Conversations are Vital to Social Selling Success

A big thanks to the Microsoft Office Small Business Academy for sponsoring today’s post on social selling. Check out their social sales webcast with Matt Heinz, Susan Detmar and Carol Ruth.

Content is not enough.

Conversation builds and deepens relationships and fosters dialogue with your target market. Conversation also creates more content and exposure. A process of eliciting feedback and generating conversation needs to be implemented as a daily discipline on major social media channels. Savvy social sellers know they have to be proactive, focused and strategic about who they engage in dialogue and they do it every day on the key social platforms they use.

Ways to start conversations using social media:

• Connect with your clients and prospects on LinkedIn and monitor their updates. When they post something you feel you can talk about ask them a question or give them feedback on their update.
• Send a private Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn message to them congratulating them on a recent success, trip or personal achievement. It could be as simple as “Amazing photos of your trip to London! How long were you there?”
• Say thank-you, all the time, (to everyone if you can) and then follow-up with a personalized comment or question. For instance, a client or prospect clicks “like” on one of the articles from Forbes you happened to share on LinkedIn. In the comments section you could tag them and say “Thanks Fred Smith! What did you think of the study by Harvard on Emotional Intelligence?” Or if someone follows you on Twitter or shares/retweets your content you could say “Thanks for the follow @SalesAcademy – how are things in Vancouver?”

Learn more about Social Sales on the Microsoft Office Small Business Academy Webcast here

These simple but contextual and customized interactions create an emotional tie and memory. People feel recognized and the back-and-forth dialogue often creates the rapport required to allow you to take the next step and engage them at a deeper level in-person, on the phone or through web conferencing/Skype.

Resist the temptation to over-automate, there’s lots of software solutions that will fake authenticity inserting the name of the person saying something like “Dear Bill thanks for the follow here on Twitter, have a great day!” Anyone who has been on social media for more than a week knows these are disingenuous boiler plated messages. They say to the prospect “you’re not important and I couldn’t be bothered to learn about you and send a personalized message.” If the prospect is worth adding to your sales funnel, then they deserve to be engaged authentically.

If you’re looking to gain more insights, strategies on social selling and check-out a demo of the new Outlook Customer Manager you can register for the Microsoft Office Small Business Academy social sales webcast here.