Social selling on LinkedIn has become a vital cog in the sales process and as a means to interact with people for the purpose of building credibility. Social selling as overtaken many of the older methods of interacting with business audiences because while they can still deliver results, activities such cold calling and unsolicited emails are not as powerful as they once were. However, as smart salespeople are learning, if you combine the more traditional methods of selling in in conjunction with social selling on LinkedIn, your success rate improves. The main activity involves the use of the LinkedIn platform as part of the B2B sales process to create awareness and influence while gradually cultivating new connections. Social selling on LinkedIn is great for building business relationships before a prospect even starts a buyer’s journey, to use content and articles to close the conversion gap and eventually move social conversations into an offline sales conversation. Social selling on LinkedIn is an additive process to existing sales tactics to connect with decision makers and influencers. Social Selling on LinkedIn consists of five main steps: It starts with establishing a professional presence on LinkedIn with clear Goals and objectives. Next, it’s about finding the right people via research into Buyer Personas or Ideal Customer Profiles. Then, engaging with those people with content, articles, research, insights etc. Building trust which is about Credibility and Connecting (read below) is next step. Ultimately, it’s about measuring the impact of our social selling activity, ROI factors such as Conversions, Mentions, References and Leads. Social selling on LinkedIn should focus on building a communication channel between social media activity such as sharing content, information or articles and the sales call to maximize buyer interactions. So, Social selling concentrates on sharing quality content to kickstart one-to-one communication between the social seller and the connection. The 6C’s To Social Selling on LinkedIn The 6C’s to social selling on LinkedIn are; CREDIBILITY CONNECTING CONTENT CONVERSATIONS CONVERSIONS CONSISTENCY CREDIBILITY Social credibility is about positioning yourself to have influence and high levels of perceived value to prospects or customers. At the practical level it is about creating professional social profiles, adding value in online discussions, demonstrating knowledge, writing and sharing quality content, being aware of industry trends plus seeking referrals from clients and co-workers to build our social brand. We should strive to be viewed as a subject matter expert and a go to resource in our industry or market for information. CONNECTING Connecting on LinkedIn. The silver bullet of social selling is timing. Getting the attention of the right person for the limited time they are using the LinkedIn platform. When it comes to social selling, the ABC of selling has moved from “Always be closing” to “Always be Connecting (with a purpose)”. It is important to note here that we need to build connections that lead somewhere, we all have had the experience of slowly realising the relationships we have been building is only a bridge to nowhere. No point in having 5000 useless connections, so plan out your ideal customer profiles. CONTENT Social content is about adding to the experience in the buyer’s journey with quality, useful and insightful articles or information. Also, the shared content should be a healthy mix of our own content plus content from other sources. A coherent social content plan maps to the buyer’s journey, giving it purpose and vision, and aligning all the content around a common set of goals for what that content should achieve. CONVERSATIONS Great social conversations should happen on purpose. To have conversations that win, your messages, content, and social selling skills need to work together. A key building block in social selling is for us to have valuable conversations with various decision-makers and adapt our value proposition to the unique situation of each buyer. When engaging in social conversations, we need to ask ourselves; What do I want my connection and audience to learn? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do? CONVERSIONS Social selling on LinkedIn has to have an ROI, taking a targeted social connection to a qualified sales lead. For this to happen, we have to use LinkedIn to incite buyers to do something different and do it with us. Our goal in social selling is to take the connection (lead) through Awareness and Consideration. The Presentation, Negotiating and Decision stages etc in the sales process is not part of social selling. We need to utilize social selling to create a buying vision in order to convert a connection into a qualified lead so they may engage in a sales conversation. Remember, that 80% of buyers actually make it to the end of the sales cycle and make NO DECISION according to Stanford Business School CONSISTENCY To succeed, thrive, and prosper in social selling on LinkedIn, we need to be consistent, insistent, and dedicatedly persistent. The principal of P.D.O comes into effect here, as Process, Discipline, and Ownership (P.D.O.) is the key to unlocking social selling success. It is also important to point out that social selling is not a shortcut to generating sales leads as starting purposeful relationships via social selling can take many touches and conversations. Consistency is part process (what you do) and part skill (how you do it). Within 5 years, 80% of the buying process will occur without any direct human-to-human interaction.” – Gartner and Forrester Sales training may be required to master social selling on LinkedIn, to learn how to influence and how we can bring to bear on customers and prospects’, by sharing content which is consumed, shared and commented on, then being visible via social conversations for the market topics we serve.
