The Gartner Future of Sales report predicts that by 2025, 80% of interactions with B2B buyers will happen digitally. With only 17% of B2B buyers' time engaged in meeting with potential suppliers and the percentage of businesses using social growing year on year, its clear that the future of sales is digital-first.

Read on to learn more about this essential tool and how mastering it can transform your sales team’s efforts and results across prospecting, relationship-building and lead generation.   

What is Social Selling?

Social selling is the use of social media by salespeople to interact directly with prospects. This medium allows salespeople to reach targeted prospects “where they live.” It also helps them drive engagement by providing thoughtful content and answering questions in order to add value and build relationships.

Specifically, social selling comprises several fundamental elements. These include the following:

• Social prospecting: Monitoring social networks for indications of customer interest, buying intent and qualified prospect status.

• Personal branding: Using social media to establish individual credibility, authority and reputation.

• Employee advocacy: Encouraging employees to use social media to share valuable content about their companies within their networks to generate greater visibility.

• Social relationship management: Using digital networks to nurture ongoing customer relationships.

• Targeting prospects: Enabling sales professionals to hone in on the most qualified or high value leads in order to focus directly on those people.

The Difference Between Social Selling and Social Media Marketing

People often ask what is difference between social selling and social marketing. While the two are interlinked, they are not interchangeable. 

The primary difference is that social selling is a sales tool with a singular goal: connecting with and nurturing prospects with a view to generating revenue.

Social media marketing, meanwhile, is a comprehensive strategy incorporating many different aspects of marketing and serves a range of goals. These include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, creating valuable experiences, and more. 

However, they’re both an important components of a digital-first sales and marketing strategy. Together, they add up to a powerful way to reach more customers and capture their business. 

Why Sell Socially?

Anyone who’s made the shift to social selling after enduring the pain of cold calling and hard sells can answer that question. Put simply, it works where traditional sales techniques are failing.

While cold calls are an unwelcome interruption, social selling - when done properly - can enhance the lives of potential customers.

In a recent State of Sales survey, 86% of sales reps recognised the importance of the long term customer relationships to successful sales. 83% said it was more important than ever to build trust before a sale.

And B2B buyer's are on the same page:

• 76% of buyers expect more personalised attention based on their specific needs.

• When selecting winning vendors, B2B buyers cited demonstrating strong knowledge of the business landscape (69%) and providing content that made it easier to build a business case (62%) as important factors.

• Up to 80% of B2B buyers stated a preference for digital selling due to the ease of scheduling and saving on travel expenses.

Social selling takes place where your buyers already spend time networking and researching business solutions. In March 2020, LinkedIn reported a 55% increase in conversations between connections on its platform. 76% of buyers have said they’re ready to conduct conversations with potential businesses over social media. 62% of buyers said that they respond to sales people sharing relevant insights and opportunities.

And the proof is in the pudding. In the UK, top sellers are 41% more likely to describe themselves as very active on the B2B social network of choice, LinkedIn.

Which is the Best Social Media Platform for Social Selling? 

LInkedIn is the clear leader for sales teams looking to connect with B2B audiences. There’s simply no better starting place for establishing your industry influence while simultaneously opening the lines of communication.

Built with networking in mind, LinkedIn has become the go-to spot for business networking. It is the natural intersection for sellers, prospects, customers and future buyers and outperforms the likes of Facebook and Twitter for lead generation. 

LinkedIn also hosts a wide variety of LinkedIn Groups. These industry-specific communities offer even greater opportunities to find new potential clients through a simple keyword search. 

In addition to using LinkedIn’s search capabilities to find people working in the companies, industries and roles you want to target, you can also take advantage of its powerful ad targeting capabilities. When you sell on LinkedIn, you’re automatically reaching out to a professional audience. However targeting criteria, such as company, industry, role and seniority, as well as the use of retargeting, can help you further zero in on your exact audience. 

But LinkedIn is far from the only option for this red-hot sales technique. Twitter chats, Facebook groups, and Subreddits are also ripe with opportunities. The key is understanding where your potential buyer is doing their research and networking online and getting involved in the process.

How to Sell on Social Media

Business has always been about relationships. This is nothing new. In fact, relationships may be more important than ever to today’s connection-craving consumers. 

So while the whole point of social selling may be about making the sale, this is the worst possible impression to make to a potential consumer -- especially right off the bat. Initial contacts should always be about establishing a connection, and never about selling or pushing a product or service.

