Selling on social media
Don't take things at face value
Listen to what they really say
You can’t always take what people say at face value. It applies to sales and I guess in anything in life except with extremely honest people (but they are rare). In 2025, even less, as almost all your interactions with potential clients happen online where incentives are twisted.
During a typical online sales conversation, their main incentive, if they don't trust you, is to get rid of you as fast as possible. They would rather tell you something that they may believe is true but is not the absolute truth. They may want to go to the next digital distraction. They want to scroll on to something else or maybe pretend to work on the next meaningless task.
This type of dynamic is very obvious to most people when it comes to seduction. Let's consider a simple example, when a woman tells an interested man, “I am very busy, I don't have time.” You perfectly know that she means, “I'm not willing to get to know you better or to date you.” You may have done it yourself to other men hundreds of times. In your daily life, you are used to not taking things at face value. When it comes to business, it's actually not that different. Well, it is a little bit different because, in business, people tend to be slightly more sincere, it's easier as there are less feeling involved. Yet, you should still think critically.
What does that mean for an entrepreneur, especially B2B company leaders? Concretely, you need to spend more time translating what leads response fundamentally mean. Usually, you will see that they decide to go for zero change. Hence, you have to understand that your biggest competitor is usually not another company. It's almost always the status quo, them doing nothing. In a lot cases, people have no other quotes in hand and never approached any of your competitors. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they do not.
If you read this, you are nobody
What their refuse means is that they don't trust you. You are not worth the hassle of the change or the implementation of a new system. They are scared, and they don't want to lose their mind with new accounting software or CRM, or simply don't want their boss to blame them. So you should make them look at the face value of what they say and not just follow a sales process. Remember, sales is one of those things in a business closer to actual life, with human-to-human interactions, feelings, and spontaneous conversations. The salesperson somehow seduces and convinces; the accountant or the programmer does not, or maybe less.
In sales, the purpose and the process live at a long distance from each other. In some jobs, like accounting, the process is the purpose. You have to declare taxes, balance the books, and the whole process is exactly the whole purpose of the job. In programming, you have to do it right and write great code, but great code usually translates into a good product if the product manager gave the right directions. In sales and marketing, it doesn't work like that. It's closer to human feelings and fears.
In practice, you must keep doing things that both attract new clients and prove you’re trustworthy. That takes the same versatility as real-world courtship: reading unspoken cues, sensing hidden feelings, and responding to needs clients never verbalize. Thus, you should not think about your sales process as a list of tasks. There is no task; there is just a purpose. You have to think about each client as an individual, as someone you have to sell to. So, when you say, “Wednesday, I'm going to follow-up with potential clients and answer the leads”, you are checking a to-do list, not meeting your purpose. Because when you do it, the process is more important than the purpose: you're just completing a task, not fulfilling your deeper objective. Many salespeople see their lead pipeline as a sequence of tasks, not as a group of humans with whom they need to build relationships.
Entrepreneurs need to learn how to enact trust between the clients and themselves. Trust can come in different ways. The easiest and first way is to demonstrate, and I think many CEOs are doing a bad job at demonstrating. You should always be asking yourself: Am I promising, or am I demonstrating? CEOs should move from the land of promises to the land of acts. Most companies promise; some companies show; and a few companies actually demonstrate on a daily basis.
The best brands -Nike, Apple, Hyundai- prove their worth every day. No one wonders whether they’re good; their ubiquity is the evidence. If their products weren’t worth it, millions of people wouldn’t keep buying them. Most of us can’t rely on that kind of automatic proof. We don’t have our products everywhere, and people don’t trust our brand yet because they don’t know us. So, we must demonstrate value to each client one at a time, trusting that as more people adopt our products, the proof will eventually speak for itself.
You are not their main concern
Think about people's context when you talk to them. They clicked on a link in the middle of a digital nightmare made of thousands of ads. What is your ad? It's just one more doomscrolling distraction. Then, the conversation that follows is more crucial than ever.
Swap the dating analogy for tailoring a suit. You wouldn’t cut the same pattern for someone headed to a board meeting, a wedding, or a beach party. Sales is no different. You must show as much interest in them as in their business context. In many cases, those two things are essentially the same for entrepreneurs, because their business is their whole life. How do you get to know them better? Ask good questions, i.e questions that make people look at themselves, not at you. A good question can be as simple as repeating what they just said so they can think more deeply about it. This way you can gain valuable information and offer something that really matters, or disqualify the leads quickly.
I like thinking you should help people translate what they fundamentally mean and go from the superficial, cosmetic sentences that they give you to the deeper truth that they want to express. Therapists do this for a living.
Let me give you a fictitious example:
“I’m thinking of quitting my job.”
“When you picture staying, what do you feel?”
“Mostly boredom. Every day feels the same.”
“What makes that routine a problem for you? What would an ideal workday look like? Do you need more challenge?”
“Yes, I’d like to solve new problems and learn new skills.”
“And what draws you to novelty? Are you worried you’re not using your abilities fully? Do you feel your current role keeps you from seeing what you’re capable of? Does real challenge make you feel engaged and alive?”
It’s a very simple example. The patient starts with a plain statement -“I’m thinking of quitting my job”- and keeps digging until core emotions emerge: boredom, fear, desire for growth. You’re not selling boredom, fear, or desire when you sell B2B SaaS, yet the same feelings surface when someone says, “I don’t want to change tools, migrate my data, or do anything new.”
Concretely, never promise and always demonstrate. Review every part of your sales process and identify where you make promises; eliminate each one. Get to know the prospect and guide them toward the truth. On every call, dig deeper. Treat each client as someone worth real time, not a quick pitch. Remember: they’re busy, and highly distracted. They can spend hours scrolling through TikTok before you show up to ask about their SaaS stack.
Sit down, no phone, no screen, and ask: What more can I do to prove that my service outperforms their current provider and makes their life easier? That’s the truth. If you don’t believe it, that’s your hurdle to clear. Approach clients the way you would a friend making a bad decision. You’d work hard to show a friend a better path—whether urging them to change jobs, leave a toxic relationship, or try a new experience. Apply the same effort to your clients: guide them, prove your value, and let the demonstration speak for itself.