Social selling has changed the way we need to think about sales conversations. Earlier in my career, selling was often taught as a fairly rigid process built around scripts, memorized responses and a polished pitch. The salesperson learned the answers, learned the presentation and tried to move the customer through a predictable series of steps.
A lot of that thinking made its way into marketing as well. We designed landing pages that deliberately removed options and pushed the visitor toward one decision: leave or give us your information. The language was different, but the underlying idea was often the same. We were trying to control the path.
Today, sales and marketing increasingly operate as an ongoing conversation with the customer. That conversation can happen during a sales meeting, in a LinkedIn comment, through website chat or in the way somebody from your company responds publicly to a complaint. Every one of those interactions can influence how people perceive your expertise, your values and whether they want to continue doing business with you.
Sales and Marketing Have Become One Conversation
Think about what happens when somebody complains about your company on LinkedIn. You respond directly to that individual, but the exchange may also be visible to everyone following you, following them or encountering the conversation through the platform. Your customer service response has suddenly become part of your marketing.
That means sales and marketing can no longer be thought of exclusively as separate activities happening in separate departments. The way we communicate with customers contributes to the brand, and the way the brand communicates can open or close sales opportunities. The conversation follows the customer across channels.
This is one reason social selling is much broader than posting content or sending LinkedIn messages to prospects. It includes how we listen, how we respond and whether our interactions create enough value and credibility for the other person to want to continue the conversation. The tools change, while the human requirement to communicate well remains central.
I think this is particularly important for entrepreneurs and smaller organizations where the owner is often the chief salesperson. You may also be the person answering website questions, replying to LinkedIn comments and stepping into a Zoom call when somebody wants more information. The customer’s experience of sales, marketing and the brand may all come through the same person.
When a Landing Page Becomes a Conversation
Traditional digital marketing taught us to build focused landing pages. We would run an ad, get somebody onto the page and reduce the number of choices available until they either left or gave us their information. That approach became so common that we even referred to some of them as squeeze pages.
I started looking at that differently when I saw what could happen through live website chat. At one point I had Drift running on my site while I was sitting at my desk. A visitor came onto the site and asked a simple question about one of my programs and my relationship with the Canadian Professional Sales Association.
I answered the question, and we went back and forth a few times. I began asking about their business, without immediately trying to turn the interaction into a formal sales presentation. It was simply a useful conversation between two people who were trying to understand whether there was a reason to keep talking.
Eventually I asked whether they wanted to move the conversation onto Zoom or Microsoft Teams. I put a link into the chat, they joined the meeting from their desk, and we continued from there. That conversation progressed from a Google search to website chat, then to a video meeting, project scoping and eventually a deal within about three weeks.
It became the biggest client I landed that year. There was no complicated funnel moving them through six carefully staged steps. What moved the opportunity forward was the ability to have a relevant conversation at the moment the customer was ready to engage.
That experience changed the way I thought about the statement, “the best landing pages are actually chat.” The technology provided access, but the technology itself did not create the business relationship. The real value came from being able to move quickly into an expertise-driven dialogue.
Social Selling Still Depends on Human Skills
The more technology becomes part of the sales process, the easier it is to become fascinated with the platform. We talk about CRM systems, marketing automation, chat tools, social networks and now artificial intelligence. Those tools can increase our reach and make us more responsive, but eventually somebody still has to have a useful conversation.
For me, great business conversations require three important qualities: empathy, curiosity and credibility. When I think about recruiting salespeople, those characteristics matter considerably because they influence how somebody engages with another human being. Some technical elements of selling are much easier to teach.
I can train somebody on our value proposition. I can show them how to use the CRM, introduce a sales process and give them examples of effective discovery questions. Developing genuine curiosity or empathy in someone who has very little of either can be a much longer project.
Curiosity causes people to ask another question because they actually want to understand the answer. Empathy helps them consider the situation from the customer’s perspective and recognize what may matter to that individual. Together, those qualities make the conversation feel much more natural and give the salesperson the information required to create useful business value.
Credibility Changes the Quality of the Conversation
Credibility is another important part of this equation. In a business context, I think credibility is built through expertise, business acumen, authenticity and keeping commitments. Those four things affect whether somebody sees you as a useful business partner or simply another person trying to sell them something.
Expertise means knowing your discipline well enough to contribute something worthwhile. Business acumen means understanding the customer’s world, including how their organization operates and what affects the decisions they make. When those capabilities come together, you can have a much more relevant conversation.
