How to increase my selling on Social Media
Buying and selling have always been social activities.
Before our lives were lit by a thousand screens full of Facebook, Twitter, and every other glowing corner of the internet, people still asked other people for buying advice, gossiping about phonograph brands over the garden fence.
And they still wrote stinging letters to manufacturers when their products let them down and scratched their brand-new records.
In the 21st century, blogs, forums, and social networks have replaced the humble garden fence, and everyone is everyone’s digital neighbour. What’s more, voices carry: Bitter complaints — whether they’re justified or not — can be public, and rapidly searchable. Just take a moment to browse Twitter for #BadService if you're not convinced.
The result has been more powerful, more connected customers.
“There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.” — The Cluetrain Manifesto
This has inspired more customer-centric companies that understand the value of incredible customer experiences. The same advances that transformed buying and empowered smart buyers are now also transforming selling — and offering huge advantages to the social-savvy.
In this guide, we’ll discuss:
What’s at risk if you don’t invest in social selling
How to use social to get to know your prospects better
How to get the right help to make the sale
You can’t afford to live in the past.
Modern social selling isn’t complex, and (mostly) it doesn’t require any specialized skills. But it does require a different way of thinking about the sales process.
There were reports that only one in four sales reps knew how to integrate social media into their sales process. Yet 61% of organizations engaged in social selling report a positive impact on revenue growth.
The upside of this skills gap? For the more forward-thinking sales professional there are huge advantages in getting into social selling today. Here are some inspiring social selling stats:
Nearly 79% of salespeople who use social media to sell outperform those who don’t (Forbes).
Ninety-eight percent of reps with 5,000 or more LinkedIn contacts reach or surpass their sales quotas, versus just 52% of those with fewer than 250 contacts (The Sales Benchmark Index).
A lead developed via social media is 7x more likely to close (IBM).
Organizations using social selling have seen a 10%–20% increase in win rate, 20%–30% acceleration in cycle time, and a 10%–15% increase in revenue (KISSMetrics).
Now let’s dig into a few tips for social selling so you can become one of those reps who knows how to leverage social.
Sell on social — Salesforce-style.
Social is deeply embedded into how Salesforce sells. Here’s how they do it:
They use Facebook and Twitter to keep ahead of what our customers and prospects are saying and to spot those who need service and sales help.
They run their own Marketing Command Center. Social Studio is our own social media monitoring, analysis, and engagement platform, and we continuously monitor what people are saying about their brand. This enables them to reply with comments, record sentiment (both good and bad), and try to help wherever they can, including flagging issues for other members of our team to follow up.
They flow what they learn into our Sales Cloud CRM platform, creating a social customer profile. Sales Cloud allows them to capture everything from Twitter handles, tweets, and LinkedIn profile pictures to details of user/customer connections — plus anything that’s public on Facebook.
They treat themselves to a guilt-free coffee break, safe in the knowledge they’ve a single, multidimensional view of each customer, and that it’s available to anyone involved in sales.
When a sales opportunity is identified, they use Chatter, their employee social network, to help them leap into action — marshalling resources and keeping everyone up to date.
Use social to get to know your prospects better.
You may be pitching the best product or service around, but that’s no guarantee you’ll win the business. Sales success depends on insight and — even harder to quantify — empathy. That’s why every good salesperson researches their prospects prior to making contact.
Before social media, this could be tough. The best a salesperson could do was check out the company’s website, wade through their annual report, and check for mentions on trade websites. Salespeople often felt like they were merely skimming the surface — with little hope of gaining the deep insight into a prospect’s needs that it takes to really tailor a pitch.
Today’s socially savvy salesperson can dive much deeper. With relatively little effort, you can discover:
Who to target within the organization
Who you know who’s already in contact with them
What’s happening in near real-time
How engaged prospects are with their own customers
What those customers want from them — and what they’re complaining about
Armed with this information, it’s a lot easier to put together an insightful, emotive sales pitch — one that’s less “me, me, me” and more “you, you, you.” Salespeople can show how products and services directly solve the issues their prospects are facing, even issues that prospects have yet to identify themselves. Plus, they’ll have a far clearer picture of whose buy-in is critical in making the sale.
The time to begin social selling is now.
There’s never been a better time to embrace social selling tools — to find new customers, craft pitches to meet their deepest needs, and bring the right people together to make the sale.
We hope you’ve found this mini-guide useful. Ready to take a deeper dive into social today? Check out our e-book How Top Marketers Excel at Social Media .
