Those of us who are old enough to remember the dotcom boom, are currently waiting for the social media bubble to burst. The problem is that we’re all still waiting. Seems like ‘Social’ is here to stay. So love it or loath it, as sales people, we need to get our heads around it. In fact 78.6% of sales people using social media to sell out performed those who weren’t using social media. (Source Forbes) So we really do need to join in! (You can download The Impact of Social Media on Sales Quota and Corporate Revenue here:)
Here we looked at the risks v benefits of social selling, but how can social selling help you to sell more? Social selling will help you to:
- Build Your Pipeline – social selling enables you to build and maintain many more relationships than was ever possible in the past. This scale brings further opportunities if you’re connecting with the right people.
- Warm up your Leads – in trials, social selling generated 40% more qualified leads and opportunities than cold calling. It’s far more effective when you call someone new with context and value.
- Stop Losing Sales – arriving too late in the sales cycle to be effective is easily the biggest problem in selling today. You can use social activity on the internet to listen for changes happening in prospective accounts and so act early.
- Beat the Competition – the customer will make an assessment of the difference between you and your competitors. You can either leave them to it, or you can add value in the sales process by helping them with that assessment. But to do so, you need to be on top of the competitors offering. Spying on the competition is that much easier, and legal, with social selling!
How do you get started? A good place to start is by talking to our marketing colleagues. The marketers have been ‘Social Selling’ for some time. A great blog to get Social Selling ideas and inspiration from is Nick Baggott’s CRM and Digital Marketing Blog and in particular his recent post Digital trends that Marketers need to think about. I’ll ask him to write an article on Digital trends that sales people need to think about! What say you Nick?
Conclusion : according to Ogilvy, 65% of the most successful salespeople believe social media is integral to their sales success, because of the above reasons. The key is to identify some relatively simple, easy to implement first steps which will follow in our next articles.
