Social Selling - What Is It?
There is a lot of buzz about the concept ‘social selling.’ Many may argue that sales, especially B2B sales, has always been a social activity. In fact, it is true that selling always revolved around relationship building and thus the focus on establishing rapport, networking and leveraging existing connections. But before, it was usually done via social clubs, civic organizations, athletic clubs, industry conferences, face to face business meetings, etc. It has only been in the last few years that the notion of social selling has changed vividly with the adoption of social media.
Now social selling involves three elements-conversing with the right people, using changes in the environment of buyers, and leveraging our relationships. It is a new way to sell via social networking channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and others. In fact, with these social networking channels, a mediocre prospect has a higher probability of getting transformed into an enthusiast buyer. Social intelligence enables sales professionals at all levels to increase their productivity and profitability.
Basically what happens is that when we are able to determine the needs of an individual in a better way, we can project our product to fit those requirements in abetter manner. We are even more likely to close the deals when our customers can easily see how our products or services are apt for their lives; social selling basically enables us to become smarter sales professionals.
If you have yet not started using social media to generate leads for your business, you are missing a great sales opportunity. With the passage of time, uninformed sales pitches and traditional cold calling will no longer work. Social selling will have a great role to play in the coming months and years. In fact, already social media tools are being more effective than traditional cold calling in generating qualified social sales leads.
However, this new concept of social selling has also given rise to a new kind of customer – Customer 2.0. This type of buyer develops opinions about different brands without even listening to a sales pitch or viewing a single ad. They learn anything and everything that they want to know about a company’s product or services via social media.
Customer 2.0 doesn’t use Google to know about a company, its products or its services. These customers just turn to social media platforms for information, advice and recommendations from their peers when preparing to make a purchase.They ignore all the messages and social media posts that are promotional; rather they turn to the people they know as well as their peer networks in order to educate themselves, evaluate vendors, assess their offerings, and make a buying decision. This is a clear shift towards the ‘Ask Economy’ from the ‘Search Economy.’
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