I read a recent post on Linkedin that social selling = marketing. Really?
The person hasn't a clue!
Anybody that reads my blogs will know that social selling is the complete spectrum of sales, from prospecting, yes, right through to closing.
If you do read people that say "social selling = marketing" then I give you permission to leave a comment saying the person does not know what they are talking about. You can mention my name if you want.
Why social selling isn't just about marketing
There are 3 key elements to social selling:-
1. Your social media profile. This is your shop window to the world and it is from this that the online buyer sees you as either somebody to help them or they move on to your competition. Obviously having a great profile is important, which is why we teach and coach you to have a great profile as part of our social selling and influence course.
2. The second element, is your network. It stands to reason that if you want to influence and sell to people in accounts, you need to be connected to them. Please, please, please don't spam people or pitch at people when you grow your network. Don't forget that LinkedIn allows you to connect to 100 people a week, that's 100 reasons to have conversations. And conversations create sales.
3. The third element of social selling is content. We know that the modern buyer is online looking for insight, they are looking to be educated, they are looking to be entertained. Now, regardless of what marketing tells you the brochures and brochureware they ask you to share on social. Buyers are not looking for these, so don't share them. In our social selling and influence course we teach and coach you how to create content. Content that engages and content that will enable you to have conversations. And conversations create sales, right!
Social selling is all about sales
1. Social selling allows you to prospect as a salesperson, in our social selling and influence course, we teach and coach you how to master outbound prospecting using social. We also coach you so you get inbound. Inbound is important to any salesperson, as the more pipeline you have the better, as a salesperson it gives you choices.
2. Even before prospecting our social selling and influence course will give you the skills to be invited into deals early by clients. Sitting on the top table, will enable you to control the sale, giving you a clear competitive advantage.
3. Social selling allows you to accelerate your pipeline at scale. Our social selling and influence course will allow you to shorten the sales cycle of deals. Once you have prospected a client and had that first meeting you need to nurture them and you need to remain front of mind with the client.
On social, you will have connected with your prospects, you will have connected to multiple people across your target business. If you use team selling, you will have multi-people from you company connected to multi-people in the prospect and you will "wave" at then every day with great informative content.
In the past, the only way you could be front and centre of client is to annoy them with calls and emails.
Here you can nurture them with relevant content. You can, of course, join conversation with different people across the prospect and start conversations. It is this flexibility, at scale, that will reduce sales cycles.
4. You can use social selling to reduce ghosting by clients. Something that has become more and more popular, by creating a "grid" of contacts and advocates within an account, you will find that the client cannot ghost you, of if they do you have multiple contacts.
5. You can also use social selling to close business. Just think, you write an article with the business case for a typical client, your prospects, you are your contacts are going to read it. If you write a compelling piece of content, this is going to drive them to close.
It's all the same methodology, it's not different methodologies for different sales stages. We teach you to do this in our social selling and influence course.
Probably why we can increase revenue by 30% and reduce sales cycles by 40%.
Ask us to show you how we connect social media with revenue and profit.
Every keystroke you make on social, should be, and can be connected with revenue and profit.
So who's doing this?
In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.
But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling? Not according to Merrill Lynch.
"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"
The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.
“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind”
Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.
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