Social selling involves using social media to interact directly with your target audience. With so many people connected to social media websites today, social selling can be a successful tool in getting your brand in front of more people. To get the biggest return on your investment here are a few tips for success:
1. Creating Alliances with LinkedIn
More than 300 million people are using LinkedIn. With those kinds of numbers, it’s easy to see why there are so many success stories about organizations that have tapped LinkedIn to gain ground on their goals and objectives. You don’t have to be focused on beating your competitors all the time – you might want to create an alliance with other companies to strengthen your standing in the industry. LinkedIn does this for you when you create a connection and get referrals from other organizations.
2. Prospect and Make Contact
Social selling is an extremely active process. However, you can make good use of a passive process by simply updating your LinkedIn profile so that it pops and attracts more attention to prospects. Just as you’re searching for them – they’re searching for you. It gets much easier when you make yourself easier to find. The larger your network becomes, the easier it will be for your prospects to find you in those 1st, 2nd and 3rd level connections.
As you reach out to prospects, do your best to make a great first impression. Your approach should be that of a person at a networking event interacting in face-to-face. Greet them by their name and then really focus on the body of your message, using the fewest, most impactful words possible.
3. Work on Your Relationships
Once you get a prospect in your network, you’ve only just begun. The work to build that relationship into a sales situation really starts in earnest after you’ve identified and attracted your prospects to you. Send messages every week or two for the next several weeks and see where the conversation takes you.
The inContact Success Story
inContact, a hosted contact center company, had a sales team that was fairly out of touch with social media. In fact, very few of them were on LinkedIn or Twitter. A sales manager at inContact wanted to give social selling a try and introduced the idea to his team. The manager built a curriculum from scratch and did a yearlong experiment to see if it actually works.
He got half of his team up to speed with the latest and greatest social media sites and taught them his curriculum and got them on board with the idea of social selling. The other half of the team was allowed to remain working as they usually did. The results for the team that introduced social selling into their daily process were astounding to say the least. This group saw an increase in revenue of 122 percent through using LinkedIn alone, and 157 percent increase in revenue for the reps using LinkedIn and Eloqua. The outcome pushed the company to integrate social selling into the workflow of every sales rep.
For what are you waiting? Does the idea of establishing a social selling curriculum seem too daunting for you to consider? Do you not have enough time in the day to pull it off correctly? If so, you’re like many companies that have taken on a professional marketing consultant to assist them in this effort. Reach out to Jasmine Sandler today for a free LinkedIn Marketing and Sales consultation on website.
