Did social selling die?
For years, social selling was hailed as the modern salesperson's superpower - the antidote to cold calling, ignored emails, and outdated sales tactics.
Build a presence, create content, engage with your network, and boom - leads come to you instead of you chasing them. right?
But somewhere along the way, people started asking - does this even work anymore?
Sales teams stopped prioritizing it. Marketing took over the company’s social media. Leadership wanted immediate ROI. and suddenly, social selling wasn’t the golden ticket - it was just another thing on the to-do list.
So, let’s ask the big question - did social selling die or did we just do it wrong?
Social selling evolved
If you’re still defining social selling as posting content and waiting for leads, then yes - it died. Because it was never meant to work that way.
The old Linkedin bro-marketing playbook (who wrote that anyway?) - post some content, slide into DMs, force a connection into a pitch - has stopped working. Why?
Because buyers got smarter.
81% of B2B buyers already have a preferred vendor in mind before they ever reach out.
85% of CEOs and VPs use social media to make purchasing decisions.
85% of the B2B buyer journey happens before a salesperson even enters the conversation.
By the time they talk to a sales person, they might have already made up their mind.
It’s not about posting. It’s about positioning
Social selling was never about posting for posting’s sake - it’s about positioning yourself where your buyers are, before they even know they need you.
We used to think the sales funnel looked like this: awareness, consideration, purchase. Simple.
But in reality, buying behaviour is messy.
Google’s "messy middle theory" proves that buyers loop through exploration and evaluation repeatedly before making a decision. Basically, the buyers journey has gotten quite messy.
image from a88lab
And where does that exploration happen?
Not in sales calls. Not in your CRM.
It happens in dark social - in the whatsapp groups, slack channels, DMs, private communities, and word of mouth recommendations that no attribution software can track.
So if you’re not present before your buyer’s decision making loop starts, you’re invisible.
How social selling actually works today
Forget the old-school playbook. Forget the idea that social selling is just LinkedIn content.
It’s actually being seen as the go-to expert in your space. It’s creating content that makes people trust you before you ever speak. It’s showing up in conversations that matter, so your name is mentioned when you’re not in the room.
It’s actually being seen as the go-to expert in your space. It’s creating content that makes people trust you before you ever speak. It’s showing up in conversations that matter, so your name is mentioned when you’re not in the room.
So, is social selling dead?
Not at all.
But BAD social selling is. If your strategy is just posting and hoping, you’re wasting time. If you treat social media like an outbound pitch machine, you’re doing it wrong.
But if you position yourself as the expert buyers already trust? If you create content that actually helps them? If you show up in conversations that matter?
You win the deal before the competition even knows it exists.
The choice is yours. You can be just another salesperson trying to book a meeting... Or you can be the one your buyers already know, like, and trust before they ever reach out.
So, which one are you?
/M.