Your focus should be on consistently providing value. Whether you’re sharing content or offering the solution to a specific problem, providing value not only establishes your authority but also your interest in the customer.

Read on for a roundup of quick tips for getting started with your social selling efforts.

1. Align your sales and marketing efforts

There is a huge amount of crossover between the disciplines of sales and marketing. However, sales and marketing departments are often woefully out of alignment.

For best outcomes, sales teams need to be aware of the latest marketing campaigns so they can share the same voice. Similarly, marketing teams need to be aware of sales’ priorities so they can provide them with a steady stream of quality marketing leads. 73% of sales teams recognise the importance of collaborating across departments to provide a unified customer experience, so the good news is that there's willingness to collaborate.

Many sales departments are playing catch up when it comes to developing the skills needed to sell successfully on social. LinkedIn Learning has seen a marked uptick in time spent on social selling courses in the past 12 months. Marketing, on the other hand, has been steeped in providing a satisfying digital customer experience for years. Get them working together on sharing skills as well as strategies.   

2. Establish authority and credibility

Authority and credibility are everything to today’s consumers. If you don’t showcase these qualities, you’re not getting their business. The good news? There are some simple ways to establish both. 

FIrst, make sure your social sales team profiles are active, attractive and professional before beginning the prospecting process. After all, as representatives of your company, their profiles are their personal brand. 

Second, utilise a variety of approaches for establishing your credibility. Today’s consumers are well informed decision makers who don’t fall for overt sales pitches. They’re big on transparency and authenticity. Sales teams should share useful content, publish thought leader pieces, and provide “social proof” in the form of success stories and testimonials.

Remember: It may sound simple, but hashtags are a big deal in the world of social selling. These keywords or phrases preceded by the # character open up social media posts to greater exposure and engagement. They’re one of the best ways to make sure your content is found.

3. Engage and be engaging

The most important word when engaging in social selling is social. Relationships are a two-way street. Nurturing prospects by engaging with their content and conducting conversation is paramount.

Social selling isn’t just about starting the conversation with customers via social media. It’s also about continuing it, building on it, and using social channels to build real relationships. 

If your social selling team is only popping up on social networks to promote your business, products and services, you'll appear too promotional and inauthentic - the worst crimes you can commit on social today!

In order to establish relationships that matter, social sellers must commit to give and take. Responsiveness is a critical part of the equation.

Your social selling team should routinely answer questions, reply to comments, and respond to customer feedback - positive and negative alike. It’s a small investment of time and effort toward the big outcome of building customer trust. Even things as seemingly simple as liking and sharing can go a long way.

4. Listen first

Customers do everything from asking questions to complaining about issues and everything in between on social channels.

Social listening lets you tune in to all of that valuable information. To find out what your customers and prospective customers are saying online about your business, your competitors, and your industry at large, all you need to do is listen.

In addition to being an effective way to stay abreast of customers’ wants and needs, your sales team can use this feedback to identify first time buyers or people who are looking to switch suppliers, and customise communications accordingly.

5. Use an Account Based Marketing approach

The better you qualify leads, the fewer resources you’ll waste pursuing leads who aren’t in a position to buy your products and services. 

Account based marketing (ABM) takes things a step further with pre-qualification. With this strategy, high-value accounts or prospects are specified and marketed to directly. ABM has proven to be so effective that funds allocated to this technique increased from 20 per cent to 28 per cent between 2019 and 2020.

This is another opportunity for sales and marketing teams to partner in the development of ABM target lists and strategies. Social platforms can be used toward this effort in many ways, such as in researching high-value accounts, updating CRM data, direct interaction and retargeting key prospects. 

Social Selling at Scale

While it may sound like an oxymoron given the role of human touch in social selling, marketing automation is an invaluable partner in the sales process and vital for scaling for social selling operations.

An automation platform can be used to track a relationship’s development, incorporate interactions across other channels, trigger behaviour and context specific communications, and loop in other salespeople for followups. Lead scoring uses to customer intelligence to let sales to know when to take the relationship to the next level and notifies the team automatically when a speedy follow up is required to close the deal.

These methods don’t just save time. They facilitate the deepening customer relationship and build trust by demonstrating you truly know the customer, where they are on their buying journey and what they need to know next.

If you'd like to find out how social media, creative content and automation can combine to boost your sales performance, we'd love to show you what's possible with the right tools. Book a demo today.