With social media channels now influencing 92% of B2B buying decisions, social selling has become an indispensable part of a sales process. Social selling helps you stay in front of your prospects, building recognition and trust to eventually win more deals. It is a long-term strategy that helps build long lasting relationships.
What is social selling?
Social selling is a technique of using social media to interact directly with customers, add value, develop deeper relationships, and ultimately, occupy a larger amount of your customer’s mindshare. This ensures that when a prospect is ready to buy, you are the first person they would reach out to, helping you achieve your sales goals.
If you’re like the most of the sales professionals out there trying to champion social selling but don’t know where to start, download the free copy of A Definitive Guide To Social Selling now! This ebook helps you understand what social selling is and how you can use it to meet and even exceed your sales targets.
Why is social selling important?
Let’s face it: Traditional sales techniques are not as effective as they used to be. A recent survey reveals that more than 90% of C-level executives said that they “never” respond to cold calls or e-mail blasts. However, the same people are surprisingly responsive to messages sent through social channels.
Social selling helps you identify prospects expressing hints of interest in the solutions you sell. These hints could be a product recommendation request on Twitter, a customer complaint on a Facebook page, or a discussion on LinkedIn. Since a conversation is already initiated, you just have to plunge in to show how your product or service can help.
So, today’s sales teams have to actively listen to these information to make the first sales contact personal and relevant rather than intrusive.
Other benefits of social selling include:
Personal Benefits:
- Professional Recognition – The chance to gain visibility, validation, and recognition for your work.
- Personal Branding – Building a stronger professional identify through thought leadership and networks.
- 73% of sales reps using social media outperformed their sales peers and exceeded quota 23% more often.
- 40% of the sales people have closed 2 -3 deals per year as a result of social selling.
- Social selling helps sales reps to get referrals within their LinkedIn networks. And these referrals have a much higher close rate than the average sale — approximately 50%
Company Benefits:
- Companies that leverage social selling have 66% greater sales achievement.
- Improves visibility and builds awareness as 75% of B2B buyers & 84% of CXO’s search for product on Social Media.
- Companies leveraging Social Media can better service their customers as 67% of customers have used social accounts for lodging complaints.
- After adopting social selling practices and LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, Eloqua – marketing software company – decreased it’s average sales cycle time by 20 days, and boosted the rate of leads converting to opportunities by 25%.
- As audiences engage with content on social media networks, a company can develop a better understanding of their customers and top performing content. This could be leveraged for developing engaging story-lines and content that would garner maximum engagement, likes, shares, etc.,
It’s clear that you can’t downplay the importance of social channels in today’s selling process. But, it’s not a one-time activity. Download the free copy of A Definitive Guide To Social Selling to get started.
What do you think about social selling? Let us know in the comments.
