Social Selling – Why is it important, and How to do it right?

It’s not a secret anymore that sales reps are struggling with generating new leads nowadays. Long gone are the days when you could pick up a phone, make a few cold calls, and land a new lead. 90% of the cold calls are not even responded to nowadays because of caller-IDs. So how can sales representatives tackle these challenges, stand out, and generate more leads? The answer is – Social selling.

What Is Social Selling?

It’s not the same as social media marketing or social media advertising. Social selling is basically the art of finding, connecting with, understanding, and foster sales prospects.

Social selling allows people to laser-target potential customers, establish rapport, and guide them through the sales funnel. Sales reps nowadays use social media to provide value to potential customers by answering their queries, responding to comments, and guiding the potential customers by hand throughout the buying process – from awareness to consideration to decision.

Why Should You Care?

- Social selling allows your sales teams to build real relationships with potential customers. With people sharing so much information about their needs, wants, and pain points on their public profiles, social media is the biggest tool that the sales reps can use to boost their company’s growth.

- People are already social buying. Potential consumers are already using social listening and social search to find potential vendors, research about them, developing an opinion about them before making the first contact.

- All the big companies are already using social selling tools to generate thousands of leads every day. Whether it’s Microsoft or Apple, everyone is boosting their productivity by prospecting for leads through social media. 

How To Do It?

“The golden rule of selling something on social media; always provide value before you ask for value.”

- Be present

The biggest mistake that one can make while social selling - using bots. One might get tempted to save time and energy by using bots for automated liking and commenting; but rather than building a rapport, these can seriously damage the professional brand. So be present, engage, and most importantly – be yourself. The whole essence of social selling is to build relationships with prospects by making yourself more human and approachable.

- Identify leads carefully

All you have to do is pay attention. Your potential consumers are already sharing their exact needs and wants on their social media profiles. Watch out for pain points and recommendation requests. 

- Provide value

The most important thing while social selling is to provide valuable insights to the right prospects at the right time. Your goal is provide valuable information to that will establish you as an expert in the eyes of potential consumers.

- Stay in touch

Staying in touch with social prospects is very important. Pay close attention to what they are posting on their profiles and jump in from time to time with a simple like or a comment. Don’t come across as too pushy. 

If you are looking to build and grow your digital sales, Sales For Life is a great way to go forward. Founded in 2004, Sales For Life helps its customers to increase sales pipeline through digital and social platforms. 

Social selling is not a one-time activity and should be a continuous process alongside existing sales techniques. Embrace it and watch your sales grow.