In the latest episode of his YouTube Podcast series, Dinis Guarda, author, influencer, futurist, and thinker, interviewed Timothy Hughes, bestselling author and co-founder of DLA Ignite, a business transformation consultancy that helps organisations and businesses leverage digital across sales, marketing, and human resources.
Timothy Hughes, bestselling author, creator, influencer, and content sales professional shares tips for social selling, and highlights the importance of community for creating a digital influence around us.
To build a background, Dinis asked his guest about his journey from sales to founding a business transformation consultancy. Narrating the course of events, Tim told him:
“Social (media) has changed the world in many ways: it’s changed the way we work and the way that society runs.”, explaining that he embraced the change with time, following the changing currents to stand where he is today, ready to evolve even further as the technological shifts unfold themselves.
DLA Ignite: Enabling digital corridors of growth
Dinis asked Tim about the driving idea to establish DLA Ignite. Tim explained that while the conventional sales model relied on a ‘door-to-door’ approach, social media and digital platforms like websites presented an opportunity where sales found a new dimension to initiate conversations.
Highlighting the irony that businesses could not harness the potentials that lay within the bedrock of social media, he said: “We realised that there was a gap in the marketplace. The people weren’t taking social media strategically. When we talk about strategy, what we do as a company is to help organisations create leading meetings from their activity on social media, which ultimately generates revenue.”
Sharing some interesting anecdotes and examples, he also emphasised that community plays a pivotal role in spreading digital influence in every direction without any need of investing in marketing and advertising.
“Community enables you to build digital influence in your marketplace and you also define your marketplace where your competition isn’t,” he said.
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The Social Selling Strategy
Dinis asked Tim to share his journey of writing ‘Social Selling – Techniques to Influence Buyers and Changemakers’. Timothy said: “We’ve now matured in a way that we talk about how people walk the digital corridors and have digital conversations. So, if you think about the way that we work, we walk in the physical world and work in the digital world where we have a digital identity that is a shop window to the world, where people are walking past every day, and they stop by to see ‘if that person is interesting enough or not’.”
Sharing the key pillars that make a difference in social selling, he highlighted the importance of a biocentric profile, content, and a large and varied network.
When Dinis asked him about the challenges that affect the adoption of digital transformations in processes, he explained: “A lot of digital transformations are based around IT systems, but the people and the systems are not digital. What we are not looking at is the human-centric ways of working and using that as a way of being digital. The more the leadership teams understand that the more they are likely to invest in the tools and training to get their people digital in their organisation. By using social and digital tools and methods, you find a long-term ability to strip out costs and to make yourself more efficient.”
Concluding the interview, he also mentioned that these principles of social selling are very much applicable in every vertical of life. “The modern job hunt is the same system of buying, and the same is the modern investor. They are all looking and searching in the same way and things,” he said.
