Hmmmm. Maybe some new technical skills, but I don’t think of social networking as being exclusively a sales skill. Using Internet-based social networking tools is a way for people to interact. If there’s a connection that facilitates a sales discussion, then great. But if salespeople are just going out there to start barking out a sales pitch, they’ll be tuned out pretty quickly. And good salespeople are already having genuine conversations with their customers and prospects.

So if a salesman were to ask me how to take advantage of social networking tools, I would go back to my post, and tell him “join the conversation. But keep it real.”

So no. I don’t think new tools or skills (unless the salesman currently lacks the ability to be genuine, which is somewhat common).

That doesn’t mean that some will not try to create a new sales tool on top of, say, Twitter, but unless it’s just a search-based tool for finding people to converse with, then I don’t think it will be embraced.

Does this then lead us into an new era of sales tools or sales skills?

Or are these the same tools that have always differentiated the car salesman from the successful salesperson?

Your customers are having a conversation about you. Do you want to participate in that conversation?

If you can participate in the conversation in a genuinely human way, then you can definitely sell without being salesy. If you cannot avoid sounding corporate or salesy, then no amount of participation can save you.