Authenticity also matters because people quickly notice when a salesperson is performing a role rather than engaging with them naturally. If you are asking questions only because they appear on a discovery checklist, the conversation can feel mechanical. Genuine interest tends to produce better follow-up questions because you are listening for meaning rather than waiting for your turn to talk.
Then there is the simple discipline of keeping commitments. If you say you will send something by Tuesday, send it by Tuesday. In a distracted business environment where people are juggling meetings, messages, platforms and priorities, consistently doing what you said you would do becomes part of your credibility.
Likability Is Useful, but Credibility Carries the Decision
Sales has always placed a lot of emphasis on being likable. There is good reason for that because relationships matter and very few people deliberately choose to spend time with somebody they dislike. Historically, a lot of relationship selling also involved golf games, sporting events, lunches and other opportunities to become personally connected.
Those activities can still help build relationships, although likability on its own does not close deals. When the decision involves meaningful money, business risk or an important outcome, the customer needs confidence in your ability to help them. That confidence comes from credibility.
A person can enjoy spending time with you and still have serious doubts about giving you responsibility for an important part of their business. The opposite problem also exists when somebody is technically excellent but impossible to work with. Effective B2B sales requires enough human connection to build the relationship and enough credibility to support the business decision.
This is where the quality of the conversation becomes such an important differentiator. Every interaction gives the customer evidence about how you think, how well you understand their business and whether you are capable of helping them navigate the decision. Credibility is built through what they experience while working with you.
Expertise-Driven Dialogue Creates Business Value
A strong sales conversation should create value before the customer buys anything. The customer may learn something about their business, see an issue differently or discover an opportunity they had not considered. That is a much stronger position than simply explaining what your solution does.
This is where consultative selling and social selling begin to overlap. The channel may be LinkedIn, website chat, Zoom or a face-to-face conversation, but the objective is similar. We want to understand the customer’s situation deeply enough to have a meaningful dialogue about the outcomes they are trying to create.
That means the salesperson needs to bring more than product knowledge. They need enough expertise and business acumen to recognize what matters in the conversation, and enough curiosity to keep exploring when the customer says something important. The conversation itself becomes evidence of the value of working together.
For sales leaders, this should also change how we think about B2B sales training. Teaching the script and the CRM is only part of preparing somebody to succeed. We also have to develop the knowledge, judgment and communication skills required to participate in serious business conversations.
Selling Risk Requires Partnership
The broader context for all of this is selling risk. When clients make meaningful business decisions, they are usually considering some combination of opportunity, investment, uncertainty and the consequences of getting the decision wrong. The salesperson who understands that context can help the customer evaluate the situation more intelligently.
That requires partnership. We need to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish and help them explore the outcomes, risks and options associated with the decision. The relationship becomes much more valuable when the salesperson can contribute to how the client thinks about the problem.
A transactional conversation rarely creates enough space for that. If the entire interaction revolves around price, features and the next step in the sales process, we may never learn what is really driving the decision. Better sales discovery gives us the context required to understand the customer’s world and contribute something useful.
Digital channels can actually help us create more of these conversations when we use them well. A person who would never fill out a long form may ask a simple question in chat. A LinkedIn comment may open an exchange that eventually moves into a private message, a call or a meeting.
Four Ways to Build Better Sales Conversations
1. Review where conversations can begin in your sales process. Look at your website, social channels and other digital touchpoints from the customer’s perspective. Identify places where people are being asked to complete a form when a simple conversation could provide a more natural next step. Then make sure somebody capable of having a useful business discussion is available when those opportunities appear.
2. Hire and coach for empathy and curiosity. Pay attention to whether salespeople genuinely want to understand the customer and whether they listen closely enough to ask intelligent follow-up questions. Product knowledge and systems training can improve capability, while the underlying quality of the conversation depends heavily on how the person engages with others. Make these human characteristics part of how you recruit, coach and evaluate your sales team.
3. Build credibility deliberately. Develop expertise, improve business acumen, communicate authentically and become obsessive about keeping commitments. Ask whether your salespeople understand enough about the customer’s world to have a meaningful conversation before they ever mention the product. Strong sales credibility is created through repeated evidence that you understand the business and can be trusted to follow through.
4. Treat every customer interaction as part of the brand conversation. A sales call, LinkedIn response, website chat and customer service exchange all tell people something about your organization. Equip everyone involved to listen, respond thoughtfully and recognize when a simple interaction could develop into a more valuable business conversation. That is where social selling becomes less about the platform and much more about how your organization shows up when somebody wants to talk.
