What is Social Selling?
Social selling is about using your social network to connect with the right prospects, build trusted relationships, and ultimately, achieve your sales goals. This sales method enables better sales lead generation and sales prospecting process and removes the need for cold calling. Building and maintaining relationships is easier within the network that you and your customer trust.
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4 Methods of Social Selling
1. Create a professional brand
Today’s world of B2B buyers is very selective and will only work with sellers they can trust. A strong professional brand shows you are an active participant in your industry. It leads to more inquiries from prospective clients. It leads to more responses to your communications.
2. Focus on the right prospects
Social selling allows you to find and connect with prospective clients more effectively than traditional sales. Over 76% of buyers feel ready to have a social media conversation and identifying prospects that meet your established criteria – such as role, function, or industry.
3. Engage with insights
Position yourself as a subject matter expert by sharing relevant industry content, commenting on news alerts, and building your professional brand. Over 62% of B2B buyers respond to salespersons that connect with relevant insights and opportunities. Salespersons can enhance their thought leadership by staying up-to-date with prospect news, and by identifying new contacts or decision makers when accounts make key hires.
4. Build trusted relationships
Build trust with prospective clients by sharing your perspectives and helping provide relevant information to common enquires. Have genuine conversations and focus on the needs of the prospective client first, selling second.
Measuring Social Selling Success
With 90% of the top-performing companies using social selling to engage with prospective clients and drive leads, it’s a strategy that works.
While connecting with people/clients online may seem easy, there is an art to engaging in a way that turns connections into leads and leads into sales. In addition, organizations need to have metrics in place to measure its success in order to know what works and what doesn’t to ensure social selling success.
While measuring performance using the Social Selling Index on LinkedIn can provide insight into a salesperson’s success, it only measures the efficacy of one platform. Metrics from just one platform tell you nothing about the metrics of another.
Therefore, organizations need to have a broader way to measure the overall success of their social selling. Leaders should plan their social selling strategically, have metrics to measure achievements and be prepared to adjust strategies that don’t deliver.