inboundJenna PerusDecember 12, 2018social selling

SOCIAL SELLING CREATES MUTUAL VALUE

inboundJenna PerusDecember 12, 2018social selling

INBOUND MARKETING YIELDS RESULTS PT. 5

SOCIAL SELLING CREATES MUTUAL VALUE

Put simply, social selling is using social media to interact with potential customers and selling via social channels. In a broader sense, social selling is identifying current and potential customers and targeting communications in various social media channels and communities. The aim of social selling is to create a dialogue that will benefit both parties. Social selling is building relationships based on mutual trust and value creation.

The value of social selling is ultimately converting sales. Taking a step back, the aim is to provide value throughout the sales cycle: answering questions and offering relevant and useful content for the potential customer. A social seller avoids interrupting the lives of prospects with cold calls and rather delights them with useful information and content. This tactic will cultivate lasting customer relationships.

Anyone, irrespective of one’s role in the organization, can be a social seller online. Picking up the phone and cold calling prospects is not social selling, quite the opposite. Instead, it is helping out the customer (and the prospect) with providing expertise where needed. Social selling aims to promote sales as well as increase awareness and visibility.

Social selling can be seen as an evolution of traditional sales techniques. The advantage of social selling, as opposed to traditional selling, is that it takes advantage of the opportunities social media platforms provide. Social media is utilised to share relevant and useful content with a wide audience of prospects and customers.

To provide you with hard data, according to LinkedIn research 78 % of social sellers achieve better results when compared to colleagues not using social media as a sales medium. Social media provides a platform for timely interaction with your prospects and customers. Also, it enables monitoring your prospects, which allows you to reach out to them at the best time. Connecting with prospects and maintaining lasting customer relationships will help you reach your business goals in the long run.

Social selling builds trust

Striving to build trust and create value for the customers, social selling advances the sales process in the sense that it helps the customers in their hunt for relevant information.

A presence in social media is a response to the shift in customer buying behaviour. Customers are looking for solutions to their challenges online. That is where social selling comes handy - social sellers can provide answers where the questions are asked. Offering help where it’s needed builds trust within the customer relationships.

Traditional B2B sales include contacting prospects in the hopes of selling a product or arranging a meeting. The problem with that tactic is that cold calling is not scalable. Reaching the right audience can be challenging, and on the other hand, potential customers are very aware due to information being available online. Therefore customers don’t often need salespeople to provide them with information at the beginning of the buying process. If your product or service is not relevant for the customer at the time of the call, it’s almost impossible to get the customer to take interest in it.

Expertise sharing via social media channels is an agile and effective way of reaching potential customers. Sharing expert content online helps potential customers to develop their thinking and encourages setting the buying process in motion. As a sales process, social selling is not as straightforward as traditional selling. Rather, it is bringing out your expertise, helping out the customers and maintaining a customer-centric dialogue.

Strategic social selling

Social selling has been around for a long time although the technology is new. Companies have been doing social selling (read: relationship building) well before we went online. Today sharing content is just easier and faster while reaching a wider audience. Relationship building, however, has always been essential to successful B2B sales.

Anyone and everyone working in connection with customers should use social selling. Especially salespeople should utilise the effective platform for reaching the audience and maintaining a dialogue with prospects and customers. Social media is also an amazing channel to build your expert reputation.

The support of management is required to reach the full potential of social selling. It needs to be goal-oriented and strategic to fully succeed. Effective content marketing calls for a neat strategy and a company culture to support the strategy. This is achieved when everyone within the company acknowledges the importance of a well-groomed customer journey. Content production should be everyone’s task, not the best-kept secret of the marketing department. The importance of content utilisation should first be understood internally, and only after that in marketing and sales.

A culture of content is a company-specific environment and attitude that embraces the importance of content marketing and internal knowledge sharing across the organization. Content culture comprises company values, mission and common goals. Everyone within the organization should share an understanding of how the content strategy links to reaching the common goals, and how content is utilised in the company’s daily life. The strategy implementation is likely to fail if the content is the responsibility of only a few marketing people.

Social selling boosts customer-centricity

Digitalisation has drastically changed B2B buying behaviour. Social media channels aren’t only for B2C buyers anymore - they have a huge impact on B2B purchasing processes as well. Networking, information search and information sharing are becoming popular within B2B processes too. This poses a challenge and a huge opportunity for sales.

Well executed social selling enhances the seller’s expert brand, expands the professional network and builds trust. The biggest benefits of social selling are customer-centricity, discoverability, image marketing and added value creation.

Investing in customer-centricity is pivotal for social selling. At its best, customer-centric sales and marketing are experienced as authentically useful and helpful. A social seller aims to be present where potential customers are looking for information and following conversations. They take part in discussions and create value by answering questions when relevant. By offering help, vision and value to the conversation, a social seller raises trust and develop his or her expert role. A potential customer is willing to engage in a dialogue with a professional salesperson if they feel they’re getting something out of the interaction. In the process, a social seller builds awareness of the company and develops the expert image of the company and themselves.

Social selling checklist:

Social selling builds trust and creates added value for the customer
Developing your expert reputation on social media is a more agile and effective way to reach potential customers than traditional sales tactics
Social selling is everyone’s responsibility
The support of management is required to reach the full potential of social selling
To succeed, social selling needs to be strategic