Simply put, Social Selling it’s the process of building relationships with potential customers through social channels.
Sales has always been about knowing your prospects, engaging them at the right time, building relationships, and closing deals. As such, there’s really nothing terribly new about it. What has changed though, is the buyer.
Today’s B2B purchaser now charts their own customer journey and they’re discovering and researching companies long before they make contact. And, of course, the ones they contact are the ones they have already been vetting.
To even have a shot at the shortlist, your sales strategy has to adapt to the new reality and connect with customers along the path they’re taking.
This is why Social Selling is so important.
It enables you to reach your potential customers at the beginning of the path to purchase (or better yet, well before) and build relationships every step of the way.
Not only that, it can also give you powerful insights about what your customers care about, how they think, and ultimately what drives their purchasing decisions. All of which is adds up to a tremendous advantage when designing a comprehensive sales strategy.
Even if your targets aren’t exactly social media socialites, they are heavily influenced by Social Selling tactics nonetheless because when they do start their online research they’ll quickly discover who their peers know, like, and trust. And those companies and individuals will immediately jump from awareness to consideration.
Social Selling is where the sales profession is headed, so the sooner you get started the more effective you’ll be in the long term.
Getting Started
To lay the foundation and start building momentum, we have put together the following four steps that we have found work best for quick results:
Step 1: Social Research
To reach your target audiences, you need to start with the conversations they’re having online. These conversations are happening typically on blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, and especially LinkedIn.
Your goal is to identify at least 10 conversations to target. To find these, make a list of relevant issues in your industry (legislation, controversies, technologies, etc.) and search for discussions online. Start with Google then go deeper by searching LinkedIn Groups, Followerwonk for Twitter profiles, and Buzzsumo for top content people sharing on your topics.
Step 2: Align Sales and Marketing
Social Selling is a team effort. Marketing and sales need to work together for this to be most effective. Start by bringing them together and having them review the targeted communities and brainstorming about ways to join in the conversations. Consider what value the team can bring, such as expert content, research, analysis, commentary, etc.
Step 3: Connect
This is where the rubber meets the road. Your company, itself, should be actively participating in relevant discussions through its own blog and social profiles, but so should your sales team. Armed with content and support from marketing, the sales team should join the targeted discussions, follow relevant participants, and build their own audiences.
Don’t expect to close a deal through Twitter, though. That’s not how Social Selling works. Rather, think of it as a gigantic networking event where you make thousands of light connections that turn into sales relationships when the buyer is ready.
Step 4: Track and Test:
As you engage with your targets, you’ll discover what messages, channels, themes, and tactics most effectively move them from potential customers to actual customers. The most important metrics to start with are:
- Audience Growth: Though not all followers are created equal, it is important to continually experiment with what makes people (especially the right people) want to follow you.
- Engagement Rate: You know your content is working when your targets like and share your posts. Make sure to track post performance and work with the sales and marketing teams to identify what characteristics perform best and worst.
- Opt-In: Once you have established awareness and trust to the point where they sign up for your newsletter list or a demo, it transitions into a more traditional sales. Until then, all activities should be designed to drive this metric.
Sales is inherently social and Social Selling is just a repurposing of core skills. One your team gets used to it, they’ll find it to be a highly efficient and effective way to reach their markets, fill the pipeline, and close deals.