How Social Selling is becoming Key in Sales

 #BeCreative is part of this month's publishing series where professionals explain how to harness creativity in times turmoil and growth.

What is social selling? It's inside sales, virtual sales and doing sales via social media and much much more! Oops, you didn't know?

• Cold calling isn't working like it used to
• Decision makers typically consume 5 pieces of content BEFORE they are ready to speak to sales rep
• The digital world continues to change the way we buy!
• 3/4 of B2B buyers research first, talk later.

It's the result of the idea that old-school sales, cold-calling, traditional advertising, the sales funnel - are becoming obsolete.

Social media is the most effective landscape for:

1 - Spotting prospects

2 - Quickly Appraising

3 - Researching

4 - Connecting

5 - Lead Nurturing

Your prospects. period.  Over 70% of sales people who incorporate social media into their selling strategy outperform their colleagues who don't, typically beating sales quotes by 20%.

Social selling is the new method of reaching prospective customers, building warm leads and nurturing them with content and personal interaction the encapsulates social authority and social-branding, while having a more essentially human approach.

Sales must also adapt to a more authentic approach. The traditional slick talking sales "sharks", may die off. The reason being, for social selling, you actually have to be interactive on a much more interpersonal and genuine angle. You have to offer value and you have to be helpful. The sales pitch will not work. The reality is:

Why Sales People Don't Understand the benefit of Social Selling

• Over 90% of sales people have not received proper social media training
• Over 70% of sales reps think the buying process is changing faster than sales organizations are responding to.
• 80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th contact, making social media an ideal place to keep going back and developing human rapport.
• Sales is becoming more of a dialogue where the customer has the power to time, negotiate and choose the channel of the sales interaction.
• An estimated 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop. This may be because they are still using the phone.

Igniting Dialogue

Creating relevant conversation, is certainly not something you usually do on a cold calling phone approach. Dialogue implies a back and forth, not a pitch, and if you don't have quality content on your social media profile (like pulse articles on LinkedIn), what social proof do you have that you are credible over the phone? Your social media profile must be the landing page, not your corporate website. This is especially true if your corporate website doesn't have: 

1 - Video content on landing page about your key products and services

2 - Outstanding testimonials, social authority, case studies and impeccably written content. 

Creating Immediate Value

How do you immediately give value to your prospect who is part of a target audience that makes up your buyer personas? Without strong content marketing or a personal brand that is believable, as a sales rep, your job is nearly impossible in the digital marketplace if you don't effectively leverage social selling.

Create Industry Surveys

One effective method is create target segment surveys, this could be people in your B2B niche or any other group. Then as a Sales rep follow up on how different prospects answered, by giving more helpful information or sharing the results in a personalized manner.

Social Prospecting

Using social sales you'll quickly realize social media is an effective way to research a prospective firm. Insight goes hand in hand with rapport building and strong investigative skills will allow you to know how to empathize with your prospects and link them to your strong service or product set.

• Sign up for their Newsletter
• Read their whitepapers
• Download their free offerings
• Take notes
• Identify key decision makers in their organization
• What are their greatest needs

Tools & Best Practices

Social selling requires you to do your homework. Don't waste time here, learn to be efficient:

1 - Invest in a social CRM

2 - Use social collaboration tools for your sales and marketing team

3 - Set up Google Alerts for competitor terms (brand names, products, key people)

4 - Join customer groups on LinkedIn

5 - Identify and follow influencers on Twitter, LinkedIn

6 - Data  mine and become a knowledge authority on social dialogue orientated forums like Quora, Reddit, and others

7 - Optimize not only soft selling but customer retention programs

8 - Harness the power of user generated content, brand advocacy and social referring

9 - Understand and implement sentiment analysis tracking

10 - Monitor SlideShare and Scribd for new presentations relevant to your industry and target buyer personas.

11 - Don't forget to optimize your social media profile, and this includes optimizing the content & quality and size of your network.

12 - Lastly, it can be done from anywhere. Social selling never stops.

Forward

When ecommerce lands on social media channels, can you imagine how key social selling is going to be? Is social selling implicated in your industry? This is just common sense if you are in B2B.

What is your advice to help others optimize their social selling strategies?

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 Michael Spencer is a prolific copywriter, blogger and digital marketing enthusiast, to read more of his articles click on the following footer: