The buyers of today’s are no longer impressed with traditional selling techniques. Social media has changed the old concept of selling and buying.
57 percent of the customers complete the purchasing path before they consider engaging with a sales representative
Gartner
Social media has empowered buyers to reach the buyers’ goals before interacting with salespeople. In the modern selling world, the requirements of the buyers have been determined by leveraging the internet and social media.
It’s actually a buyer’s market!
Selling on social media is referred to as social selling. Social selling has the power to change the sales cycle completely. In recent times, there has been observed popularity in the concept of social selling. This is because both B2B and B2C companies are getting the desired results from social media participation.
50% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn as a source for making purchase decisions
LinkedIn
But implementing social selling without any strategy does not make any sense. An effective strategy is essential for both better performance and satisfaction.
The key ingredient for doing social selling well is having a strategy.
How impactful is a social selling strategy?
A social selling strategy is basically a plan which needs to follow in order to utilize social media to connect with your prospects through your content and interactions with prospects. The motive of social selling strategy is to convert prospects into customers. Without implementing social selling strategies in sales and marketing department, salespeople do not sure about gaining benefits of social selling tools.
Top 5 elements of a successful social selling strategy
Let’s discuss the top five elements to a successful social selling strategy:
1. Accept the digital change
No doubt, the concept of digital transformation has now become a matter of survival for businesses. For any kind of business, embarking on a digital transformation is essential. It’s something that needs to be strategized and implemented effectively to ensure sustainable commercial success. Connect with sales and marketing teams on LinkedIn, share digital articles, and be a part of digital asset creation such as blog articles or videos.
2. Define roles and responsibilities for team members
For the fruitful implementation of social selling, triple-alignment is a must. It means the sales team, marketing team, and sales enablement leaders should work together as one business unit.
Sales and marketing leaders interlink when they focus on revenue generation. Setting the social selling strategy is in the hands of sales enablement leaders. They act as intermediary connecting the sales and marketing teams.
Each senior leader plays a crucial role in the success of a social selling program. Leaders can guide the best. In order to make the whole team social, sales leaders need to become social. The leaders should be enough trained and help team to acquire new sales skills that translate into sales outcomes.
3. Go beyond basic tools training
Just teaching your teams about the most popular social media platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is not at all sufficient. There is a need to integrate effective social engagement methods and the required skills into an organization’s sales methodologies.
In addition, to learn the use of various social media platforms, salespeople need to learn how to actually insert social selling into their day-to-day activities. What most required for the teams is to learn how to find useful content, how much time to spend on social selling, and how to leverage the relationships to achieve sales success.
4. Engagement
Set a purpose before engaging with a person on social media. Whether you want to increase the visibility, or set up a sales call, make sure your every interaction should serve a purpose.
The only way to capturing the true value of social selling is to make it consumable for your sales team. You should provide a process that enables your salespeople to engage without it monopolizing their time. This can be achievable by setting goals or targets to engage in social media effectively.
5. Coaching and long-term training
Unqualified leads and lost sales opportunities are turning the sales leaders to coaching and training as an effective solution. Coaching and training impart specific skills or knowledge.
- Define
The training program begins with knowing the targets and strategies, which are crucial for seller success. Defining the exact purpose will lead to maximized sales energy, focus, and engagement.
- Execute
The execution involves drawing connections between actions and goals defining the job of sellers. The right execution of the specific tasks will allow the sellers to use their time most effectively and achieve the desired results.
- Develop
It is the part where sales leaders assess sellers’ needs for skill, knowledge, and attribute development, and boosts ‘seller ownership’ of their own development potential.
- Motivate
Motivating your team is really important. Simply sharing quota and compensation plan are not enough to motivate the sellers. It is good to share your wins with the team.
Successful social selling implementation
Following the above top elements of a social selling strategy can definitely plot your steps to a successful implementation. What key elements of a successful social selling strategy would you add to this list?
This guest blog article was written by George Albert who brings years of sales and marketing experience helping organizations turning from analog to digital. He works with a motive to create behavioral change and enable B2B companies with the right competencies to engage today’s modern buyer. From start-ups to the large organizations, his guidance is allowing companies to adopt digital and social selling with the motive to increase pipeline and revenue.