Digital Selling or Is It Social Selling At times, there can be confusion over the terms Digital Selling or Social Selling. The sales training and enablement industry interchange these terms without proper explanation. Digital Selling is the act of using digital assets to engage buyers, while Social Selling is the specific act of using the social networks to engage buyers. So, digital selling or social selling – what’s the difference? Well firstly, think of all the digital assets you could use to target buyers, you have email templates, video, articles, images, infographics and online presentations. Digital Selling is the strategy of having marketing and sales work together to share and distribute these assets in a programmatic way. So Digital Selling is a big picture overview of how a business can use assets, data, sales people plus other people who touch customers to promote their brand using the digital channels. Social Selling is a tactic, an additive approach to the sales process which involves 1:1 relationship building by a sales person targeting a specific prospect via the social networks. Digital Selling is the sales side of any Digital Marketing activity to extend the reach and performance of all online activity. An example, a company launches a new product, they build a landing page and marketing goes to work promoting it. In its simplest form, this is Digital Marketing. Now marketing working with the sales and customer support channels plan how they will promote the landing page via their business/personal social accounts and connections in a unified way. This is Digital Selling. Digital Selling has overtaken the term “Smarketing” (meaning sales and marketing working together) and will become a key term for nearly every business in the years ahead. Social Selling will continue to evolve as a key skill for individual sales people to nurture relationships with a deliberate focus on the buyer’s journey (personalized messages and content). Companies are already creating Digital Selling departments, which usually compose of a team including content marketing, sales people, customer support people and marketing personnel, who act as the digital champions within the larger sales and organization. They take the mass marketing material and then focus on using all other customer touch points to promote this material, customizing it for each team and channel. Together, this department will focus on the company’s prospects and customers digital footprints, extending brand/product reach while measuring the interactions of the material which in turn can act as a trigger event for buyer engagement via social selling. When we talk about social business, digital sales transformation, digital selling or social selling, the reality is that many leaders in the sales industry have been slow to implement change even though the proof of digital success via inbound marketing is there for everyone to see. Now is the time for sales leadership to move up a gear and utilize the power of Digital Selling. Whether it is digital selling or social selling. Whatever way you see it, selling, the sales process and even sales training is being transformed. Keeping apace of the digitally influenced buyers journey and well-educated customers requires that business embraces a selling focus that relies less on the hard sell and increasingly on adding value to the buying experience and relationship via the digital channels. This means that all sales and customer touch activity must become seamless, breaking down traditional department silos like Marketing, Sales, and Service to engage customers wherever or however they want to interact with an organization. To summarize is it digital selling or social selling. Digital Selling is at the company, department and strategic level within the sales strategy, while Social Selling is at the sales skill and individual level. They are both interconnected and rely on the main business transitions that drive a digital sales transformation process in a business: social platforms, organization structure, and the culture. While the buyer preference for using the digital channels will drive the transformation inside a company, the overarching focus for any sales leadership team must be on the organizational and cultural transitions, ensuring that the sales training and selling skills are embedded into the DNA of the business so that customer preferences on how they want to do interact with us becomes and remains the focus of all selling activity.
Social Selling Tips Social selling tips in video format to help you improve your efforts in using the social networks to engage customers. When it comes to sales prospecting and lead generation, sales people are finding that the road to success is utilizing social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pintrest, Snapchat plus other niche social networks to create awareness and to connect with influencers, buyers and decision makers. This is why social selling along with digital selling has become one of the dominant tactics to find and engage with new prospects. Well trained sales people are now using social media to provide value to customers and prospects by contributing to conversations, sharing knowledge, , replying to comments and off course sharing quality content. They map the buyers journey and the digitally influenced buying process, from awareness to consideration to decision, engaging and nurturing the prospect until they are ready to have a sales discussion. Social Selling Tips Video The life of every sales person is changing rapidly. The whole sales process and buyers journey has evolved more in the past five to ten years than it did in the previous century. Whether its B2B or B2C, people are turning to the social channels to self educate as trust in the more traditional sales methods decline. This shift has left lots of sales people in difficult positions. Their once star sales tactics are becoming increasingly less effective, so as the old saying goes, its adapt or die. This is why we hope you find these social selling tips helpful. The modern sales process is about focusing on building deep relationships with people, not just trying to sell a product to them. More social selling tips would include the fact that sales is now about engagement, building trust and earning the right to sell by giving first. Also you need to be consistent with your social media activity, similar to a gym, short bursts will have limited effect. Some salespeople just do random acts of social, spending a few days all over their social media channels and then they don’t do any activity for a week or two. Like most habits in life, the best results come from regular consistent and persistent activity. This is why social selling can seem fruitless, so we put together these social selling tips in a video for you. Every sales tasks takes work, there is no magic instant formula. Nurturing relationships through the social networks can be time consuming. As you spend time trying to engage buyers leveraging social networks, you may think maybe cold calling wasn’t that bad. After all, you just picked up the phone and it was quick. Maybe not so easy. And once upon a time it was relatively successful. However the numbers show it’s not anyways effectively today. Less than 1% of cold calls to a prospect results in any type of follow up interaction plus 90% of B2B decision makers never actually respond to a cold sales outreach. But let’s get real, ever business needs to acquire new customers, so sales prospecting is a key sales task if a business is to achieve revenue targets. But that doesn’t mean you need to panic at the notion of having to get sales training to become skilled at social selling. With a bit of time and planning, you can boost your social selling skills in no time. So enjoy this social selling tips and tricks video to help you more effectively engage your buyers. When you feel ready to move from dabbling in social media to engage buyers towards becoming skilled in digital selling, feel free to check out The Digital Sales Institute “social selling training“, a business school standard course which is online for you 24/7, learn practical techniques at your own pace, understand the tactics that can grow your social reach and is full of tips you can implement straight away. In no time at all, our social selling tips module will have you using the 6C’c of Social Selling to engage relevant, interested buyers that you can progress to offline sales discussions and meetings for deeper interactions. We hope you enjoy these social selling tips. You might also like to view our post, Guide to effective sales prospecting.