"Increasing revenue. That’s what businesses are all about.”
To achieve that goal marketing and sales teams have to source enquiries, convert them into paying customers and retain them as loyal brand ambassadors that generate referrals and other forms of brand awareness.
The challenge is that old methods of finding and qualifying prospects are becoming more and more inefficient in the modern world. This is where the power of social media comes to the fore.
Many people do not understand how social media works, so they use it in a very traditional way. This leads to a barrage of broadcasters and attention-seekers online whose key focus is to see how many impressions and click-throughs they got on their latest post. Unfortunately these metrics can be artificially inflated by using social media advertising and creates a scheduled, robotic style of social media that is usually expensive and relatively ineffective.
Accenture’s State of B2B Procurement Study finds that 94% of B2B buyers conduct some degree of research online before making a business purchase.
Your prospective customers are researching and listening to what others are saying online – what they’re saying about you, your competitors; how you and your employees represent yourselves on LinkedIn. An active presence on social media is now expected rather than a nicety, but customers now expect you to do more than just post out scheduled content on a regular basis.
How social media actually works
Social is not a tool, a platform or even a Facebook advert. Social is an activity related to or designed for human being to connect with one another. Good social media therefore needs to do three things:
- Be a 2-way conversation
- Intended to build relationship and encourage interaction
- Add value
That is why a lot of social media you see these days is actually anti-social. Social actions are intended to add value, anti-social actions intend to derive value.
When you share your knowledge, help people find resources, give recommendations and leave feedback you are being social. You’re adding value to conversations and building your networks. If you’re just posting in the hope of getting attention and click-throughs you’re trying to derive value. This often doesn’t work because you haven’t spent time building social capital within the online communities you’re part of. This is where social selling comes in – how to use social media effectively to generate enquiries.
How social selling works
Social media when used strategically offers a great opportunity for salespeople to effectively conduct research on their prospects and efficiently qualify leads. It is quick, cost-effective and generates great marketing intelligence which leads to long-term revenue-growth opportunities.
Research commissioned by Dell and published in The Social Business Journal Volume 3 showed 75% of all customers say they use social media as part of their buying process. In B2B marketing, many don’t just check the company’s social media profiles, they look to employee accounts as well, particularly the senior leadership team and the people they will speak to on a day to day basis as part of the sales journey.
31% of B2B professionals said that social selling allowed them to build deeper relationships with their clients. For B2B businesses, a quick overview of a LinkedIn profile can help your marketing and sales teams identify all sorts of useful information about your prospective clients’ precise wants and needs.
You can find out:
- What events they’re going to (and whether you should have a presence there)
- What industry magazines they continually share content from (which you should start reading too for more insights)
- Which thought leaders they listen to (and who you should follow for more insights)
- What’s going on in their industry
- What’s going on in their company
- Whether they have decision-making authority
- What specific challenges they have that your product or service could help them with
Your marketing and salespeople can work together to actively build relationships, and continually engage with prospective clients during the entire sales process and beyond.
The ideal is to create a community of customers that are so happy with your product and service that they actively refer you and talk about you online and in doing so you help them become micro-influencers. Influential people who talk to others in their network like them about your product or service. This is backed up by the data – Neilson research suggests 72% of people trust a recommendation from someone they don’t know and this jumps to 92% if it’s someone they already know.
Recommendations and testimonials are an important part of the marketing mix, especially on social media. Fantastic social sellers also complete regular network mapping exercises – to see who else their current clients know so they can proactively ask for useful referrals.
There is incredible return on investment to be made in social media, but organisations can’t judge it by traditional key performance indicators. The investment in social media is in the community you create, the goodwill you generate – the intrinsic value of social capital.
It is not about the number of impressions a certain post or hashtag gets or what your click-through rate is. Unfortunately, vanity metrics will only get you so far and if you don’t understand what social capital is and how to utilise it in your marketing strategy then you’re going to fall behind even further.
To do social selling effectively, you need to answer the questions that potential and current customers have, as well as sharing content that support your brand’s marketing goals – corporate social responsibility is becoming more important than ever. By providing custom content and creating a dialogue with current and prospective clients, your marketing and salespeople build trust and credibility over time and this becomes associated with your brand.
Unfortunately, many salespeople don’t understand how social selling works and how easy it can be. They worry that they will have to spend lots of time on social media fostering connections as well as doing their follow up meetings, calls and emails. Done well, effective social selling activities can be achieved in 15 minutes a day, leaving plenty of time for meetings, follow up calls and emails.
Others struggle because they don’t know what to post. According to a survey by PeopleLinx, only 26% of sales reps felt as if they knew how to use social media to sell. If the majority of your salespeople aren’t properly trained on how to use social media effectively in a social selling capacity, the organisation is missing out on a number of opportunities.
How do you start to adopt a social selling approach?
Start by identifying employees who are already active on social media and sharing information about your industry and company. Ask them what kind of content they would like to see come from your company channels.
Look at your competitors to see how they are utilising social media. Look at the company pages, individuals in the senior leadership team and those in the marketing/sales team to see how they are adopting social selling practices.
Create a basic social media policy so it’s clear what is and isn’t acceptable in terms of creating and sharing content across their networks to amplify your brand’s reach and engagement.
Some basic social selling training can have a huge impact on building and developing relationships with current and prospective clients, identifying where your target audience is active on social media and embracing the opportunities that social selling presents.
53% of salespeople want help in understanding social selling better because sales people using social media as part of their sales techniques outsell 78% of their peers and 46% of individual social sellers hit quota compared to 38% of sales reps who don’t
Social selling is a powerful strategy that can vastly improve efficiency and results of your marketing and sales departments which is why Companies with consistent social selling processes are 40% more likely to hit revenue goals than non-social sellers.
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