Understanding Social Selling
Social selling is a new approach to selling allowing sales people to precisely target their prospects and establish rapport with customers through existing connections. Most of us have heard about social selling, but only a few know what it really means.
Social selling and social media advertising are not the same. Simply put, social selling allows marketers to pursue business prospects on social media and build rapport with a network of laser focused leads. When done right, social selling can replace the process of cold calling or even complement it to win more ROI.
Marketers and sales people who have yet not incorporated social selling into their sales process are losing out on a lot. Most successful business use social media resources to connect with prospects, develop a connection with them and turn them into business leads.
Three prominent platforms that can help you kick-start your social selling:
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Whichever platform you use, you need to reach your unique target audience. Here are four notable best practices that can help:
1. Establish your brand
Establishing your brand on social media means creating meaningful conversations with customers. Even if you are new to social media, there is no need to get salesy right from the first day. Before you create a sales pitch, try to establish your position as an industry expert.
A simple example could be sharing valuable and shareable insights about your industry, brand, market trends and so on.
2. Listen to your audience and build relations with the right people
Social listening is a critical skill that brands must imbibe. Modern customers want to be listened to. Use tools like Hootsuite, Rfactr, or others to find out what your audience, competitors and other potential users are talking about. With the help of right tools, you can pinpoint the pain points and create more natural opportunities for your brand.
3. Do not mimic, be real
Today’s customers look for personalization and instead of writing one message and broadcasting the same one to each of your customers, take out time and create personalized messages for each one of them. The process can kick-start real conversations with your target audience.
4. Put in consistent efforts
Last, keep putting in consistent efforts. A successful social-selling campaign will not show results in a day or two. It will take weeks and months to give you what you desire. Keep doing what is required, monitor and measure the results, improve and repeat the cycle.
Maintain a habit of following up with your customers, reach out to the old ones and keep them in the loop.
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Here are a few tools that can help you with your social selling:
1. Hootsuite
You can consider Hootsuite as your social selling tool as it helps you organize all your communication at one place. While you have Hootsuite inbox handy, you can organize, monitor and respond to any private or public message that your brand receives across all social media pages.
Some other useful features include:
- Built-in theme features to tag specific communication threads. Tagging helps you filter important messages
- Quick saved-replies help you re-use replies for common queries
2. LinkedIn Social Selling Index
Sales Navigator from LinkedIn is a blessing to marketers and salespeople. LinkedIn Selling Index that works in tandem with its Sales Navigator to boost your social selling based on its four pillars viz establishing brand presence, finding the right prospects, leveraging business intelligence and building trusted and professional relations.
The Index lets marketers and salespeople measure each pillar, add them all up to reach the final SSI score. This tool is really helpful in measuring the performance of any social selling campaign.
3. Rfactr (Social Port)
The tool is designed with the sole purpose to streamline social selling efforts for marketers and salespeople across various genres. The platform makes social sharing easy thereby boosting both marketing and sales productivity.
Besides, Rfactr also helps marketers in identifying prospects on social media based on their buying stage in the buyer’s journey.
Sales is all about building relationships, establishing credibility and providing the right solutions to the right prospects at the perfect time. Social selling is more or less the same with the difference of leveraging social media to create relationships with your prospects and customers.
Use the power of social selling, expand your network, improve your sales funnel and reach your sales goals. starting now!
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