling, email cadences and the energy it gives off.
Social Selling has a different dynamic – it’s quieter.
If sellers are using a dialling office, that sales office now is quieter – they’ll notice the difference in energy.
The instincts will be different to, with cold calling or cold email – you get a bite and you jump on it to get it on call – social selling is a multi-step approach.
We worked with one company that had a very aggressive sales culture. Calls, emails and activity were happening constantly. When part of the team’s time shifted towards Social Selling, they started getting conversations with people who had previously told them where to go on the phone.
The problem was that the team still had the same “do it now” mentality – rather than treating as a multi-step approach – they just dived straight to the pitch and lost so many leads.
That instinct is engrained and it will take time to adjust. some of your top performers may struggle with that at first, which is why we recommend piloting with sellers who are actively interested. A top performer that is negative about a new approach and demoralise the whole team.
We recommend starting with a small pilot group of people who are open to Social Selling, getting some early success, sharing those wins widely across the business and then roll out to the wider team.
2. Leadership not being on board
The second mistake is a lack of leadership support – this includes sales leadership and senior leadership.
If Social Selling is going to work, leaders need to reinforce the new behaviours. It isn’t enough for marketing to want the sales team to use LinkedIn if sales leadership treats it as optional.
Social Selling is about understanding the customer, understanding what matters to them and starting conversations from what we call familiarity first.
That doesn’t mean spending months warming people up. It’s a 2-3 week strategy which increases response rates. for teams approaching social selling for the first time, that can feel uncomfortable. That’s where leadership need to step in and support the new ways of working.
If sales leadership isn’t bought in and doesn’t understand this new way of working, they could undermine the social selling programme.
3. Not mapping a Social Selling process
The third mistake is expecting salespeople to work out the process themselves.
If Social Selling is new to them, they are being asked to design a process in an environment they do not yet understand.
What normally happens is predictable, they rebuild the same process they already use for cold calling and email – that kind of approach to LinkedIn doesn’t work.
Social Selling is person-to-person – that’s why it converts better. Sellers using social selling outperform those using just email and the phone. If you take your cold outreach process and move it onto LinkedIn, you’ll miss the point and get no return on investment.
Salespeople also need the right assets to support the process. A lot of traditional marketing collateral is too salesy or too marketing-led to share naturally inside a LinkedIn conversation. Sellers need assets for all the stages of the journey, from problem aware to solution aware.
4. Poor time management
Salespeople can waste a huge amount of time on LinkedIn while believing they are prospecting.
They can spend two hours searching for people, looking at profiles and moving between different parts of LinkedIn without actually moving anyone forward.
That’s why Social Selling needs specific time blocks for specific tasks. Don’t simply tell a salesperson to “go on LinkedIn” and hope they figure it out.
Sellers should know why they are are going on LinkedIn – what action are they going to complete.
That might include:
- Moving a group of prospects to the next stage
- Connecting with new people
- Following up existing conversations
- Reviewing Sales Navigator lead lists
- Completing a specific set of actions
The worst scenario is logging into LinkedIn and asking, “What do I do now?”
The activity needs to be planned before the salesperson starts.
5. Poor lead management
Lead management is another major problem.
Most CRMs are not designed to manage the small, light-touch actions that happen during Social Selling.
In our model, we use the Seven Steps of Social Selling. Some of those steps are tiny actions: connecting with someone, sending a thank-you note or coming back to a prospect later.
If a seller wants to move five or ten prospects forward by one small step, they should not have to spend more time updating the CRM than completing the action itself.
Where budget permits, Sales Navigator can be connected to the CRM.
Salespeople can then manage those early-stage prospects inside Sales Navigator, create lead lists, record notes and build different buckets for people they need to revisit.
We describe Sales Navigator as a battlefield CRM for this stage of the process.
Our preferred point to move the lead fully into the CRM is when the prospect becomes open to having a call.
6. Weak LinkedIn profiles
A lot of salespeople still underestimate the importance of their LinkedIn profile.
Every action creates a reaction.
Send a connection request and the prospect may look at your profile. Send a DM and they may check your profile. They may even receive a cold email and then go to LinkedIn to see who you are.
Your profile is where prospects decide whether you are relevant and whether it is worth continuing the conversation.
The problem is that many sales profiles simply describe what the salesperson does – it doesn’t explain the value proposition.
The banner, headline, About section and Featured section should help explain the service, show case studies and give the prospect useful information about why the offer matters to them.
A LinkedIn profile should be doing some of the selling before the conversation even happens.
7. Connecting too late
Salespeople often connect with prospects when they need something from them.
We recommend to sales teams they connect before you need it.
The longer the right prospects are connected to your sales team, the more time there is for familiarity to build.
If you have Sales Navigator, we recommend connecting with around 20 relevant people per day. You may not prospect all of them immediately, but they are now in your network and will be easier prospects to approach later.
The first 90 to 100 days of Social Selling are normally the hardest. Salespeople are learning the process, building their network and trying to create pipeline at the same time.
If they continue connecting throughout that period, the next quarter becomes easier because they can start working with people who already know who they are.
8. Poor sales and marketing integration
Sales and marketing need to work together on LinkedIn.
One example we use with sales teams is running LinkedIn events.
Marketing creates and delivers the event. Salespeople invite their prospects through LinkedIn. Then the sales team follows up those prospects after the event.
Where this goes wrong is when sales cannot see how the event helps them sell, while marketing cannot convert the people attending without sales involvement.
We have seen this approach generate conversations with prospects who had previously ignored salespeople, create inbound messages and even produce RFP opportunities.
The important point is that marketing runs the activity, sales helps fill it, and sales follows up the people afterwards.
9. Introducing automation and AI too early
There is nothing inherently wrong with automation or AI.
The problem is using them before the sales team understands what actually works on LinkedIn.
If sellers have no feel for what works, they can easily build an automated process that gets no leads, damages their account or simply scales ineffective behaviour.
Our approach is simple:
- Go manual first
- Learn what works
- Understand what needs the seller
- Identify what does not need the seller
- Automate only after the process is proven
AI and automation should make the salesperson more efficient at selling, not get in the way of the salesperson selling.
10. Getting LinkedIn messaging wrong
The final mistake is messaging, LinkedIn is not email.
It is not the phone either.
It has a different set of behaviours.
We would argue that LinkedIn is much closer to WhatsApp messaging or meeting someone at an event.
That changes how salespeople should communicate.
If you take an email sequence and simply move it into LinkedIn, you are likely to get poor results because the platform does not behave in the same way.
This is why we recommend learning what works manually before creating templates or automation.
Once the sales team understands how people actually respond on LinkedIn, they can create messaging frameworks based on real conversations rather than guesses.
Otherwise, they are simply automating failure.
Getting Social Selling right
Successful Social Selling is not about telling salespeople to spend more time on LinkedIn.
If your sales team is active on LinkedIn but struggling to turn that activity into consistent pipeline, the problem is rarely effort alone. It is usually the process behind it.
We help sales teams use LinkedIn and Sales Navigator to find the right prospects, start better conversations and turn use social selling to fill their pipeline.
If you want to improve LinkedIn prospecting, strengthen Sales Navigator adoption and give your sales team a clearer route from connection to conversation to pipeline, talk to us about how we can help.