Social selling is a concept hovering around social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to find the right business-minded and ready-to-engage prospects for growth.
Ultimately, social selling develops and bridges the reverential relationship between three groups; company, salesperson, and prospects and creating strong b2b sales strategies.
This tactic is more concentrated on the B2B sales team and prospects because it focuses on employee advocacy rather than the brand’s official social media.
It is considered a strong tool for your sales team and is 7x efficient compared to other lead gen tactics.
Companies that are practicing this sales process are 40% more likely to hit revenue goals than those that are keeping themselves away from social selling.
Continue reading this blog to uncover what exactly social selling is, and how important it is for B2B employees and companies. Also, learn how your business can start social selling right away.
Social selling is a method (or a process) used by B2B sales reps to interact directly with prospects. This sales technique is used to:
⦁ Find the right prospects
⦁ Improve sales lead generation
⦁ Create an efficient sales prospecting process
⦁ Eliminate the contingency for cold calling
⦁ Build valuable and trusted relationships through social interactions
However, the ultimate goal of social selling is to increase the number of sales through the funnel of positive engagement by providing thoughtful content and injecting value into critical business subjects.
Social selling is effective because 64% of team meeting goals are achieved with social selling techniques.
Social selling is important as it leverages social media platforms to build relationships and drive sales. It enables businesses to engage with potential customers directly, understand their needs, and provide personalized solutions. Social selling facilitates trust-building, establishes credibility, and nurtures long-term customer relationships. By leveraging social networks, businesses can expand their reach, increase brand awareness, and ultimately boost sales conversions.
When sales reps use social selling theory, they should include several fundamental strategy elements. These include the following:
Social Prospecting: Checking social footprints for signals of customer preference, buying intent, and other activities that are proximate to conversion.
Personal Branding: Using social networks to build credibility, courtesy, and controllability.
Employee Advocacy: Scripting and sharing valuable content about their business ongoing on social media for greater visibility.
Affinity Management: Observed to manage and nurture ongoing customer relationships.
Targeting Prospects: To connect and transcend the most qualified leads to focus directly on those users.
Now that you have well known the theory of social selling, let’s look at some benefits that it provides to a Sales Rep and the company.
As social selling is based on finding the right prospects and nurturing the qualified ones for lead establishment, it offers seamless benefits to the company and the sales rep. Following are some benefits that have been seen after implementing a strong social selling strategy.
1. Enabling Personal Branding
Social selling gives an employee a scope of developing their face value personally. As social profiles are created with their real name and image on social media, it optimizes personal branding. You may infer this as a company counter strategy for brand establishment in social footprints.
- Become a thought leader
You may have seen some videos illustrating the importance of business matters or something from reputed people working in top-notch positions. Those are examples of social selling concepts. They are thought leaders, generally, observed as informed opinion leaders that inspire people with their ideas, act as a source of trusted vocals, and know-how to replicate people’s ideas to success.
2. Create better career opportunities
Companies should respect and help talented employees and provide them with the opportunity to scale and grow professionally. Social selling gives personal growth a boost. Using social selling tools, a sales rep can become a master in the field of social marketing, social selling, social media management, and more.
Additionally, the Gartner Future of Sales Report illustrated that by 2025, 80% of interactions with B2B buyers happened digitally. Digitally utilizing social channels means social selling will grow as well.
3. Contribute to company victory
Besides bringing their talent to their job-specific duties, employees can contribute to achieving the company objectives by participating in the strategic social selling program. Social selling is a corporate-level strategy and contributing directly gives great exposure to your talent. Social Selling Benefits for the Company
- Increased brand visibility
Social selling increases the employee’s branding and helps them develop themselves as industry thought leaders. Those thought leaders further help the business audience with innovative ideas. And this promotes brand visibility and audiences are attracted to talk to them personally.
- More, higher-quality leads
Generating high-quality leads from the targeted market is the ultimate feature of social selling. As the social selling technique approaches concentrated strategies, practices, and processes to optimize social profiles, it pitches only the buyers ready to purchase.
- Amplified web traffic
Social selling tools’ practices are based on digital platforms thus requiring a website for post-management work. Social selling tools like Linkedin Sales Navigator allow you to reach a large number of audience minds who are ready to talk. There you can customize your campaign and land them on your website landing pages which increases web traffic.
- Improved sales results
Other than the expansion in quality leads that can help deals, social selling is likewise an incredible method for expanding the typical deal size and driving better win rates. Social selling can assist you with arriving at additional possible purchasers inside an association. More potential means more clients, and that implies more income for your organization.
So, now that you know what social selling is and its benefits for tech sales and the company. Let’s move ahead in the race to know how your business can easily get started with social selling strategy.
The following process reflects researched-based answers for good results.
⦁ Figure out lucrative and relevant platforms
⦁ Create and optimize your profile
⦁ Share critical and business subjective matter updates
⦁ Encourage users to participate in your content
⦁ Connect with targeted customers and prospects
⦁ Share insightful content at a sustainable pace
⦁ Monitor and analyze your engagement
⦁ Leverage the best social selling tools
⦁ Continue practicing the above tactics to secure social efforts
Social Selling Success Data
Now it’s time to look at some factual information and data related to social selling if you’re still not convinced. Underneath data points are collected from reliable sources like Linkedin, IBM, Everyone Social, and more.
- A social selling project can drive 16% better win rates, 2x pipeline, and convey 48% bigger arrangements.
- When a sale is generated through the use of employee advocacy that sale is 7x more likely to close.
- Thought leaders receive 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels.
- 90% of audiences never answer a cold pitch, yet 75% of B2B purchasers utilize social media to settle on buying choices.
- Half of the income affected by social selling is in 14 joint ventures, including IT companies, medical care, and marketing & advertising.
In the end, social selling will never die. Sales-generating practices with social selling tools and techniques are generating 5x ROI from the marketing budget.
