Social selling offers impressive benefits to companies, when spread across the organization.
Your sales organization should be active on social media to drive brand awareness and sales. Social selling is considered soft selling, and it should always be educational for prospects; providing answers, offering interesting content and engaging people until they are ready to purchase from you.Related: How to Make Social Selling a Company-wide Effort
Here is an informative infographic on what social selling is, how to get started, the benefits involved and how Employee Advocacy can help. Remember to scroll down to read the complete article!
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As the name reflects, social selling happens on social media. That’s the place to start interacting with potential clients. When the right approach is made from the sales side by offering real value to prospects, there’s a high chance to engage well with them. To succeed in social selling, relying on the ABC method is the best solution. And in this case ABC doesn’t mean Always Be Closing, the focus is rather on creating connections. Putting in simply, it's an acronym for Always Be Connecting.
Traditional Selling vs. Social Selling
Social selling has numerous benefits compared to traditional selling. The latter includes techniques like cold calling, cold emailing, advertising, and buying lead lists. However, none of these are personalized, as the contacts are random and might be already outdated. Plus, repeating the same sales script over and over again is not a useful strategy, either. On the contrary, social selling provides a great opportunity to utilize salespeople’s professional networks, that will result in increased reach. It allows them to put emphasis on real people who are their target audience. When salespeople’s approach is right and they are able to start the conversation from the right angle, success is more likely to happen. We say, the main five benefits of social selling are: 1) increased revenue, 2) multiplied audience reach, 3) shortened sales cycle, 4) increased awareness and trust, and 5) thought leadership.
How to Get Started with Social Selling?
Obviously, the first step is to create social media accounts on the right channels. Next, being active by sharing professional content, liking and commenting on other users’ content is key. This will create a strong online presence. The content being shared needs to add real value to others, and is the most effective when it solves pain points and problems of target audiences. (Hint: using smart call-to-actions is a must when doing social selling.) Last but not least, measuring the impact of shared content is vital to realize what works and what doesn’t.
The Role of Employee Advocacy in Social Selling
A well-structured Employee Advocacy platform functions as a content hub. There, salespeople are able to browse among relevant and up-to-date content and share those to their networks with a single click. The platform also provides detailed analytics of shared content. With that, users will understand and be able to optimize times and content types that resonate the best with their target audiences. In addition to these, when an Employee Advocacy platform is spiced up with a fun gamification factor, its users will become more motivated and excited to use it. So, what are you waiting for? Implement Employee Advocacy to your sales strategy and become a winning social seller!
