Social Selling is based on the sharing of quality content with your audience to initiate an interaction and a commitment which will encourage a purchasing decision. However, it’s not just about absorbing your community’s content and telling yourself that you’ve got it all figured out! No, as in real life, a good Social Seller is, above all, a social being; someone who creates a personalized interaction and who creates trust before being a Salesperson.
The Basics of Social Selling
Why is there so much pressure nowadays for Salespeople to add the Social Selling string to their bow? Quite simply because the behavior of buyers has changed, and the market requires Salespeople to adapt. The changes are easy to understand and are not as recent as we think. Buyers have access to a wealth of information directly at their fingertips via the Internet and social networks. They can inform themselves, compare, and consider different options between alternative solutions, all without having to contact a sales representative. A Forrester study estimates that 70-80% of the buying journey is done online, alone.
Prospective customers are selecting their contacts more and more drastically, they don’t want to be bothered anymore. Buyers are most often the initiators of the process and less and less in response to a solicitation. The sales representative should therefore no longer want to sell but above all make people want to buy. To do this, the secret often lies in the content. This is the first good impression a sales representative can make. Being seduced first, by content discovered at random on a timeline, on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, can be a sign of a future commercial relationship of interest.
The salesperson should no longer just want to sell but rather to make people want to buy.
For the company, this means that the content it publishes on social networks must specifically meet what these potential buyers are looking for. This brings us back to the famous Limber moto: good content, at the right time, to the right person, on the right channel. In terms of sales prospecting, Sales teams must also be attentive to even small signals to be able to provide the same good content in response to an identified need for information.
The Social Seller: create more personalized relationships
In a social selling approach, it is almost no longer a question of sales per-se, but rather of personalized advice. Because the buyer has already taken the time to inform themselves, sometimes at length, about the product, the salesperson no longer really needs to present the product. Above all, you must convince them that it is your product that exactly meets their needs, that precisely answers their problems.
This implies knowing the pain points of the prospect, their personal pain points. Through the monitoring you set up, the sales consultant must also know the type and quality of content the buyer considers. By offering, for example, value-added content, you can stand out from the crowd.
The Social Seller: an overworked lead generator…
What is expected of a salesperson who practices Social Selling, a “Social Seller”, is that he or she is above all a creator of links on social networks. So, take the test and go whisper in the ear of your Sales team that it would be good for them to start Social Selling. Expect to hear “but I don’t have time for that, it’s an extra task in my already overloaded day!”.
That’s absolutely true! If, after everything, you’re only adding Social Selling to a daily sales routine and not trying to transform your daily routine by including Social Selling.
Social Selling is not about adding a task to an existing routine but about transforming that routine by including Social Selling.
On the same note, it is essential that the Social Seller has the right elements to optimize their approach, namely:
- quality content, to which he or she has contributed, for example, by bringing his or her expert opinion to the table.
- a tool that allows them to save time in their monitoring and market insight activities.
- a tool that enables them to optimize content sharing on social networks.
- a tool that allows them to propose to the visitor an initial commercial introduction thanks to a contact form.
- a tool that allows them to track their key accounts and to be notified, in real time, of the news from their contacts, thanks to a mobile app.
- a tool that enables them to monitor the performance of publications to better understand the expectations of prospects.
With all of these factors considered, does it seem too difficult to become a Social Seller? Not if all the features are available on a single platform… Welcome to Limber.
Want to know more? Sign up for our a demo webinar or download our White Paper!
Jamie Swanson