Why now, is the right time to start socially selling
Most companies are socially buying, are you in turn socially selling?
In a world where everything is online, merging your sales technique with an increasing digital network will lead to you organically developing a social selling platform.
A year and more has gone by since lockdown 1.0 and all client meetings, informal coffee chats and networking as we knew it moved online. The recent virtual cafés are now otherwise known as Zoom, Teams, Hangouts..
As a result, social selling has become more prominent than ever.
In a nutshell, Social Selling is the selling of a product or service following online, virtual relationship and trust building.
Finding clients can be tricky, however, with the way social media works today, finding clients through an online platform can be incredibly easy – after all, you can just hop onto the search bar on any platform and search for an industry-related hashtag, and there’s a whole world of conversations and prospects who are potentially interested in what you have to offer.
Building rapport and trust amongst your prospective clients means you can sell your product more easily. You’re not a stranger bustling around trying to make more money, you will be seen more as a colleague, a friend – a confidante even and you can use this to your advantage. Keep posting topical, factual, inspiring content and when your prospective client needs a product or service that you sell, by having a pre-established relationship, they will think of you first.
You just need to be on the right platform, with the right content attracting the right audience, then BINGO!
You’ll know from previous experience that people share everything on social media from interests and hobbies, their work pain points right down to where they shop.
By spending time socially listening you’ll see/hear your potential clients sharing a large amount of personal information online, whether it’s a business gripe, lack of time, asking for a recommendation, they might do a poll to find a solution to a larger issue. You name it see it as an opener for you to connect and engage with them.
It’s like going to a physical networking event where 20% of the people present were stood underneath a dream client locator pin. You wouldn’t ignore this, would you?
Socially selling means you have the online tools, to spot opportunities from the content that surrounds you daily, how to politely interact, connect and nurture them all the way down the buying funnel.
Home in on what information your online followers are talking about, if you’re in sales you need to share this with your marketing team, or make a note of it somewhere for you to use in your messaging across your content in the coming weeks/months.
Now you know a bit more about social selling and how vital it is in today’s buying cycle.
Here are some facts on why you need to start doing it:
1. Real online relationships lead to sales. Start creating real relationships with prospective clients and followers rather than just focussing on targets and KPIs, and watch how your sales flourish. Relevant hashtags can lead you to prospects who are already discussing your type of product. Maybe add into your CRM the hashtag source of how you found your lead, so you can manage them more strategically.
First things first, make sure your client facing staff, account managers and sales alike have brilliant online personas, All-star LinkedIn profiles etc. They all need trustworthy profiles and the company needs to be prominent too.
2. Your preferred audience are already socially buying. As I previously mentioned, more and more people are buying online. Customers tend to research businesses they may want to buy from, so make sure your business comes across well on more personal platforms such as Twitter or LinkedIn. 75% of B2B buyers use information from at least one social network site as part of their research into a potential supplier – if your social pages reflect badly on the business, that’s a lost customer and they’ll research more reputable and trustworthy businesses.
3. Your competitors are doing it. Get ready for these figures, because they are HUGE – 90% of all top sales professionals are already socially selling, and the figures get higher as the salesperson gets younger. If your competitor is socially selling, and this suits the customer best (for whatever reason), you’re missing out on customers. Your sales staff should be engaging in some way, shape or form with relevant content on LinkedIn. This keeps the algorithm in favour of the business as it hints at the business being active, engaging and therefore successful.
Where do we start?
We would strongly suggest LinkedIn as an initial place to socially sell, after all LinkedIn was BUILT for social selling, so take advantage of this!
Step 1
Set up a company page on LinkedIn, make sure all your staff connect themselves to the company page and start provide your staff with great content.
Step 2
Get all your client facing staff to check their profile and SSI (social selling index) score on LinkedIn.
Step 3
Then set some guidelines as to what they can post, how to post and provide collateral, like whitepapers, images, videos etc. for them to use.
Step 4
They need to connect with all their customers, people they have met in meetings, networking events, exhibitions etc.
Step 5
They need to follow industry-related companies – give them a list.
Make it easy for them and provide the LinkedIn company page URLs. This way they will see all the posts from these companies in their own personal feed.
Step 6
They need to ideally be on LinkedIn every day, engaging with their connections posts, checking out their feed and connecting with new people (through hashtag or content searches).
In addition
I’d like to suggest, on a regular basis provide in house ‘social selling’ workshops, to remind staff of why social selling is important, what’s new and how they can access company information to share.
Like anything you’ll want to test it’s working:
- You can do this with regular staff checking their SSI scores
- Monitoring the CRM with any LinkedIn taggable fields – source of contact, etc.
- Google analytics – how many people are visiting from your LinkedIn posts
- LinkedIn company page analytics
Finally, enjoy it, it should be social.
Happy selling!!
If you would like to discuss further how The Thinking Cap can help you start on your socially selling journey, get in touch. We run lots of bespoke LinkedIn workshops where we go through these stages and help put things in place internally. You'll come away with all the information you need, trained staff and all the recordings so if any new starters come along they have all the training videos to watch and refer back to.
Our details are: Lisa@thethinkingcap.co.uk or call 07436 223688
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